We draw on the behavioral agency model to explore the ethical consequences of CEO equity incentives. We argue that CEOs are more concerned with funding pension plans when they have more to gain from their stock options yet will increasingly underfund employee pension funds as their current option wealth increases. Our findings reveal that both effects hold when the CEO has greater power (also occupying board chair) over firm decision making. Our study suggests that there is an ethical dimension to (...) equity incentives, given they are intended to align CEO interests with shareholders, yet potentially incentivize CEO behaviors with adverse consequences for employees. Insights from our findings provide boards and regulators with behavioral levers to protect employee well-being in the context of pension funding. (shrink)

We examine the unique nature of agency problems within publicly traded family firms by investigating the earnings management decision of dominant family owners relative to non-family. To do so, we draw upon literature demonstrating that family owners are loss averse with respect to the family’s socioemotional wealth, or the affective endowment derived from firm ownership and control. Our theory and findings suggest that potential reputational consequences of earnings management lead family principals to engage in less of this practice relative to (...) non-family firms, and that founder family firms are less likely than non-founder family firms to use earnings management. Moreover, the family-firm effect varies with the firm size, the degree of CEO entrenchment, and the firm’s stock structure. We provide important insights regarding differences between family and non-family principals in the use of unethical accounting practices, thereby extending agency theory and advancing an underdeveloped research area. (shrink)

The issue of advocacy has dominated discussion of the ethical dilemmas facing nurses. However, despite this, nurses seem to be no further towards a solution of how they can be effective advocates for patients without compromising their working identity or facing conflicts of loyalty. This article considers some of the problems around advocacy and, by the use of critical incidents written by nurses involved in a diploma module, attempts to highlight where the problem could lie. A communications model is outlined, (...) using a theoretical framework taken from the work of Jürgen Habermas, and applied to nursing practice. Finally, two examples are given from the research, which illustrate how the model could be used, highlighting the problems and pitfalls that still have to be overcome. The conclusion is a positive one, in that it suggests that advocacy is possible if nurses re-examine their practice in the light of the model proposed. (shrink)

Wallace Martin's response to "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents" is anything but naive. Its most sophisticated device is to posit my invention of a "naive reader" and to suggest that I would place the New Critics and their heirs in that category. But when I see the movement of criticism after Arnold as exhibiting an anti-self-consciousness principle or being so worried about a hypertrophy of the critical spirit that the spirit is acknowledged only by refusing its seminal or creative (...) force, I am not alleging naiveté but "organized innocence," or the privileged assignment of some given, intuitive power of creation to the area of art which excludes the area of philosophy or philosophically-minded commentary. This defensive partition of the critical and the creative spirit, which recognizes the intelligence of the creative writer but refuses the obverse proposition that there may be creative force in the critical writer, I have elsewhere named the Arnoldian concordat. Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of Criticism in the Wilderness. (shrink)

In view of Hartman's article, the canny critic might with some justice claim that the dispute is actually one between Anglo-American and Continental traditions and arm himself with all the historical and philosophical resources that the former can provide. Occam's razor and the armed vision might in the end prove equal to Nietzsche's hammer and the broken hammer that haunts the pages of Heidegger. However, the canny critic will realize that no matter how armed, he would still lose the argument (...) because of his refusal to relinquish one resource that in the end constitutes his irreducible commitment to his tradition: his assumption that the debate should be conducted in accordance with rules he knows and understands. Through a Hegelian Aufhebung in critical controversy, it is now precisely those rules that are in question. What is at stake is not something that can be decided by rational arguments, but our shopworn conception of rationality itself; not logic, but the question of whether or not our logic is an a posteriori construction of a more primal rhetoric; not truth, but the devious ways in which this concept is used to mask the will to power. And finally, given that these are serious questions, they will be misunderstood if there is no room for play in discussing them. Wallace Martin, professor of English at the University of Toledo in Ohio, is the author of The New Age under Orage and is preparing a book on the theory of criticism. He responds in this essay to Geoffrey Hartman's "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents". (shrink)

