Hobbes and all the commentators so far who have argued for the overall coherence of his philosophy have attempted, and failed, to establish it on a foundation in "mechanical" conceptions of body and motion, according to Weiss. But Hobbes in effect overcame the inherent limitations of the mechanical model when he introduced in his conception of man as a seeker after power a model drawn from a different kind of machine: "cybernetic" structures carried over from psychology into politics are (...) the real basis of Hobbes's system. (shrink)

This study modelled associations between gender, ruminative cognitive style, alcohol use, and the time course of negative affect over the course of 43,111 random assessments in the natural environment. Participants completed 49 days of experience sampling over 1.3 years. The data indicated that rumination at baseline was positively associated with alcohol dependence symptoms at baseline as well as higher negative affect over the course of the study. Consistent with negative reinforcement models, drinking served to decrease the persistence of negative affect (...) from moment to moment. However, this ameliorative effect of drinking was evident only among women, suggesting an increased risk for negative reinforcement driven drinking behaviour. In addition, rumination appeared to counteract the desired effects of alcohol on mood among women. This suggests that women who ruminate more may be motivated to consume larger amounts of alcohol to achieve the desired effects. Overall, the results indicate that ruminative cognitive style and the persistence of negative affect from moment to moment may reflect an individual vulnerability for the development of alcohol use disorder especially among women. (shrink)

This paper argues that the notion of value has been overly simplified and narrowed to focus on economic returns. Stakeholder theory provides an appropriate lens for considering a more complex perspective of the value that stakeholders seek as well as new ways to measure it. We develop a four-factor perspective for defining value that includes, but extends beyond, the economic value stakeholders seek. To highlight its distinctiveness, we compare this perspective to three other popular performance perspectives. Recommendations are made regarding (...) performance measurement for both academic researchers and practitioners. The stakeholder perspective on value offered in this paper draws attention to those factors that are most closely associated with building more value for stakeholders, and in so doing, allows academics to better measure it and enhances managerial ability to create it. (shrink)

Shows the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in discussions of the body.

Data science, and the related field of big data, is an emerging discipline involving the analysis of data to solve problems and develop insights. This rapidly growing domain promises many benefits to both consumers and businesses. However, the use of big data analytics can also introduce many ethical concerns, stemming from, for example, the possible loss of privacy or the harming of a sub-category of the population via a classification algorithm. To help address these potential ethical challenges, this paper maps (...) and describes the main ethical themes that were identified via systematic literature review. It then identifies a possible structure to integrate these themes within a data science project, thus helping to provide some structure in the on-going debate with respect to the possible ethical situations that can arise when using data science analytics. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory focuses on how more value is created if stakeholder relationships are governed by ethical principles such as integrity, respect, fairness, generosity and inclusiveness. However, it has not adequately addressed strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests and how this perception can even lead some stakeholders to view the firm’s strategies as unethical. To fill the void, this paper directly addresses strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests, or what we refer to as harmful stakeholder (...) strategies. Specifically, it identifies factors associated with stakeholder perceptions of harm that are likely to cause them to consider a strategy unethical, examines the negative implications for firms that pursue such strategies in terms of likely stakeholder responses and damage to stakeholder relationships, and provides theory to help explain how firms are likely to respond to stakeholder claims that a strategy is unethical, based on factors such as the strategic importance of the claim to the firm, how long the strategy has been in use, the costs of remediation, the risk of stakeholder mobilization or new regulation, and whether firms can reasonably rationalize their actions. Assessing harm allows a firm to make a more accurate estimate of the costs of a strategy and can assist managers in allocating resources intended to reduce or remediate harm. (shrink)

The stakeholder perspective has provided a rich forum for a variety of debates at the intersection of business and society. Scholars gathered for two consecutive years, first in North America, and then in Europe, to discuss the major issues surrounding what has come to be known as stakeholder theory, to attempt to find common ground, and to uncover areas in need of further inquiry. Those meetings led to a list of “tensions” and a call for papers for this special issue (...) to help address them. In this article, we introduce the resulting articles and provide some brief commentary on their importance. We end with a few of our own observations about the stakeholder perspective and stakeholder research. (shrink)

