This article introduces and discusses the initial results of a survey focused on the contents, role and effectiveness of company codes of ethics. The article examines the contents of the codes of ethics of companies operating in the private sector in Italy, quoted on the Italian Stock Exchange (Standard& Poor/Mib-Milano Indice Borsa). The purpose of this investigation was to identify any correlations between sector characteristics and the contents of the codes of ethics, which would enable us to (...) map out the main principles followed in writing the companies' codes of ethics. The analysis was conducted in order to ascertain whether there were common factors deriving from the shared ethical questions faced by the companies operating in the same sector of activity. As the first step, the 40 companies were subdivided into three main economic categories -Industrial, Financial and Service. Then the contents of each code of ethics were evaluated and classified in accordance with different criteria. The main categories of classification were based on -general principles, social values, rules of conduct, relationships with third parties, implementation and sanctions. The next objective was to investigate whether these characteristics were due to the regulation of the sector of reference, the existence of sector benchmarks for best practice, or simply companies' voluntary stance on ethical issues. The main conclusions were that the codes of ethics of the Italian companies that we analysed do not seem to show relevant differences traceable to sector of activity, and their adoption is affected by several reasons other than intentionally ethical considerations. (shrink)

More businesses are embedding stakeholder engagement (SE) practices in their corporate disclosures. This article explores the extent to which SE practices are featured in the sustainability reports (SRs) of 48 Italian food and beverage businesses, following the latest Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. The researchers analyze the content of their SRs dated 2020 and 2021. They utilize a panel regression technique to examine the relationship between stakeholder engagement disclosures (SED) and corporate financial performance (CFP), and to investigate the mediating (...) role of SR assurance. The results show a positive and significant relationship between SED and CFP. They also confirm that there is a moderating effect from SR assurance on this causal path. However, the findings reveal that SED in SRs of Italian food companies is still moderate. This contribution builds on the logic behind the stakeholder theory. It implies that there is scope for food companies to forge relationships with stakeholders. It indicates that it is in their interest to disclose material information about their SE practices in their SR and to organize third party assurance assessments in order to improve their legitimacy with stakeholders. (shrink)

This study evaluates corporate governance issues in publicly quoted companies in Nigeria, which border on board characteristics, composition and roles in strategy development processes, appraisal of directors, as well as relationships between boards and CEO, top management and other stakeholders. The empirical findings of the study reveal useful insights with respect to corporate governance practices in Nigeria. The results show that Nigerian public companies have embraced the principles of good corporate governance, although they are at different levels (...) of adoption of the various corporate governance issues. These companies have medium-sized boards, with majority of them having leadership structures that are characterised by separation of the positions of chairman and CEO. This paper draws a number of conclusions and recommendations and also highlights some limitations that can be improved upon in future studies. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a mainstream issue as both researchers and managers are realizing its importance, but knowledge gaps persist. In particular, the processes underlying the adoption of responsible managerial practices and the effects associated with them are still at the centre of intense debate. Not surprisingly, managers expect formalized procedures that might influence corporate managerial processes and especially corporate strategies. Given the growing emphasis on the integration of CSR into corporate strategy, the purpose of this qualitative study (...) is to explore the antecedents of this process and the dynamics underlying it. We focus on a medium-sized, family-owned Italian company, SABAF SpA. We find that: the beliefs and value systems of entrepreneurs play a fundamental role in shaping a sustainable corporate strategy; the importance of the relationship between social performance and financial performance depends to some extent on the kind of competitive strategy that a company has selected; and people need to be aware of it – that is, CSR strategies must be explicit and codified into specific managerial procedures. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a mainstream issue as both researchers and managers are realizing its importance, but knowledge gaps persist. In particular, the processes underlying the adoption of responsible managerial practices and the effects associated with them are still at the centre of intense debate. Not surprisingly, managers expect formalized procedures that might influence corporate managerial processes and especially corporate strategies. Given the growing emphasis on the integration of CSR into corporate strategy, the purpose of this qualitative study (...) is to explore the antecedents of this process and the dynamics underlying it. We focus on a medium-sized, family-owned Italian company, SABAF SpA. We find that: the beliefs and value systems of entrepreneurs play a fundamental role in shaping a sustainable corporate strategy; the importance of the relationship between social performance and financial performance depends to some extent on the kind of competitive strategy that a company has selected; and people need to be aware of it – that is, CSR strategies must be explicit and codified into specific managerial procedures. (shrink)

In A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, Dragonetti advances a theory of action based on rewards for virtues. The idea of rewards, especially of awards, relies on the hypothesis that intrinsic motivations drive the actions of good or virtuous citizens. We apply this theory to virtuous entrepreneurs who voluntarily adopt ethical principles as promoted by a recent Italian law. These firms receive an ethical rating by the Italian Competition Authority and can access a set of economic and non-economic (...) benefits. We survey a sample of 152 private companies with an ER and examine their views on the economic and social motivations and benefits as well as the perceived usefulness of the ER for improving ethical behaviour. An exploratory factor analysis detects four categories of motivation and two categories of benefits, which we use in regression models to test Dragonetti’s theory. Overall, respondents see the ER as an effective tool, except in terms of improving economic performance. We also find that entrepreneurs with lower economic and higher responsiveness motivations attain higher ERs. However, in the respondents’ opinions, the ER is not producing any concrete benefits since we find no relationship between the ER and economic or competitive rewards. These findings have implications for the ICA as well as for private companies. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 4, Page 981-998, October 2022.

In Italy in recent years, an exponential increase in the frequency of medical malpractice claims relating to the issue of informed consent has substantially altered not only medical ethics, but medical practice as well. Total or partial lack of consent has become the cornerstone of many malpractice lawsuits, and continues to be one of the primary cudgels against defendant physicians in Italian courtrooms. Physicians have responded to the rising number of claims with an increase in ‘defensive medicine’ and a (...) prevailing preoccupation with the purely formal aspects of consent. The result is a plethora of consent forms, believed to be a guarantee of ‘informed consent’, as well as a growing reliance on informed consent as a shield against judicial action brought by the patient. Physicians ‘inform’ patients without really sharing information, often delegating the task of communication to other professionals who are not doctors. Italian judges always condemn the physician when information to the patient has been inadequate, thus leading insurance companies to consider the lack of valid informed consent as the total responsibility of the physician and/or the hospital. It is necessary to change tack, to remove this idea of consent which permeates the defensive culture of medical practice. Italian physicians need to be trained, first of all, to become aware that information and consent are two distinct processes, albeit closely connected. Valid communication demands a higher level of professionalism from physicians. (shrink)

The three-yearly conference of Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS) has taken place in Bergamo, the 15th, 16th and 17th December 2010. The charming venue has been the former convent of Sant’Agostino, nowadays University of Bergamo. The conference program has been structured distinguishing plenary and parallel sessions: the first ones were 40 minutes long and designed for international guests: S. Abramsky from the Wolfson College of Oxford, A. Hagar from Indiana University, P. Janich from Philipps Universitaet (...) of Marburg and S. Okasha from University of Bristol. The complete program of the conference can be downloaded here: . We followed all the plenary sessions, and the first part of our report concerns them. There is just the exception of professor S. Psillos’ talk, which was indeed programmed, but didn’t take place due to greek unrest of the last December. The second part of our report concers the parallel sessions, that were 20 minutes long and designed for concurrent talks split between subject areas. We will keep this division into areas in our report and we chose four talks per area. However, it must be said that we had not watch the parallel sessions completely, since their being simoultaneous. This means that our review of the conference will be perspective, both because of subjective standpoint and because of the mentioned limitation. Still we hope we can offer a quite complete picture of the three-days conference, as we hope this overview may be considered as a general review of it. Just a few words must be still said to introduce to our review. The structure of each review will consists in a presentation of the talk’s author(s) (which we faithfully copy hereinafter) followed by a brief remark by us. Since many compliments could be surely done to the SILFS’ organization and to the University of Bergamo, an overall effect seems hard to be drawn, because of some arising perplexities. Although these are just our shared impressions about the conference, we think they must be remembered. One could note outward that the conference have had three official languages: English, French and Italian. Apparently, this is something that has not been justified since French has been useless and Italian has often prevented the comprehension by foreigner attendance. Many defections have taken place, something that could be said about the conformity with the program (in spite of the high number of speeches). Of course these defections have been caused by different reasons, but they become an indication of lack of professionalism as the number grows. Coming to an estimation of the inner issues, first we are seriously puzzled about the selection criterion (if any) which the SILFS has chosen the invited speakers with. One can notice that excellent talks have been put together to shallow speech without substantial scientific commitment. One has to keep in mind that who is just worthless, much lowers the general level. The topics have been various, although many were historical reconstruction and the "historiographic" approach in the study of Philosophy of Science seems therefore prevailing. Those talks whose subject was Logic and its applications, have been the highest-quality ones, by the fact that they were close to contemporary researches. More specifically, we would like to quote those concerning Quantum Computation and Logic of Quantum Mechanics. Talks of Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Science were first-rate works, too, having showed high proficiency, though even specialistic topics were often technically handled, to the detriment of laymen (as us). (shrink)