All social theorists and philosophers who seek to explain human action have a 'model of man'; a metaphysical view of human nature that requires its own theory of scientific knowledge. In this influential book, Martin Hollis examines the tensions that arise from the differing views of sociologists, economists and psychologists. He then develops a rationalist model of his own which connects personal and social identity through a theory of rational action and a priori knowledge, allowing humans to both act (...) freely and still be a subject for scientific explanation. Presented in a fresh series livery and including a specially commissioned preface written by Geoffrey Hawthorn, Hollis's important work is made available to a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Most of the medieval arts of poetry and prose were written before the middle of the thirteenth century, but their dissemination was not uniform in all parts of Europe. In England, the surviving copies of a work such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova taper off notably toward the end of the thirteenth century, and the numbers do not begin to pick up again until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. This pattern is no accident of preservation but (...) reflects a significant revival of interest in Latin rhetoric and literature, centered at Oxford in the late fourteenth century. The characteristic literary materials and rhetorical methods of this renaissance resonated beyond the university environment and are reflected with striking precision in the references to rhetoric scattered throughout the vernacular poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading the Bloody "Face of Nature":The Persecution of Religion in Hawthorne's The Marble FaunMartin Kevorkian (bio)Perhaps The Marble Faun is a novel which needs to be seen in a certain light to be fully revealed. Although Hawthorne has always had his admirers and defenders among literary critics, this novel has sometimes been selected for unfavorable comparison"; this 1941 assessment by Dorothy Waples (224) still aptly describes the critical terrain (...) and the challenge of reading Hawthorne's last complete novel. In recent scholarship, Nancy Bentley's The Ethnography of Manners (1995) has been influential in marking The Marble Faun for continued unfavorable comparison. Geoffrey Sanborn (1998), in building a case for the postcolonial intelligence of Herman Melville, uses Bentley's argument about the novel's disregard for the "lower orders of creation" to set up Hawthorne as a representative of the typically blinkered "white male writers" against whose limitations Melville shines (18, 214n33). Hawthorne, especially in The Marble Faun, has become a kind of whipping boy for American literary history.Be that as it may, my concern is not to establish Hawthorne's status as a victim of criticism, but rather to seek a recovery of what may be sacrificed in hasty dismissals of The Marble Faun. The present article proposes that this novel arrives at its greatest insights by a consideration of the dynamics of exclusionary violence as such. Henry James lamented the absence of "real psychology" in the novel, and Ludwig Lewisohn complained about its lack of "acceptable intellectual or moral content" (cited in Waples 1941, 224). Yet the novel's achievement may be seen to meet both these criteria, in part because it delivers an analysis of intellectual history as a history of mimetic sacrifice. In response to Waples's terms of challenge—the need for a certain light that reveals—I suggest that mimetic theory's reading of the Enlightenment allows the novel to disclose more critical historical intelligence than has generally been attributed to it. [End Page 133]This reading will focus on the interaction of three characters: the mysterious Miriam, the mysterious Donatello, and the even more mysterious figure known as the Model. In setting up the action of the narrative, the novel divulges little about the backgrounds of any of these characters but places them in a situation with a readily discernible structure: the relationships between the figures may be defined by the element of pursuit. Donatello follows Miriam wherever she goes. But he is not the only one who does so. The hazy figure of the Model likewise shadows Miriam. The Model's pursuit of Miriam may precede Donatello's, or the two pursuits may be somehow coeval; the novel refuses to specify either pursuit as original, focusing instead on the late-stage escalation of resentment between Donatello and the Model.This mimetic pursuit culminates in the central violent event of the novel: Donatello, claiming authorization from Miriam's glance, hurls the Model from a precipice. I have argued elsewhere that when the protagonists thus decisively act to exclude the shadowy character known as the Model, they enact the foundational move of Enlightenment discourse and the ideal of Platonic dialogue upon which that discourse is based.1 Michel Serres summarizes the Platonic-Enlightenment strategy of communicational purity and clarity:To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety—or a variation—of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the demon, the prosopopeia of noise.(1982, 67)Miriam and Donatello, the united protagonists, indeed demonize the Model in these terms. What I would now add to that equation is the value of the Model's vocational identity: he is a Capuchin monk. Within the communicational framework of my earlier analysis, the most telling details were detected in Hawthorne's emphasis on the Model's "noisy" and "hazy" profile. In hurling the Model from the edge of the precipice and thus silencing his interruptions, Donatello secures for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] On the Hegelian Sublime: Paul de Man's Judgment Call Martin Donougho In recent years, the sublime has become a focus of renewed interest in philosophy and literary theory, despite being (perhaps in part because it is) "the most confused and confusing notion of the time" (Honour 1977, 145). 1 Much of the interest has been directed at the (...) Kantian account and the long tradition stemming from it. By contrast, little attention has been paid to G. W. F. Hegel's version of the sublime, whether of the phenomenon itself or of its conceptualization. That is natural enough, it might be thought, given the marginal place accorded the sublime in Hegel's scheme of things--he simply was not interested. Yet, that very marginality is of interest, if we follow the lead of the subtlest of commentators, Paul de Man, in his essay "Hegel on the Sublime" (1983). As de Man reads and diagnoses it, Hegel's marginalizing of the sublime (much as with the section on symbolics or, indeed, aesthetics tout court) serves the interests of an aesthetic ideology. The gesture of putting the sublime aside in fact reveals more about the philosopher's system than is found in his express doctrine, de Man insists. The sublime, like Hegel's allegory, should then be read symptomatically, as the "defective cornerstone" of the entire system. 2 In this essay, I have two aims: besides explicating Hegel's theory of the sublime on its own terms, I try to assess de Man's reading of Hegel's rhetorical strategies.Even if de Man's charges fail--as I argue they do--his approach to Hegel remains, I think, full of insights. The sublime, it might well be thought, betokens the same penetration of an objective field by subjective theory that (for Heidegger and others) is at issue with Western metaphysics as a whole; a prime instance of this would be Hegel's own allegedly masterful project, including his attempt at an aesthetic system. So understood, "on the sublime" would translate as over the sublime, that is, in a bid to enframe and control discourse about "the most high" or "great writing" (see Longinus). 3 And then we might ask, for example, what Hegel is doing [End Page 1] when he consigns the sublime to a minor role, or when he instead gives the classical Ideal star billing. How exactly does he stage his discourse about art?Oddly enough, Hegel's sublime is not at all part of the main theoretical line stemming (if only in retrospect) from Immanuel Kant. That line might be dubbed "the Romantic sublime"--the title of an influential book by Thomas Weiskel, which appeared posthumously in 1976--or, alternatively, "the Yale sublime," in honor of an entire group (which includes Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom) who wrote about the tendency of Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson to invest themselves in their topic. 4 Kant himself points to a possible illusory move he labels subreption. Here--to apply a useful distinction Peter de Bolla (1989) draws--we have not just a discourse on, but also a discourse of the sublime. 5 The discourse of the sublime produces the very category it is meant to analyze, hence providing a space for "experience" of the sublime. A boot-strapping process induces a "subject-effect," calls forth a subject position. The remarkable thing is that--although he is said at sixteen to have made a translation of Longinus 6 and although he was, of course, familiar with the whole Kantian approach, which in many respects should have been congenial to him--Hegel stands apart from this "Romantic," or "hermeneutic," sublime. He does not at all give the appearance of staging readings in the manner sketched above, but instead adopts a distanced, disinterested perspective on the phenomenon.Even so, his aesthetic system might be accused of framing a discourse on the sublime, which, through seeking dialectical profit on its investment, shades into a discourse of the sublime. Thus, de... (shrink)