The change in shape of the C. elegans embryo from an ovoid ball of cells into a worm-shaped larva is driven by three events within the cells of the hypodermis (epidermis): (1) intercalation of two rows of dorsal cells, (2) enclosure of the ventral surface by hypodermis, and (3) elongation of the embryo. While the behavior of the hypodermal cells involved in each of these processes differs dramatically, it is clear that F-actin and microtubules have essential functions in each of (...) these processes, whereas contraction of actomyosin structures appears to be involved specifically in elongation. Molecular analysis of these processes is revealing components specific to C. elegans as well as components found in other systems. Since C. elegans hypodermal cells demonstrate dramatically different behaviors during intercalation, enclosure and elongation, the study of cytoskeletal dynamics in these processes may reveal both unique and conserved activities during distinct epithelial morphogenetic movements. BioEssays 23:12–23, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This paper considers the problem of causal explanation in classical and statistical thermodynamics. It is argued that the irreversibility of macroscopic processes is explained in both formulations of thermodynamics in a teleological way that appeals to entropic or probabilistic consequences rather than to efficient-causal, antecedental conditions. This explanatory structure of thermodynamics is not taken to imply a teleological orientation to macroscopic processes themselves, but to reflect simply the epistemological limitations of this science, wherein consequences of heat-work asymmetries are either macroscopically (...) measurable (entropy) or calculable (probabilities), while efficient-causal relationships are obscure or indeterminable. (shrink)

One vigorous line of thought in contemporary moral philosophy, which I shall call ‘Neo-Aristotelianism,’ centers on three things: a rejection of traditional enlightenment moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism; a claim that another look at the ethical concerns and projects of ancient Greek thought might help us past the impasse into which enlightenment moral theories have left us; more particularly, an attempt to reinterpret Aristotle’s ethical work for the late twentieth-century so as to transcend this impasse.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had extraordinary successes in classifying photographic images of objects and are often described as the best models of biological vision. This conclusion is largely based on three sets of findings: (1) DNNs are more accurate than any other model in classifying images taken from various datasets, (2) DNNs do the best job in predicting the pattern of human errors in classifying objects taken from various behavioral datasets, and (3) DNNs do the best job in predicting (...) brain signals in response to images taken from various brain datasets (e.g., single cell responses or fMRI data). However, these behavioral and brain datasets do not test hypotheses regarding what features are contributing to good predictions and we show that the predictions may be mediated by DNNs that share little overlap with biological vision. More problematically, we show that DNNs account for almost no results from psychological research. This contradicts the common claim that DNNs are good, let alone the best, models of human object recognition. We argue that theorists interested in developing biologically plausible models of human vision need to direct their attention to explaining psychological findings. More generally, theorists need to build models that explain the results of experiments that manipulate independent variables designed to test hypotheses rather than compete on making the best predictions. We conclude by briefly summarizing various promising modeling approaches that focus on psychological data. (shrink)

In Explaining Attitudes, Lynne Rudder Baker considers two views of what it is to have a propositional attitude, the Standard View and Pragmatic Realism, and attempts to argue for Pragmatic Realism. The Standard View is, roughly, the view that “the attitudes, if there are any, are particular brain states”. In contrast, Pragmatic Realism that a person has a propositional attitude if and only if there are certain counterfactuals true of that person.Baker’s case against the Standard View is a complex one. (...) One aspect of that case is that there are no good general arguments for the Standard View. We argue that one of the three she considers, an argument from causal explanation, can be defended. The problematic premise, according to Baker, is the claim that unless beliefs are [identical to, constituted by, or realized by] brain states, they cannot causally explain behavior. Baker tackles this premise in two ways: in Chapter 4, she attempts to undermine the brain-explain thesis by taking issue with the conception of causal explanation that she believes supports it; in Chapter 5, she argues against the brain-explain thesis directly, by attempting to show that it is false, whether or not the Standard View is true. Neither of these attempts are successful, on our view.The alternative version of the causal argument we develop uses the doctrine of physicalism as a supplementary premise rather than appeal to a reductive conception of causal explanation. After presenting this alternative version, we consider how Baker might respond to it by drawing on her discussion of materialism. We conclude that Baker’s argument against materialism does not generalize to physicalism as we construe it. (shrink)