We examine the equity valuation effect of press releases of upgrades or downgrades reflected in the Covalence Ethical Quote, an index ranking the ethical performance of multinational firms. The index is updated quarterly and is comprehensive enough to include 45 criteria reflecting working conditions, impact of product, impact of production, and company institutional impact. Thus, it captures many dimensions of firms’ ethical performance that are not accounted for in previous research. Our research encompasses a joint test of the value relevance (...) of the index itself and the impact of ethical reputation on a firm’s value. We find first a significant causal relationship between stock market reactions and changes in the CEQ. Specifically, disclosures of positive changes in firm ethical performance cause increases in firm value. Second, cross-sectional analysis indicates a positive association between changes in firm ethical performance and both its financial performance and its financial reporting quality. Collectively, these results suggest that the CEQ conveys information that is useful to investors. Further, corporate measures taken to increase ethical performance are associated with positive benefits to shareholders. Finally, investors have concluded that good news about their firms’ efforts to be ethical is worth the cost. (shrink)

Purpose driven companies have developed their corporate culture with a commitment to stakeholders, Sustainable Development Goals, and social responsibility, prioritizing the management of organizational intangibles over capital. The overall objective of this research is to gain knowledge regarding the attention and emotional intensity registered by young Spanish university students when visualizing corporate purpose versus corporate visual identity, as well as the image of the Chairman of the main Spanish companies quoted on the IBEX 35. The techniques of (...) eye tracking and galvanic skin response have been used with 31 Spanish university students. The results suggest that brands with the highest brand equity in the Interbrand ranking are also the ones that receive the highest levels of attention and emotional arousal, and that a well-formulated corporate purpose is not enough to satisfy the public if company credibility is low due to previous perceptions of an organization. (shrink)

In contrast to the recent rise to economic importance of offshore finance centres (OFCs), the topic of taxation has so far created little interest among scholars of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This paper makes two contributions to addressing this lacuna. Applying a range of influential normative theories of ethics, it first offers an ethical evaluation of tax havens. Second, the paper examines what use large firms that are headquartered in two OFCs—Bermuda and the Cayman Islands—make of formal CSR tools. The (...) emerging duplicity in tax havenbased companies professing social responsibility highlights once more the political nature of CSR, where at least some firms and/or industries can successfully limit government power to enact regulation as well as shape the discourse around CSR. The study of CSR in OFC-based firms thus calls into question the usefulness of the often quoted definition of CSR as going beyond the law. (shrink)

Virgil's fourth Eclogue is one of the most quoted, adapted and discussed works of classical literature. This study traces the fortunes of Eclogue 4 in the literature and art of the Italian Renaissance. It sheds new light on some of the most canonical works of Western art and literature, as well as introducing a large number of other, lesser-known items, some of which have not appeared in print since their original publication, while others are extant only in manuscript. (...) Individual chapters are devoted to the uses made of the fourth Eclogue in the political panegyric of Medici Florence, the Venetian Republic and the Renaissance papacy, and to religious appropriations of the Virgilian text in the genres of epic and pastoral poetry. The book also investigates the appearance of quotations from the poem in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century fresco cycles representing the prophetic Sibyls in Italian churches. (shrink)

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (_ir_)responsibility (CS_I_R) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of _WeBuild_ (formerly known as _Salini Impregilo_), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes (...) built by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals. (shrink)

Soft regulation has increased its importance in science and technology governance. Despite such indisputable significance, the literature on technology policy and regulation so far seems to have dedicated only a limited attention to a systematic understanding of the factors affecting compliance with these soft rules. This article addresses this limitation. By way of a literature scoping exercise, we propose a taxonomy of the mechanisms affecting compliance with soft regulation. We subsequently apply the taxonomy as a guide to examine the opinions (...) of a small group of scientists and company managers in the Italian nanotechnology sector. The case study does not assess compliance in a direct way, i.e., observing how organizations comply with regulation, but it explores the opinions on what the factors affecting compliance are. (shrink)

The paper responds to the recent calls for further evidence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on the extant literature, the authors identify four characteristics contended by academicians as peculiarities of SMEs’ approach to CSR: the intrinsic relationship between CSR and corporate strategy motivated by the need to continuously dialogue with stakeholders; the centrality of the entrepreneur's ethos in CSR decisions; the coexistence and the cross‐effect of economically instrumental and ethically motivated CSR policies; and (...) the finalization of CSR initiatives to specific firm growth objectives. These four peculiarities are explored in the case of an Italian medium‐sized company operating in the furniture industry. The outcomes show how the four peculiarities are salient in analyzing the CSR approach by the company and suggest areas for further research aimed at developing a thorough theory of CSR in SMEs. In particular, we deepen the analysis of the nature of the uniqueness of medium‐sized companies’ approach to CSR, providing possible interpretations of the reasons making medium‐sized companies’ approach to CSR different from both small and large companies. (shrink)

The corporate social responsibility and industrial relations studies have evolved mostly in parallel. In this paper, we integrate the IR with the CSR perspective, highlighting their similarities and differences. In particular, the study adopts a framework which includes a wide set of CSR-related issues to explore what unions and companies negotiate under the umbrella of CSR. It analyses and compares the national sectoral agreements of two key industries in the Italian economy, i.e. Metal and Chemical. We find that (...) these two sectors exhibit differences because the CSR-related issues covered by the two contracts are formally labelled as CSR in the Chemical contract, and not labelled as CSR in the Metal contract. We also find similarities regarding the CSR-related issues covered and not covered by the national contracts, and the binding processes centrally negotiated for their implementation. We interpret the similarities in light of the specificities of the Italian IR system, and the differences in light of the negotiation traditions of the two sectors under study, which induce the actors in the Metal sector to focus more on what differentiates the CSR and IR perspectives, and the actors in the Chemical sector to focus more on what the CSR and IR perspectives share. (shrink)

The paper responds to the recent calls for further evidence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on the extant literature, the authors identify four characteristics contended by academicians as peculiarities of SMEs’ approach to CSR: the intrinsic relationship between CSR and corporate strategy motivated by the need to continuously dialogue with stakeholders; the centrality of the entrepreneur's ethos in CSR decisions; the coexistence and the cross‐effect of economically instrumental and ethically motivated CSR policies; and (...) the finalization of CSR initiatives to specific firm growth objectives. These four peculiarities are explored in the case of an Italian medium‐sized company operating in the furniture industry. The outcomes show how the four peculiarities are salient in analyzing the CSR approach by the company and suggest areas for further research aimed at developing a thorough theory of CSR in SMEs. In particular, we deepen the analysis of the nature of the uniqueness of medium‐sized companies’ approach to CSR, providing possible interpretations of the reasons making medium‐sized companies’ approach to CSR different from both small and large companies. (shrink)

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (_ir_)responsibility (CS_I_R) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of _WeBuild_ (formerly known as _Salini Impregilo_), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes (...) built by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals. (shrink)