Professor Martin West's paper, titled ‘The Parodos of the Agamemnon’’, argues with characteristic learning and insight that Archilochus’’ fable of the fox and the eagle was a major source for Aeschylus’’ description of the portent of the eagles and the pregnant hare in the parodos of the Agamemnon . The portent is vividly described by the chorus: two eagles, one black and one white behind feed upon a pregnant hare. Poetry is not real life, and Aeschylus’’ picture is not (...) a naturalist's field-report. At the same time, an image's power increases in proportion to its precision, and I have no doubt that at some stage behind Aeschylus’’ description there was a personal sighting of a parallel incident by Aeschylus himself perhaps, or by Archilochus, or by an unknown figure who passed on his report. Fraenkel's commentary avers that ‘precise zoological identification of the species of eagle named by Aeschylus must not be attempted.’’ This is a fair warning, but not for the reason advanced by Fraenkel here: the plumage variation among different birds of the same species, which makes the identification of large raptors in the wilds of Greece today a problem for even the most expert ornithologists. There are two better reasons. One will emerge in the course of this note. The other is that no ancient writer using the Greek language came at all near to the modern classification of eagle species native to Greece. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a reverse effect of constraining interpretation and limiting itself to the moral ordering of commerce defended by Aquinas, the Summa Theologica both motivated the enrichment of the Christian imaginary in narratives like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, The Canterbury Tales. In the case of the Divine Comedy, it expanded the reflection on the categories of sinners related to money, and as regards The Canterbury Tales, it provided support for the construction of anti-models in some (...) of the framed narrative types of misers, simoniacs, and fraudsters. This article aims to present Aquinas’ instructions regarding the uses of money, juxtaposing, at times, with literary texts. For this purpose, biblical passages, commentators of the Catholic tradition Bible, and texts from economists are brought in as the Summa Theologica is analyzed. Theoretical thinkers of Christian thought, such as Augustine and Boethius, and economic thought, such as Molina and Robbins, have been used. (shrink)