This paper views such distinctions as creation and degeneration or good and evil in the Eastern sense of unity in polarity rather than in the Western sense of dual, antagonistic principles. Hence it considers the thermodynamic forces of evolution as processes of creation driven by entropy dissipation and explores the analogies this conception bears to the Hindu image of nature as the changing mist of a universal breath. Using this image, the paper examines the sense in which the second law (...) of thermodynamics connects chance and teleology in the operations of nature and provides for a causal hierarchy in which decision and volitional behavior co‐participate with the laws of nature to determine the course of evolution. (shrink)

A fundamental claim associated with parallel distributed processing theories of cognition is that knowledge is coded in a distributed manner in mind and brain. This approach rejects the claim that knowledge is coded in a localist fashion, with words, objects, and simple concepts, that is, coded with their own dedicated representations. One of the putative advantages of this approach is that the theories are biologically plausible. Indeed, advocates of the PDP approach often highlight the close parallels between distributed representations learned (...) in connectionist models and neural coding in brain and often dismiss localist theories as biologically implausible. The author reviews a range a data that strongly challenge this claim and shows that localist models provide a better account of single-cell recording studies. The author also contrast local and alternative distributed coding schemes and argues that common rejection of grandmother cell theories in neuroscience is due to a misunderstanding about how localist models behave. The author concludes that the localist representations embedded in theories of perception and cognition are consistent with neuroscience; biology only calls into question the distributed representations often learned in PDP models. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard claims that an agent is less than fully rational if she allows some attitude to inform her deliberation even though she cannot justify doing so. I argue that there is a middle way, which Korsgaard misses, between the claim that our attitudes neither need nor admit of rational assessment, on the one hand, and Korsgaard's claim that the attitudes which inform our deliberation always require justification, on the other: an agent needs reasons to opt out of her concerns (...) – not reasons to opt into them or to stay in. As long as an agent has no good reason to abandon some concern of hers, she is reasonable to harbour it, and to allow it to inform her view of what reasons she has. A rational agent must therefore have the capacity to form higher-order attitudes toward her concerns; but rationality only requires that she exercise that capacity when she has some good reason to do so. (shrink)

Do firms respond to changes in economic growth by altering their corporate social responsibility programs? If they do respond, are their responses simply neglect of areas associated with corporate social performance or do they also cut back on positive programs such as profit sharing, public/private housing programs, or charitable contributions? In this paper, we argue that because CSP-related actions and programs tend to be discretionary, they are likely to receive less attention during tough economic times, a result of cost-cutting efforts. (...) However, the various CSP performance areas vary in terms of their resource requirements and their influence on financial performance, which suggests that firms may respond differently depending on area. Consequently, in addition to examining CSP concerns separately from positive actions and programs, we also examine the influence of economic growth across the five areas of diversity, employee relations, the environment, product quality/safety, and the community. Based on data from 837 firms over 15 years, our results suggest that firms neglect some areas associated with CSP during economic downturns, resulting in increased concerns about community and employee relations, product safety/quality, and the environment. However, this relationship does not apply to positive actions and programs. Instead, firms tend to increase their positive CSP programs in areas such as diversity, employee relations, and the environment during periods of slow economic growth and reduce them when the economy picks up. We offer potential explanations for our findings and discuss their importance to research on CSP. (shrink)

How should the Bible be used in Christian ethics? Although this question has been addressed many times, little attention has gone to how the Bible actually has functioned in constructing theological ethics. In this book, Siker describes and analyzes the Bible's various uses in the theology and ethics of eight of the twentieth century's most important and influential Christian theologians: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Bernhard Haring, Paul Ramsey, Stanley Hauerwas, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. In approaching (...) each author, Siker organizes his study around five related questions. First, which biblical texts does each author in fact use, and, second, in what ways do they use these texts? How does each envision the authority of the Bible? What kind of hermeneutic does the author employ? Finally, what has each author's particular approach to the Bible yielded in terms of Christian Ethics, or, in other words, what are the practical results? Siker ends each chapter with a critical evaluation of the various problems and prospects for the author's use of Scripture, and concludes the study with a comparison and contrast of all the authors' respective appropriations of the Sermon on the Mount. (shrink)