The paper responds to the recent calls for further evidence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on the extant literature, the authors identify four characteristics contended by academicians as peculiarities of SMEs’ approach to CSR: the intrinsic relationship between CSR and corporate strategy motivated by the need to continuously dialogue with stakeholders; the centrality of the entrepreneur's ethos in CSR decisions; the coexistence and the cross-effect of economically instrumental and ethically motivated CSR policies; and (...) the finalization of CSR initiatives to specific firm growth objectives. These four peculiarities are explored in the case of an Italian medium-sized company operating in the furniture industry. The outcomes show how the four peculiarities are salient in analyzing the CSR approach by the company and suggest areas for further research aimed at developing a thorough theory of CSR in SMEs. In particular, we deepen the analysis of the nature of the uniqueness of medium-sized companies’ approach to CSR, providing possible interpretations of the reasons making medium-sized companies’ approach to CSR different from both small and large companies. (shrink)

A great part of human genetics research is carried out collecting data and building large databases of biological samples that are in a non-anonymous format. These constitute a valuable resource for future research. The construction of such databases and tissue banks facilitates important scientific progress. However, biobanks have been recognized as ethically problematic because they contain thousands of data that could expose individuals and populations to discrimination, stigmatization and psychological stress if misused. Informed consent is regarded as a cornerstone in (...) the protection of personal autonomy in research involving human subjects. Yet in recent years this fundamental concept has been overwhelmed by the genomic revolution. From a general overview of international literature, it seems evident that informed consent issues have come into sharp focus, in particular in relation to the twin issues of time extension (blanket versus specific/repeated consent) and personal extension (group consent). After an introduction on obtaining informed consent in the context of genetic research, this paper addresses the apparent lack of a single, universal model of obtaining informed consent among populations involved in genetic research and it argues for the need to develop an ethical framework tailored to the specific features of each project. In order to support this theory of contextualizing, the case of a private biotechnology company, SharDNA is presented. The present paper explores the management of its biobank, developed from a genetic research project carried out on isolated populations living on the Italian island of Sardinia. In particular, the paper highlights how the company is tackling the problem of informed consent and other ethical requirements for genetic research, such as the respect of individual privacy, the population approach and the existing Italian legal regulatory framework. (shrink)

The masters of mankind in Smith's day were the "merchants and manufacturers," who were the "principal architects" of state policy, using their power to bring "dreadful misfortunes" to the vast realms they subjugated and to harm the people of England as well, though their own interests were "most peculiarly attended to." In our day the masters are, increasingly, the supranational corporations and financial institutions that dominate the world economy, including international trade -- a dubious term for a system in which (...) some 40 percent of U.S. trade takes place within companies, centrally managed by the same highly visible hands that control planning, production and investment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 525 "an awareness of its perfection in perfect sell-identity" stems from his own theological bias: if God is to be connected with the world, His thinking cannot be merely a thinking about itself; His mind must also contain the Ideas of the sensible world. The inconsistency is quite apparent in the concluding paragraph of the introductory chapter three on "SellKnowledge ": If we study chapters seven and (...) nine of Book Lambda against the background of these texts on the meaning of friendship, it becomes apparent that a fortiori God's thinking must concern his own being and that "the thinking of thinking" is the supreme form of self-knowledge. Far from being an objectless returning to oneself, this knowledge concerns the very being of the First Principle. It would also seem to fot|ow that iust as knowing a friend is a certain degree of self-knowledge because of the ontological kinship between the self and a friend, God, in knowing himself, also knows, to a certain degree, the essential principles of things in so far as he is the first being encompassing within himself the perfections which other beings possess. This would, however, not imply that the first being would know the world as distinct from himself or as dependent on himself (pp. 33-34). How can God (the Unmoved Mover) think only of Himself, and at the same time, to a certain degree (whatever this means) know also the essential principles of things, the perfections which other beings possess? And what textual justification is there for attributing this position to Aristotle? There are a number of errors in the text. Some of them are as follows: (1) On p. 21 Elders quotes from Laws 987b, in spite of the fact that the Laws ends on 969c. The passage referred to would have to be in Epinomis, but at 987b there is nothing of the text he quotes, to wit, vo~g ~v n0ooXQf3o0oa~E~0~tv 6006g 0~tv. (2) On p. 24, note 41, he correctly gives the text at 432a4 as ~ ~oggdSEo~xotg do0n~o~g x6 vo~x6 ~oxt but makes it mean: '~ere are phantasmata in which the intelligible things are contained." Evidently he confuses this with the passage at 431b1--4. (3) On p. 279, p~.~oxr should read p~i~.t~r (4) On p. 5, ~oo~v should read 6.~ao6v. K. W. Hsaa~oroN Emery University In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. Two Volumes. By Charles Trinkaus. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970. Pp. 985. $22.50) I. Since the appearance of Burckhardt's classic essay more than a century ago, three schools of thought have grown up around the problem of the nature and extent of humanism 's relationship to Christianity. The classic position, represented by Burckhardt, Symends, Dilthey, Gentile, Cassirer, Saitta, and others, has interpreted humanism as an essentiaUy anti-Christian, anti-scholastic, rationatistic, and individualistic phenomenon caught up in an overwhelming concern for attaining to historical greatness in this world. If religion has been considered at all (and it is usually left to take care of itself), it has been so reinterpreted as to become consistent with the interests of emerging secularism, liberalism, and modern science. Opposing the Burckhardtian position, however, is one originally associated with the work of Giuseppe Toffanin and, more recently, Hiram Haydn. Here, Renaissance humanism is seen to be fundamentaUy Catholic, orthodox, and traditional---the two movements joined in perfect harmony by a common concern for antiquity and universaiism, for Latinity, faith, and corporate elitism, and by a common opposition to democratic particularism, heresy, individualism, modernity, and the vernaculars. What makes these two positions extreme, however, is the existence of the largest, most 526 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY moderate, and most diversified camp. Originating with Thode, Pastor, Olgiati, and Joachimsen, among a host of others, it has encompassed the general view that humanism and Christianity are separate yet interrelated. For some, medieval Catholicism is not the antithesis but the fountainhead of Renaissance humanism--the religious cause of a secular effect. For others, humanism is a novel intellectual movement, but one yet operating within a still... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950Eva L. CorredorA History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950, by René Wellek; xvii & 458 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, $42.50.The seventh volume of René Wellek’s history of modern criticism may well be the most interesting of his eight-volume monumental oeuvre. Devoted to German, (...) Russian, and Eastern European criticism between 1900 and 1950, it exemplifies most strikingly Wellek’s personal battles with critics who were roughly his contemporaries and closest to his own European background. “I should like to think of my History as ‘elucidatory,’ as not ‘argumentative’ or ‘polemical’” (v, xxi), Wellek writes, but he does not shrink from expressing his own critical perspective usually in a gentlemanly humorous or ironical, but occasionally also quite harsh and stubborn fashion. He insists on the importance of individual value judgments in critical analysis, particularly when they are his own: “I do not believe that... my views and those of my contemporaries will be replaced by completely different assumptions” (“Reflections on my History,” The Attack on Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 145).Since Wellek rejects the idea of a historical determinism and thinks that “an evolutionary history of criticism must fail” (The Attack, p. 144), he provides less a history than a collection of essays in which he offers succinct appraisals of writers, thinkers and critics both as individuals and as participants in the broader literary movements of the century. He presents “portraits” (p. xv), which he also calls “doxographies” (The Attack, p. 143), containing a vast amount of quotations carefully selected to support the authority of his own views or to let them speak for themselves when he would rather not comment.More than any previous work, this volume embodies Wellek’s will and determination to carry on against all odds even when he can no longer do so on his own. An accident in 1986 left him bedridden and dependent on students and secretaries to help him with his research and writing. He was able to draw on a wealth of previously published essays, some of which had been written more than three decades ago. There are some arguable inaccuracies and shortcomings (his canon includes obscure writers but not Adorno and [End Page 259] again no women writers), and problems with his bibliographies and references. Yet Wellek’s unique talent to assemble in one volume half a century of critical commentary on the literatures of half a dozen different cultures appears intact. So do his well-known critical positions.Among his most interesting essays are those on Spitzer, Auerbach, Ingarden, Bakhtin, and Benjamin, highly erudite men in whose company Wellek enjoys moving. On the other hand, some extraordinarily fertile minds and their enormous influence on the post-1950 critical discourse are often quickly dismissed or treated with unnecessary condescension. Young Roman Jakobson “should be forgotten” (p. 372). Freud’s psychoanalysis “seems forced and mistaken” (p. 79). Heidegger “often ascribes a meaning which seems to me absent in the text itself” (p. 89). Wellek’s low tolerance of any but his own interpretation of Dostoevsky appears repeatedly in this volume: Thomas Mann’s views are called “strange” and “distorted” (p. 12), Freud’s “deeply flawed” (p. 79), Bakhtin’s “simply wrong” (p. 357), and Lukács’s “simply... [those] of Communism” (p. 232). Wellek’s anti-historicism is dramatized in essays on Auerbach and his “historical perspectivism” (p. 132), vs. Spitzer who “always saw that there is a point at which historicism must fail” (p. 144). The vacuum of German criticism during the Nazi period is hauntingly demonstrated. The essays on Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, and in particular György Lukács reveal best Wellek’s notorious feuds with Marxists. Wellek indulges in a sarcastic critique of the Marxist Lukács’s “doctrinaire limitations” (p. 245) and attempts, wrongfully, to “prove” the Hungarian philosopher’s “exaltation of Socialist Realism” (p. 244). When in the mid-eighties and after much encouragement Wellek finally writes an essay on the early Lukács, he... (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the (...) largest producers of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate. (shrink)