The late A. J. Ayer once dismissed Oxford Idealism as unphilosophical, with “the uplift coming from Balliol and subtleties from Merton.” If nothing else Geoffrey Thomas shows in this impressive and painstaking study that there was more than moral uplift at Balliol, and many subtleties besides, though how many of these last come from the University of London, where the book began life as a 1983 doctoral dissertation, is moot. Thomas notes two reasons why past philosophers continue to interest (...) us: either the fascination of arguments for positions that may well be insupportable, or else the intrinsic interest of certain perspectives they open up, though their actual reasoning may be weak. Thomas assigns Green firmly to the second camp, while trying his hardest to make good some of the poor or simply absent argumentation. An exercise in rational reconstruction as much as straight exposition, the book establishes a coherence and salience to Green’s moral thought that few might have suspected. (shrink)

Umm el-Qaab VII: Private Stelae of the Early Dynastic Period from the Royal Cemetery at Abydos. By Geoffrey Thorndike Martin. DAI Cairo, Archäologische Veröffentlichungen, vol. 123. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. 219, 90 plts. €128.

In this paper, I consider the contribution of Geoffrey Bennington's book, _Scatter 1_, to the ongoing discussion of the political dimension of deconstruction. Focusing on the resonances between Bennington's "politics of politics" and the notion of infrapolitics, I suggest that Bennington's major contribution revolves around the introduction of undecidability into political action and thought.

Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. However, it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of (...) the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously. (shrink)

In this lively collection ten philosophers tackle the notoriously elusive issues raised by religious discourse in a series of linked debates. The debates focus on reason and faith; the logic of mysticism; the meaning of the word 'God'; language, biblical interpretation and worship; and religion and ethics. Through contemporary philosophical analysis it is possible to shed new light on teh status and language of religion, and in many ways the contributors to Religion and Philosophy break new ground in this perennially (...) controversial field. The collection is addressed to philosophers, theologians and anyone with a general intellectual interest in religion. Certainly it will be a valuable addition to the reading list of all teachers or students of the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Editorial NoteThis lecture was given by Per Martin-Löf at Leiden University on August 25, 2001 at the invitation by Göran Sundholm to address the topic mentioned in the title and to reflect on Dummett’s earlier effort of almost a decade before. The lecture was part of a three-day conference on Gottlob Frege. Sundholm arranged for the lecture to be recorded and commissioned Bjørn Jespersen to make a transcript. The information in footnote 1, which Sundholm provided, has been independently confirmed (...) by Thomas Ricketts in an email to the author. The present version has been edited by Ansten Klev. Following the displayed text there is a lacuna in the original transcript corresponding to a pause in the recording when the tape was changed. The continuous text of the present version is the result of a few additions to the original transcript suggested by Klev and agreed to by the author. (shrink)

The discussion of collective agency involves the reduction problem of the concept of a collective. Individualism and Cartesian internalism have long restricted orthodox theories and made them face the tension between an irreducible concept of a collective and ontological reductionism. Heterodox theories as functionalism and interpretationism reinterpret the concept of agency and accept it as realized on the level of a collective. In order to adequately explain social phenomena that have relations as their essence, in this paper we propose a (...) relational, holistic account of collective agency and argue that functionalism and interpretationism can be integrated into such an account. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe, Günther Patzig und Wolfgang Wieland. Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

In the revised and updated edition of this classic introductory text, Martin Hollis leads his readers through the age-old philosophical questions of free choice and human nature, appearance and reality, reason and experience.