Theology and science are both essential to the process of making sense of the world. Yet their relationship over the centuries has been largely adversarial. The Darwinian revolution, in particular, has necessitated a radical reinterpretation of the traditional dogma concerning creation. In this paper I discuss two general issues that presently obstruct communication between scientists and theologians in this arena and that are brought into acute focus by Wolfhart Pannenberg. First, the need to exercise care in the use of such (...) denotative concepts as field especially in understanding the Darwinian character of the evolutionary process is addressed. Second, the ontological room science necessarily leaves theology in this enterprise is considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of TestimonyGiorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of MetaphysicsJeffrey S. Librett (bio)By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as (...) its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting.—Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?—Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language”I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.—Adolf Hitler, speech before theReichstag, April 26, 1942From his early works on, Giorgio Agamben has opposed the thought of no contemporary philosopher more consistently and programmatically than that of Jacques Derrida, whose questioning of phonocentric metaphysics Agamben has tried to replace by a characterization of metaphysics as (what I am calling here) graphocentric. To go back behind the replacement of the voice by the letter is for Agamben to recover the event of language itself, the taking-place of language as Being.1 In his conceptualization of the project for such a recovery, as we shall see, Agamben’s commitment to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined by his investment in the Christian God as logos.This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in... (shrink)

In this article, we discuss a hypothesis to explain the preferential synthesis of the superoxide sensitive form of aconitase in mitochondria and the phenotype observed in manganese superoxide dismutase mutant mice, which show a gross over accumulation of stored fat in liver. The model proposes that intermediary metabolism is redox regulated by mitochondrial superoxide generated during mitochondrial respiration. This regulates the level of reducing equivalents (NADH) entering the electron transport chain (ETC) through the reversible inactivation of mitochondrial aconitase. This control (...) mechanism has a dual function; firstly, it regulates levels of superoxide generated by the ETC and, secondly, it fine‐tunes metabolism by channeling citrate either for the production of NADH for energy metabolism or diverting it for the synthesis of fats. In this setting, the mitochondrial redox state influences metabolic decisions via a superoxide–aconitase rheostat. BioEssays 26:894–900, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 85-87.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly held US corporations to disclose all information, whether it is positive or negative, that might be relevant to an investor's decision to buy, sell, or hold a company's securities. The decisions made by corporate managers to disclose such information can significantly affect the judgments and decisions of investors. This paper examines academic accounting research on corporate managers' voluntary disclosures of earnings forecasts and non-GAAP earnings measures. Much of the evidence from this research indicates (...) that some managers engage in opportunistic disclosure behavior that often benefits one group (managers and shareholders) at the expense of other groups (often other investors). The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of this behavior. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert’s ‘Three Dogmas about Promising’ is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the literature, not only for its account of promissory obligation based on joint commitment, but for its equally important focus on two properties of such obligation, which her account uniquely and elegantly captures: first, that the duty to keep a promise is necessary—the obligation stands regardless of the content or morality of the promise—and, second, that it is directed, with the promisee having unique standing to demand performance. A related (...) point, implied by Gilbert’s argument, is that moral requirements, alone, can never have those properties. Here I challenge that point, arguing that moral requirements, under the right circumstances, can give rise to necessary and directed obligations, after all, and I propose one such moral obligation of which the duty to keep a promise may well be an instance. Nevertheless, I conclude, it may not provide as plausible a basis of promissory obligation as joint commitment. (shrink)

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Philosophy of law was until recently dominated by abstract investigation into the nature of law, a pursuit known as ‘general jurisprudence’. In this way, it resembled a branch of metaphysics or mid-twentieth century philosophy of mind, seeking to uncover the essential properties (...) of a general and multiply realizable phenomenon. Today, philosophers study law with a sharper focus, and with a more specialized lens – that of ethicists, for example, or epistemologists, or philosophers of action.That is not to say there has been a drop in groundbreaking work in general jurisprudence (see, for... (shrink)

A common occurrence in television news is the showing of graphic scenes of human suffering. It was hypothesized that viewing such scenes could be harmful to a segment of the population. A controlled experiment examined the impact of images showing victim blood inserted into into television news stories about auto accidents. The amount of blood shown was manipulated, resulting in three video versions, roughly in terms of low, medium, and high. Participants were measured beforehand on the variable of "locus of (...) control" and randomly assigned to one of the three treatment groups. Dependent variables included emotional impact and mean world syndrome. The results suggested blood shown on screen makes a difference in the perceived emotional impact of the story. Locus of control was found to be linked to mean world syndrome. The findings suggest that the quest for hardhitting news and high ratings must be tempered with the knowledge that some viewers are adversely affected by these graphic scenes of human suffering. (shrink)