In this article, we use a sample of Norwegian quoted companies in the period of 2001–2010 to explore whether the gender quota requiring 40 % female directors on corporate boards changes the likelihood of women being appointed to top leadership roles as board chairs or corporate CEOs. Our empirical results indicate that the gender quota and the resulting increased representation of female directors provide a fertile ground for women to take top leadership positions. The presence of female board (...) chairs is positively associated with female directors’ independence status, age and qualification, whilst the presence of female CEOs is positively related to the average qualification of female directors. Firms with older and better educated female directors are more likely to appoint female board chairs. The likelihood of female CEOs’ appointment increases with the percentage of independent directors and directors’ qualifications, especially those for female directors. Furthermore, the gender gaps with respect to qualification, board interlocks and nationality between female and male board chairs vanishes after Norwegian companies’ full compliance to the quota in January 2008. However, the gender quota has no significant impact on the gender gaps between female and male directors after its full compliance. Our article thereby contributes to understanding how gender quotas, presence of female directors, percentage of female directors on boards and other board characteristics can determine the gender of top leaders of organizations. (shrink)

Recently, a number of scholars have warned against the risk of a new form of deliberately deceptive communication companies use to assure stakeholders of their good intentions in the adoption and development of digital technologies and advanced information systems based on artificial intelligence. This corporate behaviour, defined as machinewashing, in an attempt to empower engagement processes in the stakeholders’ network and satisfy stakeholder expectations with regard to the ethical implications of the use of artificial intelligence, has, in the final (...) instance, the prevailing purpose of achieving better levels of corporate performance and reputation. However, thus far, scholars have not provided any empirical studies on the existence of corporate machinewashing strategies, and there is a significant lack of clarity as to how to measure machinewashing. Utilising the corporate digital responsibility theory, this paper offers an original methodological contribution to the nascent research field dedicated to machinewashing behaviour. Particularly, this paper provides considerations for detecting machinewashing through an analysis based on the comparison between the information capacity of the reporting and the information reliability level as a proxy for machinewashing strategies and, thus, for the real impact of digitalisation strategies on stakeholders. To this end, we conducted an exploratory content analysis of the reports of 10 Italian-listed companies from 10 different industries. Overall, looking at the gap between what companies say about the impact of digitalisation from an ethical perspective, and what really happens, our results define a possible path for identifying machinewashing, the fields where it happens and the practices that companies use in order to realise these strategies. (shrink)

Nowadays, cities have became the laboratory of new forms of political mobilization based on urban branding policies which improves marketing of the city image in various ways by converting the visual image of the city into a brand image. In the early twenty-first century, the city of Turin as the Italian prototypical one-company town started investing heavily in urban branding strategies, in order to modify its former image of an industrial city. The core of the paper is a theoretical (...) framework to understand the Urban Branding in Post-Fordist cities, which were developed through a review of the literature on both city branding and the industrial cities. Following a review of the extant literature on the urban image in general and city branding in particular, this research outlines distinct elements, categories and dimensions of a place brand, as well as a number of approaches in post-Fordist and postindustrial cities with example cases of each approach. This Paper aims to analyze the relationships between Post-Fordist Cities and Urban Branding through the case study of Turin, particularly deepening the role played by urban branding policies not only in promoting the city image but also in refusing some particular urban representations. (shrink)

The fact that Internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines’ approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they (...) return. We analyzed the first 30 webpages returned searching “vaccines autism” in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. The results show that not only “alternative” search engines but also other commercial engines often return more anti-vaccine pages (10–53%) than Google (0%). Some localized versions of Google, however, returned more anti-vaccine webpages (up to 10%) than Google. Health information returned by search engines has an impact on public health and, specifically, in the acceptance of vaccines. The issue of information quality when seeking information for making health-related decisions also impact the ethical aspect represented by the right to an informed consent. Our study suggests that designing a search engine that is privacy savvy and avoids issues with filter bubbles that can result from user-tracking is necessary but insufficient; instead, mechanisms should be developed to test search engines from the perspective of information quality (particularly for health-related webpages) before they can be deemed trustworthy providers of public health information. (shrink)

Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity (...) on the board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

For more than forty years, Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's most important and influential philosophers, has been a leading participant in the postwar turn that has brought Nietzsche back to the center of philosophical enquiry. In this collection of his essays on the subject, which is a dialogue both with Nietzsche and with the Nietzschean tradition, Vattimo explores the German philosopher's most important works and discusses his views on the _Ubermensch_, time, history, truth, hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. He also presents (...) a different, more "Italian" Nietzsche, one that diverges from German and French characterizations. Many contemporary French and poststructuralist philosophers offer literary or aesthetic readings of Nietzsche's work that downplay its political import. Shaped by the revolutionary tradition of 1968, Vattimo's interpretations take Nietzsche seriously as a political philosopher and argue for and defend his relevance to projects for social and political change. He emphasizes the hermeneutic aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, characterizing the Nietzschean project as a political hermeneutics. Vattimo also grapples with Heidegger, a philosopher who has had a profound influence on the interpretation and understanding of Nietzsche. Vattimo examines Heidegger's philosophy through its complex relationship to Nietzsche's, and he produces a Heideggerian understanding of Nietzsche that paradoxically goes against Heidegger's own readings of Nietzsche's work. Heidegger believed Nietzsche was the ultimate metaphysician; Vattimo sees him as the founder of postmetaphysical philosophy. Throughout these essays, Vattimo draws on and quotes extensively from fragments in Nietzsche's notebooks, many of which have never before been translated into English. His writing is clear, elegant, and accessible, and, for the first time, Vattimo's own intellectual developments, shifts, and continuities can be clearly discerned. The loyal testimony and unique perspective in _Dialogue with Nietzsche_ makes a convincing case for another orientation in Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