Moral luck is a puzzling aspect of our psychology: Why do we punish outcomes that were not intended (i.e. accidents)? Prevailing psychological accounts of moral luck characterize it as an accident or error, stemming either from a re‐evaluation of the agent's mental state or from negative affect aroused by the bad outcome itself. While these models have strong evidence in their favor, neither can account for the unique influence of accidental outcomes on punishment judgments, compared with other categories of moral (...) judgment. Why might punishment be particularly sensitive to moral luck? We suggest that such sensitivity is easily understood from the broader perspective of punishment's ultimate adaptive goal: Changing others’ behavior by exploiting their capacity to learn. This pedagogical perspective accounts for the exceptional influence of outcomes on punitive sentiments and makes predictions for additional moderators of punishment. We review evidence supporting the pedagogical hypothesis of punishment and discuss fruitful directions for future research. (shrink)

I defend a new reading of Spinoza's account of causation that reconciles the strengths of the mechanist and formal cause interpretations by locating instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws inside individual natures; natures are efficacious because that's where the laws are. God's necessity, for instance, follows from certain logical principles contained within God's nature. Causes between finite particulars likewise stem entirely from finite natures. They do so, I argue, because finite instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws are inscribed (...) within those natures. In each of these instances, effects follow from natures on account of laws contained within them. (shrink)

How do people excluded from political life achieve political agency? Through a series of historical events that have been mostly overlooked by political theorists, Martin Breaugh identifies fleeting yet decisive instances of emancipation in which people took it upon themselves to become political subjects. Emerging during the Roman plebs's first secession in 494 BCE, the _plebeian experience_ consists of an underground or unexplored configuration of political strategies to obtain political freedom. The people reject domination through political praxis and concerted (...) action, therefore establishing an alternative form of power. Breaugh's study concludes in the nineteenth century and integrates ideas from sociology, philosophy, history, and political science. Organized around diverse case studies, his work undertakes exercises in political theory to show how concepts provide a different understanding of the meaning of historical events and our political present. _The Plebeian Experience_ describes a recurring phenomenon that clarifies struggles for emancipation throughout history, expanding research into the political agency of the many and shedding light on the richness of radical democratic struggles from ancient Rome to Occupy Wall Street and beyond. (shrink)

Martin Wrights original ground-breaking and influential analysis of the defects of the adversarial system of justice, plus the arguments in favour of a more ...

Causal contextualism holds that sentences of the form ‘c causes e’ have context-sensitive truth-conditions. We consider four arguments invoked by Jonathan Schaffer in favor of this view. First, he argues that his brand of contextualism helps solve puzzles about transitivity. Second, he contends that how one describes the relata of the causal relation sometimes affects the truth of one’s claim. Third, Schaffer invokes the phenomenon of contrastive focus to conclude that causal statements implicitly designate salient alternatives to the cause and (...) effect. Fourth, he claims that the appropriateness of a causal statement depends on what is contextually taken for granted or made salient. We show that causal invariantism can explain these linguistic data at least as well as contextualism. We then argue that pace Schaffer, some causal sentences are always correct and can never be plausibly denied, regardless of the context. (shrink)

¿Cuáles son los componentes distintivos del cuerpo humano que permiten identificarlo como un elemento material diferente del resto del mundo físico? ¿Son tales elementos algo meramente funcional, o remiten a otra dimensión que va más allá de la instrumentalidad? Estas son las preguntas que se plantean en el libro “Biología y racionalidad. El carácter distintivo del cuerpo humano” de José Ángel Lombo y José Manuel Giménez Amaya. Partiendo desde la perspectiva filosófica, los autores buscan clarificar estas cuestiones ofreciendo un marco (...) conceptual interdisciplinar que remite en todo momento a la unidad de la persona humana. (shrink)