Recent perspectives on community investments suggest that they are opportunities for firms to create value for shareholders and other stakeholders. However, many corporate managers are still influenced by a widely held belief that such investments erode profits and are therefore unjustifiable from an agency perspective. In this paper, we refine and test theory regarding countervailing forces that influence community-based firm performance. We hypothesize that high levels of available slack will be associated with higher community-based performance, but that this relationship will (...) be moderated by three important governance variables: board independence, investment fund ownership, and CEO ownership. We find support for our hypotheses in longitudinal study of a large sample of U.S. corporations. (shrink)

Forgiving wrongdoers who neither apologized, nor sought to make amends in any way, is controversial. Even defenders of the practice agree with critics that such “unilateral” forgiveness involves giving up on the meaningful redress that victims otherwise justifiably demand from their wrongdoers: apology, reparations, repentance, and so on. Against that view, I argue here that when a victim of wrongdoing sets out to grant forgiveness to her offender, and he in turn accepts her forgiveness, he thereby serves some important ends (...) of apology and reparation, no matter what else he did—or did not do—by way of repair. Although much overlooked, the simple act of accepting forgiveness joins victim and offender in affirming and acting upon some important shared background assumptions, including many of those expressed in standard apologies. Perhaps more surprisingly, I argue that accepting forgiveness also fulfills the duty to counteract any concrete harm wrongfully inflicted. The argument helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of forgiveness, including that a victim can change her offender’s normative status, making him a less fitting target of the resentment, indignation and shunning of others, and even his own guilt pangs, simply by forgiving him. (shrink)

Entropy and information are both emerging as currencies of interdisciplinary dialogue, most recently in evolutionary theory. If this dialogue is to be fruitful, there must be general agreement about the meaning of these terms. That this is not presently the case owes principally to the supposition of many information theorists that information theory has succeeded in generalizing the entropy concept. The present paper will consider the merits of the generalization thesis, and make some suggestions for restricting both entropy and information (...) to specific arenas of discourse. (shrink)

"What is whole on earth? … [D]oesn't this building of the times upon each other make the whole of our species into a formless monstrous structure [zum unförmlichen Riesengebäude], where one carries away what another began to build, where what never should have been built remains standing and in centuries finally everything becomes One Ruin [Ein Schutt], amongst which, the more broken and crumbling it is, the more confidently the hesitating people live?" "Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte (...) der Menschheit1"With the subordination of Church to State introduced by the principle of “cuius…. (shrink)

While classical schools today typically exhibit a carefully considered approach to the linguistic arts of the trivium, the equally important mathematical arts of the quadrivium have received relatively little consideration. This being so, mathematics is often approached in ways that are not distinctly classical. This article seeks to establish the importance of the quadrivial arts as a means of ascending from lower to higher things. Though most know Plato’s comparison of a lack of education to being imprisoned in a cave, (...) relatively few are familiar with the role the quadrivial arts play in ascending from the cave. Because the mathematical arts cultivate and direct the imagination, they enable students to move beyond sensible particulars to the formation of forms and figures by the mind. Thus, the mathematical arts help free us from an undue preoccupation with lower things and direct us toward the pursuit of knowledge and what truly is. (shrink)

Short-term performance increases that are sometimes observed after CEO successions may be evidence of self-interested behavior. New CEOs may cut allocations to long-term investment areas such as research and development (R&D), capital equipment and pension funds in an effort to drive up short-term profits and secure their positions. However, such actions have unfavorable consequences for some stakeholders. This study provides evidence that both R&D and pension funding are reduced subsequent to a succession, even after accounting for industry trends. The expected (...) short-term profitability increases are also observed.A major implication of these results is that boards of directors and other interested parties should carefully monitor the actions of new CEOs with regard to their treatment of R&D and pension funding if they would like to prevent such actions from occurring. This study also highlights the need to investigate other potential self-interested behaviors of new CEOs. (shrink)