For more than forty years, Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's most important and influential philosophers, has been a leading participant in the postwar turn that has brought Nietzsche back to the center of philosophical enquiry. In this collection of his essays on the subject, which is a dialogue both with Nietzsche and with the Nietzschean tradition, Vattimo explores the German philosopher's most important works and discusses his views on the _Ubermensch_, time, history, truth, hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. He also presents (...) a different, more "Italian" Nietzsche, one that diverges from German and French characterizations. Many contemporary French and poststructuralist philosophers offer literary or aesthetic readings of Nietzsche's work that downplay its political import. Shaped by the revolutionary tradition of 1968, Vattimo's interpretations take Nietzsche seriously as a political philosopher and argue for and defend his relevance to projects for social and political change. He emphasizes the hermeneutic aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, characterizing the Nietzschean project as a political hermeneutics. Vattimo also grapples with Heidegger, a philosopher who has had a profound influence on the interpretation and understanding of Nietzsche. Vattimo examines Heidegger's philosophy through its complex relationship to Nietzsche's, and he produces a Heideggerian understanding of Nietzsche that paradoxically goes against Heidegger's own readings of Nietzsche's work. Heidegger believed Nietzsche was the ultimate metaphysician; Vattimo sees him as the founder of postmetaphysical philosophy. Throughout these essays, Vattimo draws on and quotes extensively from fragments in Nietzsche's notebooks, many of which have never before been translated into English. His writing is clear, elegant, and accessible, and, for the first time, Vattimo's own intellectual developments, shifts, and continuities can be clearly discerned. The loyal testimony and unique perspective in _Dialogue with Nietzsche_ makes a convincing case for another orientation in Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Possibility and Necessity in the Time of Peter Abelard by Irene BininiWolfgang LenzenIrene Binini. Possibility and Necessity in the Time of Peter Abelard. Investigating Medieval Philosophy Series. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. xii + 326. Hardback, $166.00.This book is an impressive work written by a young Italian scholar who received her PhD only five years ago in Pisa. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 gives a (...) survey of "Early 12th-Century Debates on Modal Propositions"; part 2 is devoted to "Abelard's Modal Logic"; [End Page 327] part 3 deals with the views of "Abelard on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Modalities." The author displays a profound knowledge of the relevant literature. The primary sources comprise twenty manuscripts preserved in various European libraries, plus forty-eight printed works (from Abelard to William of Sherwood). The list of secondary sources contains altogether 136 items from A (Astroh) to Z (Zagzebski), but, interestingly, it does not mention a monograph that, by its very title, claims to give an exposition of Abelard's logic, namely Maria Teresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli's La Logica di Abelardo (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1964).As far as I can judge (as a nonnative English-speaker), the linguistic quality of Binini's book is quite good. The explanations in the main text, including the translations from Latin sources, are easily comprehensible, and the many quotations (distributed over no less than 655 footnotes) are almost without any fault. Thus, the book rightly deserves inclusion in the prestigious series Investigating Medieval Philosophy. Yet, at least according to my taste, the book contains many redundancies. Again and again, the author first explains a certain issue at some length, then confirms the correctness of her interpretation by means of a longer (English) quotation, and finally reconfirms it by fully quoting the Latin text in the footnotes.As Binini explains in the book's concluding chapter, her aim is to present "an all-encompassing reflection on [Abelard's] works on modalities" and "a comparison between these works and the parallel reflections advanced by other masters and logicians in the early 12th century" (308). She undoubtedly achieves this goal. The comparison of Abelard's views on possibility and necessity with the views of other logicians is mainly carried out in chapters 1–3. Ancient and early medieval logicians such as, in particular, the Stoics and Boethius favored the basic idea that "something," p, is necessary if and only if p is always the case (or true). Accordingly, p is possible if and only if p is at least sometime the case. Abelard, however, was not willing to accept that each possibility has to become realized at some time. He instead offered a "nature-based characterization of possibility" that can "account for unrealized, past, counterfactual, and even unactualizable possibilities" (308). Abelard's idea is that something, x, is possibly a P if and only if the property of being P is compatible with the nature of x. Hence this view basically amounts to a de re conception of possibility that attributes modalities to things, while the temporal view attributes modal properties primarily to propositions (or states of affairs) and hence can be labeled de dicto (or de sensu).Let us now turn to Binini's twofold aim (as formulated on the back cover of her book) to present a "uniform and consistent" reassessment of Abelard's theory of modalities and of his modal logic. The former task is tackled in chapters 8–10. After summarizing, in chapter 8, Abelard's general views on "Nature and Modalities," chapter 9 is devoted to a detailed discussion of the "Many Senses of Possibility." In five consecutive sections, Binini investigates the conception of (1) possibility as "non-repugnancy with nature" (illustrated by the thesis that "any man can be a bishop" [235]); (2) unrealizable but "conceivable" possibilities (such as the existence of humans lacking the ability to laugh [240]); (3) determinate potencies (like that of an amputee who nevertheless "can walk" [248]); (4) past and counterfactual potencies (like that of a blind person who might be able to see); and (5) other puzzling de re possibilities (such as "irrational humans" [261]).The final... (shrink)

The radical changes deriving from the COVID-19 emergency have heavily upset some of the most familiar routines of daily work life. Abruptly, many workers have been forced to face the difficulties that come with switching to remote working. Basing on the theoretical framework proposed by the Job Demands-Resources model, the purpose of this paper was to explore the effect of work overload, on behavioral stress, meant as an outcome linked to the health impairment process. Furthermore, the aim of the study (...) was to explore the mediating role of job crafting, considered as a second-order construct consisting of two dimensions in the abovementioned relation. Participants were 530 workers experiencing remote working or work-from-home during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Hypotheses were explored by using three different latent variables, measured reflexively through indicators on a 5-point scale, extracted from validated questionnaires. Data analysis was performed through Structural Equation Modeling; to test the mediation, bootstrap validation was computed. Results showed that the mediation of job crafting was partial. More specifically, the direct effect between work overload and behavioral stress was positive; moreover, the indirect, negative effect through the mediation of job crafting was also significant. Therefore, results showed that job crafting can play a crucial role as a protective factor supporting the activation and adjustment of suitable resources; these resources can be useful to deal with the negative effects of work overload, particularly under the condition of heavy remote working and use of technologies, on individual outcomes. Starting from the current global scenario of the pandemic that has not yet ceased its effects, the study suggested decisive theoretical and practical implications. Accordingly, findings extended the current trends in occupational health psychology research, with special reference to the mainstream topic “work and COVID-19” in the Italian context. Finally, results can give suggestions to companies engaged in managing change, recommending that they build a collaborative workplace at the individual and collective level to implement job crafting interventions and enrich the personal and organizational resources of workers, which is useful cope with the current demands. (shrink)

In 1995 Walker & Company published a small book authored by the professional writer Dava Sobel entitled Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Not only did the book sell exceptionally well; it also spawned a three‐hour film, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, and a new, lavishly illustrated work, The Illustrated Longitude, by Sobel and Harvard's William J. H. Andrewes. It is difficult to think of another book in the (...) history of science that has attained comparable success. Yet it seems that history of science journals have taken scant notice of the book; my efforts to locate reviews of Sobel's volume in history of science journals have turned up only a single review, that being in Italian. This is all the more distressing because the book and film present a very controversial view of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. This is not the place to examine Sobel's recipe for success, but it seems relevant background in reviewing a book also written by a professional journalist, also published by Walker, and fairly comparable in format to Sobel's.The history of science is rich in fascinating stories that could delight a variety of readers. The story of the search for longitude in the eighteenth century is certainly one of these; the dramatic quest to discover Neptune in the mid nineteenth century is another. Put overly briefly, the latter is the story of the frustrated efforts of a young, personally diffident but intellectually bold Cambridge graduate, John Couch Adams, to convince either the director of the Cambridge Observatory or England's Astronomer Royal to look for a planet that Adams's calculations had told him must be located at a specific position. It is also the story of the brilliant and arrogant Urbain J. J. Leverrier, who had independently completed comparable calculations and who beat Adams to the discovery by persuading not one of his French colleagues but an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory to launch a search, which within a few hours had located Neptune. It is also the story of the immense controversy that followed and that has in the last few years been given a new twist with the recovery of key documents carried off to Chile from the Royal Greenwich Observatory.Tom Standage, science correspondent for the Economist and author of The Victorian Internet, has taken up the challenge of retelling the Neptune story, which had previously been treated in dozens of articles and in book‐length studies by John Pringle Nichol, Albert Glodin, Morton Grosser, and Patrick Moore. Moreover, Standage presents the Neptune narrative as the centerpiece in a story that stretches from William Herschel's discovery of Uranus to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and even to the spectroscopic detection in the last few years of dozens of extra–solar system planets. Standage's clear and engaging prose is based on extensive reading in English and French sources, some manuscript work, and interviews with a number of the discoverers of extra–solar system planets. Although the book is bereft of footnotes, an annotated bibliography at its end partially fulfills their function. Numerous illustrations appear, but these tend to be rather dark and small.Although the book is generally reliable, some significant errors appear. For example, whereas Standage reports that William Herschel did not see Uranus alter in size, Herschel observed its diameter nearly double in the two months after his first observation of it. It is John, not William, Herschel who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Benjamin Peirce's last name is misspelled , as is Christiaan Huygens's first name , and it is incorrect to say that Huygens “considered it was unlikely that there was life elsewhere in the solar system” . Also, because Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher played such a major role in the discovery of the planet Pluto by creating and directing the research program that enabled a recent high school graduate, Clyde Tombaugh, to be the first to recognize the planet on a photographic plate, it seems inappropriate that Standage makes no mention of Slipher in recounting the discovery of Pluto.Overall this is a highly engaging story, well told and based on good sources. One would hope that it may follow Longitude into film, at least a documentary, and that other authors and publishers will recognize the market for such exciting stories from the history of science. (shrink)

A re-publication of the whole of the work of Marsilio Ficino, being an impossibility, Kristeller1has presented students with a monumentalSupplementum Ficinianum, in which he brings together everything that was not included in the Basle edition, which he takes for his basis, everything, that is to say, that he has been able to trace in the course of a very thorough search made in numerous Italian and foreign libraries. In a learned introduction there are prefixed to the edition three indexes, (...) of the codices, editions, and works of Ficino, and with each work is given a concise account of its origin, purpose, and fortune in the world. There follows the collection of Ficino's writings, some unpublished, and some having already been published sporadically, but omitted from the Basle edition. The final items are two indexes of proper names quoted in the Basle edition and in theSupplementumrespectively. (shrink)

Crawshay-Williams defines the scope of his book as the study of statements "put forward with a sort of claim to general acceptance by the company [to which they are addressed]". Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca would certainly agree that only such statements are capable of giving rise to controversy. But this point, and one other that I shall mention shortly, are nearly the only ones on which the two books agree. And there is profound disagreement about how even this point is to (...) be interpreted. Crawshay-Williams is interested only in the extent to which the claim to acceptance can be satisfied. The phrase I have just quoted is his definition of statements that are testable. His book is largely a discussion of the tests that can be used to determine the correctness of such statements. The implication is, of course, that any genuine controversy can, in principle, be adjudicated by applying such tests to the statements over which it arises. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, on the other hand, are primarily interested in ways of expressing the claim to general acceptance. Their book is mainly a study of the means by which a statement, or a series of them, can be put forward so as to claim general acceptance by the company to which it is addressed. For them, controversy consists in claims and counter-claims. It can thus be decisively settled only when a claim is sufficiently overpowering to silence all counter-claims. But such a result can be accomplished only by force or hypnosis, and these settle controversy not by adjudicating it but by abolishing it. Controversy cannot therefore be adjudicated at all, except in relatively trivial cases. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Appeal to Immediate Experience: Philosophic Method in Bradley Whitehead and Dewey The insight and guidance of Professor John Herman Randall, Jr. have made this book possible. Rather than merely acknowledge my debt to him I would like to express my gratitude here for his unfailing kindness, his penetrating criticism of my efforts, and the help he has given me in clarifying the complex problems of this subject-matter. I wish also to acknowledge the kindness of the following publishers (...) in permitting me to quote from their publications: F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, by Allen and Unwin Ltd.; J. H. Randall, Jr. and J. Buchler, Philosophy: An Introduction, by Barnes Noble, Inc.; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality and Essays on Truth and Reality, by Clarendon Press, Oxford; F. J. E. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind, by Columbia University Press; R. W. Church, Bradley's Dialectic, by Cornell University Press; John Dewey, The Man and His Philosophy, by Harvard University Press; J. Dewey, Logic and Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, by Henry Holt Company; R. Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic, by R. Kagey; J. Dewey, Nature in Experience and Whitehead's Philosophy, by Longmans, Green & Co.; A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, Modes of Thought, Adventures of Ideas, Process and Reality, T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy, and J. H. Muirhead, Bradley's Place in Philosophy, by the Macmillan Company; A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature-and An Equiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, by the Macmillan Company and the Cambridge University Press; H. B. Haldane, Human Experience, by John Murray Ltd.; J. Goheen, Whitehead's Theory of Value, by Northwestern University Press; J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, by Open Court Publishing Co.; G. Santayana, Realm of Essence and Scepticism and Animal Faith, by Charles Scribner's Sons; and J. Dewey, "How is Mind to be Known?" The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy," M. Gross, The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead," and M. C. Otto, The Journal of Philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Appeal to Immediate Experience: Philosophic Method in Bradley Whitehead and Dewey The insight and guidance of Professor John Herman Randall, Jr. have made this book possible. Rather than merely acknowledge my debt to him I would like to express my gratitude here for his unfailing kindness, his penetrating criticism of my efforts, and the help he has given me in clarifying the complex problems of this subject-matter. I wish also to acknowledge the kindness of the following publishers (...) in permitting me to quote from their publications: F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, by Allen and Unwin Ltd.; J. H. Randall, Jr. and J. Buchler, Philosophy: An Introduction, by Barnes Noble, Inc.; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality and Essays on Truth and Reality, by Clarendon Press, Oxford; F. J. E. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind, by Columbia University Press; R. W. Church, Bradley's Dialectic, by Cornell University Press; John Dewey, The Man and His Philosophy, by Harvard University Press; J. Dewey, Logic and Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, by Henry Holt Company; R. Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic, by R. Kagey; J. Dewey, Nature in Experience and Whitehead's Philosophy, by Longmans, Green & Co.; A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, Modes of Thought, Adventures of Ideas, Process and Reality, T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy, and J. H. Muirhead, Bradley's Place in Philosophy, by the Macmillan Company; A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature-and An Equiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, by the Macmillan Company and the Cambridge University Press; H. B. Haldane, Human Experience, by John Murray Ltd.; J. Goheen, Whitehead's Theory of Value, by Northwestern University Press; J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, by Open Court Publishing Co.; G. Santayana, Realm of Essence and Scepticism and Animal Faith, by Charles Scribner's Sons; and J. Dewey, "How is Mind to be Known?" The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy," M. Gross, The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead," and M. C. Otto, The Journal of Philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by (...) FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period , during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 news articles published in Italian newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and removal of the social self, through the devaluation of values and de-culturation, to the objectivizatlonof the ego, the state of oneness and unity with all. The remaining sections of the book give an analysis of Rumi, the universal man of the Eas~, and an analysis of Goethe, the universal man of the West. The Rumi chapter contains impressive translations of RumPs poems and the (...) Goethe study offers a very pertinent critique of K. R. Eissler's psychoanalytic interpretation of the great man. Added is a case history of a young man who lived in two cultures, and after many errors and meanderings obtained full integration. The final section offers an application of the transcultural state to health, social change and leadership. A most rewarding and challenging work, marred only by an incredible number of typographical errors and a sometimes uneven English due to misunderstandings of the Dutch printers. Hg~RY WALTESBRANN Washington, D. C. Natural Law and Modern Society. Essays by John Cogley, Robert M. Hutchins, John Courtney Murray, SJ., Scott Buchanan, Philip Selznick, Harvey Wheeler, and Robert Gordis. (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1966. Pp. 285. Meridian Books. $1.75.) This group of essays has been discussed from time to time at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. The essays provide an excellent survey of the various contexts in which the idea of natural law is functioning today: in jurisprudence, political theory, sciences, religions, and philosophies of culture. Though the emphasis is on "modem society," there is a large amount of history in this collection, going back to the ancients, and one of the most valuable features of the analysis is the evidence here offered that "natural law" has meant and still means many different things, and that this flexibility of meaning gives the idea an enduring vitality and relevance. This is the particular theme of Scott Buchanan's "Natural Law and Teleology", which chapter reviews almost the whole history of philosophy to show how the content of natural law has varied for teleological reasons. Since it is impossible to review this whole story, it seems simplest and least distorting to quote a series of passages from the essays so that the reader can estimate the range of subject-matter and the kind of observations in the volume : The natural lawyer who lacks a sense of history, a factual sense, is as seriously deficient as the one who has been victimmed by the historical setting of his own time. Social scientists are concerned with digging up and evaluating exactly the kind of factual material the conscientious natural lawyer needs (Cogley, pp. 24, 26). We are free, with the deference that is due previous laborers in the vineyard, to work out the ~pplication of the principles of natural law to the conditions of our own time. The ends of uman life are heldto be unchanging; the search for the best way of achieving them is continuous and adapted to changing conditions and new knowledge. The search for a revival of natural law--not necessarily, or even principally pitched in Thomistic terms but projected more generally on a ~us gent~um, pluralistic basis--may well be the dominant theme of American legal philosophy over the second half of the century (Hutchins, pp. 34, 37, 46). Plato saw an epitome of the legal and political crisis of the city-state in the trial and death of Socrates.... The sophists are operators in opinion and power.... Plato sets out to find the truth in science and the good of the state.... There is no doctrinal answer to the quest.... The Dialogues practice what they preach, a relentless dialectical exposure of ideas masquerading in dogmas and opinions.... The endless mutual persuasions in any community could result in good laws if the formal processes of government provided insights for the citizens and magistrates alike.... Neither Plato nor Aristotle commonly uses the phrase 'natural law'.... For the Stoics what Plato had described as the "community of ideas," which was only the notion of the interpenetration of BOOK REVIEWS 103 mutual implication of ideas, became the Logos, the perhaps infinite total of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drama in Aesthetic Education:An Invitation to Imagine the World as if It Could Be OtherwiseFlorence Samson (bio)Maxine Greene, philosopher-in-residence for the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI), suggests that through aesthetic education "new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened. Persons see differently, resonate differently." As Rilke wrote in one of his poems, and as quoted by Greene, "they are enabled to pay heed (...) when a work of art tells them, 'You must change your life.'"1 Greene interprets Rilke's words to mean that "a work [of art], when fully perceived and carefully attended to, makes a demand upon beholders—a demand that they change, look with new eyes, hear with new ears, become something they have not been before."2 Greene believes that "the perceiving, the noticing [about which Rilke spoke] are enhanced," for in the process of "[o]pening ourselves as perceivers to the work, entering into it kinaesthetically, we free ourselves to grasp it in its vital fullness and complexity."3This life change, to which Rilke refers, occurs as we take into our own being the experiences of others and realize that not everyone sees the world as we do. As we look critically at ourselves and our complicity in situations that position people as "other," we are moved to imagine that the world could be otherwise.Curriculum, Change, and Aesthetic EducationAesthetic education, an inquiry-driven engagement with a work of art, can be a catalyst to bringing about change. The aesthetic education experience consists of a number of components. LCI agrees upon a repertoire of "works of art" deemed likely to fulfill the requirements of engagement and inquiry. These may include, but are not limited to, music, drama, and opera performances, and mask, photo, and art exhibits. For each work of art, the LCI [End Page 70] researchers and other staff prepare a resource binder, entitled Windows on the Work. The teacher educator has several meetings with the teaching artist assigned to that work to develop the questions that will power the inquiry process, determine the structure and activities of the pre- and sometimes post-performance classes, and guide the students in their engagement with the work of art.I have included an aesthetic education experience program each term in my graduate and undergraduate elementary and early childhood education courses. My course outlines describe this component and the related student assignments. For the fall 2004 course, I chose Ping Chong's Secret History: Journeys Abroad, Journeys Within.4 This drama documentary, written and directed by Ping Chong and Leyla Mordirzadeh in collaboration with Sara Zatz, was directly related to one of my course goals—teaching for equity and social justice. This involves providing teachers with opportunities to "engage in productive dialogues about both inequities and possibilities for social reconstruction in the communities within which they and their students are developing."5Ping Chong & Company was founded thirty years ago "to create innovative works of theatre and art that explore the intersection of race, history, culture, and technology in the modern world."6Ping Chong, Insider/Outsider, and His Approach to TheatreCanadian-born and New York-reared Chong—theatre director, choreographer, and video and installation artist—is "fascinated and disturbed by the position of the outsider, the person made to feel 'other' in a society" and "probe[s] the drama of those pushed from one culture to another."7 He has done extensive research on both immigrants and refugees and recognizes that there is a psychological difference in the trauma experienced by members of both groups in the transition from one culture to the other.Chong's unique "talk, reveal, and seek to understand" approach to theatre "moves us toward unification, toward diminishing the barriers between peoples, and thus toward embracing all that is good in civilization."8 His work is grounded in his experience of sharing a common ethnicity and language with his community in Chinatown and occupying the position of "other" as the only Chinese student in his high school. Because of his experience of being "other," Chong has "a real kind of empathy and connection" with his projects.9 He considers... (shrink)

Amartya Sen's teeming account of an ecumenical life lived across three continents and over nine decades, in the interstices of colonial encounter, takes the reader on an intimate journey through some of the most significant global, intellectual, and historical events of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We learn of Sen's formative years at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan University (he was named by the sage himself), and of the lasting impact of the Bengal Famine of 1943 on (...) his oeuvre and outlook. At Cambridge (where Sen was a student and later master of Trinity College, becoming the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college), his interlocuters included Edward Morgan Forster and Piero Sraffa—the Italian economist who reputedly catalyzed Wittgenstein's later work by scratching his (own) chin with an upward sweep to communicate a non-verbal “form of life” expletive. Sraffa and the Marxian Maurice Dobb, among others, fueled Sen's interest in welfare economics at a time when the discipline was all about capital and growth. Several chapters also point to the little-known impact of the ancient Indic renunciatory tradition on Sen's dazzling, counterintuitive vision of economics as an ethical enterprise, more concerned with living well than with factors of capital growth or prosperity as such. “Even though economic growth is important,” Sen writes, “the single-minded pursuit of it... is terrible... for people's quality of life.” A good life gains more substantially from opportunities for the development of existential capabilities. This insight is at the heart of Sen's modified social choice theory. He tells us that it was fully anticipated and realized in ascetic outlooks that proliferated around the fifth century BCE across the Eastern Gangetic Plain, incorporating parts of modern Bihar, Nepal, and Bengal (proximate stomping grounds of Sen's childhood and early youth). It's worth lingering on this point.The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers—a winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded to Sen as well in 2020—discerned early signs of non-Western modernity in these subcontinental ascetic philosophies, instigated by eccentric proponents, such as Kashyapa the elder, Makkali of the cowshed, Ajita of the hairshirt, and Vardhamana Mahavira and Siddhartha Gautama, the more reputable founders of Jainism and Buddhism, respectively. By modernity, Jaspers means individual self-sufficiency, in the Kantian sense: a dissociative freedom from the paraphernalia of law, custom, habitual observances, and the lives and examples of others. Sen agrees and disagrees. In his reading, the Indic enlightenment tradition pioneered by the Buddha and his contemporaries calls for critical yet compassionate coexistence, points of reentry into, rather than rupture from, the mainstay of human interaction. Buddhist asceticism (much like Sen's brand of economics) takes the suffering of the destitute as a conceptual springboard. Its proposal to end suffering—or capability-deprivation, in Sen's formulation—through the liberation of transformative resources for living well (agencies and choices) is revealed only in the company of others, on plural ground (to follow Sen's thinking about justice) and as a program of joint action. The program is thwarted by systemic inequality and interpersonal intolerance when, for example, interest groups (identified by gender, race, religion, caste, sexuality, and so on) insist on privileged distance or divergence from other groups.Sen's memoir tempts us to imagine the earliest Buddhist disciples in his own likeness: fearless, free, highly sociable, brimful of curiosity and clarity, a touch impatient, compassionate, tolerant, restless, immeasurably sane. (shrink)

Space is one of the most fundamental concepts over which scientific knowledge has been constructed. But it is also true that space concepts extrapolate by far the scientific domain, and permeate many other branches of human knowledge. Those are fascinating aspects that could di per se justify the compilation of a long bibliography. Another one is the passion for books. My interest in some physical, historical and philosophical problems concerning the concept of space in Physics, and its properties, can be (...) traced back to the early 1980. Since that time, I have being studying, with several collaborators, the influence of space dimensionality in different physical phenomena, like the Casimir Effect, neutron diffraction, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and the stability of Schrödinger’s and Dirac’s hydrogen atom in arbitrary number of dimensions, as well as epistemological aspects of the works of Kant, Ehrenfest an others on this particular subject. Meanwhile, I gave lectures about the History of the Concepts of Space in Physics at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF), at the Program of History of Sciences, Technics and Epistemology of the Federal University of Rio the Janeiro (UFRJ) and also at the Physics Institute of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). As a consequence of both this interest and my love for books, I continuously bought books on space for my personal library which contains now quite one half of all the books quoted here. In 1996, Roberto Moreira and I published the Sources for the History of Space concepts in Physics: From 1845 to 1995 in the series Notas de Física of the CBPF (NF # 084/96), which is still available online. This was a first initiative to share our bibliography on space. At that time, it contained 1075 references, including 414 books entirely devoted to space, 380 articles in periodical journals and proceedings and 281 miscellaneous citations. After fifteen years, I decided to focus my attention here to collect what in my opinion are the 601 essential books which could be useful for anyone interested on learning about space. An important restriction is imposed here by language: only texts written in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin were considered. References are given in chronological order covering the period between 1739 and 2010. For each year, the books are listed in alphabetical order of authors’ name. An onomastic index is included at the end of the book. -/- Francisco Caruso Rio de Janeiro, October 2011 . (shrink)

According to the Green Paper presented by the European Commission in July 2001, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis (Commission of the European Communities, 2001b, p. 6). On this basis, in 2002, the Italian Government, and especially the Italian Ministry of Welfare, launched an initiative called CSR-SC (social commitment) in order to foster the proactive (...) social role of Italian enterprises, with great attention on SME involvement. The technical partner of the Italian Ministry of Welfare for this initiative is Bocconi University. The goal of this contribution is to present the main results of CSR–SC research project developed by Bocconi University. The paper provides a detailed picture of the general scheme designed to carry out the research project and a review of the different methodologies used to support the solutions proposed. (shrink)

The article tries to reconstruct the Wirkungsgeschichte of the De pace fidei and it focuses on some fundamental moments of its fate. Nicholas of Cusa was one of the first not just to recognize other religions' value, but also to individuate a source of richness in religious pluralism. His work had fortune since the years after its draft, the 1453, known and quoted by Eimerico da Campo, Giovanni of Segovia, Juan de Torquemada and Pope Pius II. The debate, alive (...) and still open, around the possible influence of the work to Italian humanistic context is reconstructed, in particular about Pico and Ficino. Trusted traces of reception of the work can be individuated in France, in authors like Bodin and Postel. Finally the article is focused on modern fate of the work in Germany: beyond the cultural contest into reception and translation had done, the work analyze the reception by the German philosopher Lessing and on his comparison with Cusanian ideas about the vision of tolerance elaborated by the last one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:1 & 2 Thessalonians by Douglas FarrowAnna Silvas1 & 2 Thessalonians by Douglas Farrow (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2020), xx + 336 pp.1 and 2 Thessalonians are probably the very first written testimonies of early Christianity. When Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians in AD 50, Our Lord Jesus Christ had "accomplished his exodus in Jerusalem" (see Luke 9:31) not twenty years before. Here we find the paradosis of the (...) Mystery of Christ among the Gentiles, the first articulations of Trinitarian faith (see 1 Thess 1:2-5), expressions of longing for the coming Parousia of Christ, warnings of a strange lawlessness already at work ripening towards a great apostasy and the coming of the "man of lawlessness."Douglas Farrow has pondered 1 and 2 Thessalonians for many years, attested by his numerous expositions and essays over three decades. He brings to his task a ready command of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and a vast reading of historical commentary and controversy, an intense personal and ecclesial faith, and a sense of historical, prophetic, and pastoral urgency.Throughout the book are excurses on themes opened up by the words and phrases of St Paul's text: Satan (82-86); the sexual body and virtue in sex, divorce, and remarriage (95-114); the remedial pains of purgatory (beginning in this life); the reality of final retribution, the finality of hell; the untenability of so-called "universalism" (131-41,178-84,192-96); the imminency and the delay of the Parousia (199-204); the apostasy / man of lawlessness / Antichrist; the temple in which the Antichrist seats himself (205-42); the mystery of lawlessness at work, especially in undermining the Church (245-61).In studying Paul's eschatological themes, Farrow necessarily ponders other scriptural texts leading in the same direction: Dani 7-12; Jesus's Olivet Discourse in its most extensive form at Matt 24:1-25:46 (though it really begins at 23:23); 2 Pet 2:1-5, 3:3-15; much of the Rev 6:1 through 19:21; [End Page 398] Deut 32:1-43 (Farrow says the Song of Moses encapsulates the whole of human history); Psalms 97 (LXX 96); 110 (LXX 109); Wis 4-5, 10-19; Sirach 50; Joel; Zech 8-14; Mai 3-4; 2 Mace 5-9; Isa 66:5,14-16; and so on. Farrow holds that Paul worked from knowledge of Jesus's apocalyptic teachings in aversion closest to Matthew's (138,142,184, 189, 205).Farrow takes companions in his exegesis: Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Haimo, Anselm, Aquinas, and others. He knows Luther's hermeneutics and Calvinist disputes about supra- and infra-sessionism and double predestinationism. He consults more recent prophets, quoting at length from Newman's amazingly prescient 1838 discourses on the last times, Solovyovin 1899, and Fulton Sheen in 1948 and 1958. Another exegete is an artist: Luca Signorelli, whose Disputation of the Antichrist in Orvieto Cathedral Farrow refers to several times.Farrow shows his affinity with Irenaeus. That means cleaving to the visible and invisible truths of the Incarnation of God the Word, respecting concrete and embodied realities, keeping in view the transcendent goal ("The glory of God is a living man—and the life of man is in the vision of God"), instinctively flinching at gnosticizing tendencies—sophisticated re-interpretations of Scripture that elide the rule of faith and dissolve truth. It means a ruling sense of the Kingdom of God as an intervention from heaven rather than generating from man or from the earth. It means a spirit of obedience to the commandments, to the paradosis that descends to us from above in Christ, effected by the Spirit in the ecclesia, the company of brethren destined to "gather to Christ" at his coming (1 Thess 2:1), who practice that final gathering to Christ by participating in the Eucharist on the "Eighth Day," the Lord's Day.Farrow deplores the patchy reading of 1 and 2 Thessalonians in the lectionaries: "While 1 Thessalonians fares a little better, barely half of 2 Thessalonians is read in the Churches" (11). Missing is the eschatologically pivotal 2 Thess 2:3-15, where Paul, distinguishing... (shrink)

Pricing algorithms are computerized procedures a seller may use to adapt instantaneously its price to market conditions, including to prices quoted by its rivals. These algorithms are related to the extensive use of web-collectors which contribute in many industries to identifying the best price. In such settings, price competition operates between algorithms, no longer between executives of brick and mortar companies. In this context, the question is to know how implicit forms of collusion may arise between the sellers. (...) This paper is aimed at discussing this conceptual issue in a price-setting homogeneous product oligopoly with decreasing returns to scale where algorithms implement matching policies. Using fixed point argument, we find a family of equilibrium prices encompassing Cournot and Pareto efficient solutions, if matching is allowed upward and downward. Dynamical stability is studied in the linear demand constant return case. When matching operates only for price undercutting, this family is extended up to a bottom value of the market price, close to the Walrasian price. Pricing algorithms may solve the Bertrand–Edgeworth paradox. (shrink)