As is well understood, the values inherent in the dominant neoclassical economic paradigm are self- interest and optimisation. These are the values that guide individuals and policymakers in advanced capitalist economies in their economic decision making. As a consequence, the economics discipline, arguably, is insufficiently oriented to helping people and organisations make wise choices, choices about what is really and truly in people's best interests. In other words, there is strong reason to believe that economics has a wisdom deficit. This (...) paper draws on great philosophers such as Aristotle to explain what wisdom is and why, although economics is concerned with the normative aspect of decision making, economics has too infrequently been used to help people or their societies make wise decisions. This paper is also concerned with how a society's economic decision-making processes can be improved in order that these processes incorporate a much greater dose of wisdom. One relevant question here is: can we learn with the help of philosophers, psychologists and organisation researchers how to make economic decisions that apply the practical wisdom that Aristotle advocated? This paper's overall purpose is first to point the way toward greater decision-making wisdom, and second to propose one method for improving the wisdom of important economic-related decision making. Hopefully, this paper will serve to put the issue of decision-making wisdom higher on the agenda of economists and, as a consequence, lead to wiser decisions in the economic sphere, thereby reducing the wisdom deficit. (shrink)

This article extends earlier research concerning the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, with particular emphasis on methodological inconsistencies. Research in this area is extended in three critical areas. First, it focuses on a particular industry, the chemical industry. Second, it uses multiple sources of data-two that are perceptual based (KLD Index and Fortune reputation survey), and two that are performance based (TRI database and corporate philanthropy) in order to triangulate toward assessing corporate social performance. Third, it (...) uses the five most commonly applied accounting measures in the corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP/CFP) literature to assess corporate financial performance. The results indicate that the a priori use of measures may actually predetermine the CSP/CFP relationship outcome. Surprisingly, Fortune and KLD indices very closely track one another, whereas TRI and corporate philanthropy differentiate between high and low social performers and do not correlate to the firm's financial performance. (shrink)

This article extends earlier research concerning the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, with particular emphasis on methodological inconsistencies. Research in this area is extended in three critical areas. First, it focuses on a particular industry, the chemical industry. Second, it uses multiple sources of data-two that are perceptual based (KLD Index and Fortune reputation survey), and two that are performance based (TRI database and corporate philanthropy) in order to triangulate toward assessing corporate social performance. Third, it (...) uses the five most commonly applied accounting measures in the corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP/CFP) literature to assess corporate financial performance. The results indicate that the a priori use of measures may actually predetermine the CSP/CFP relationship outcome. Surprisingly, Fortune and KLD indices very closely track one another, whereas TRI and corporate philanthropy differentiate between high and low social performers and do not correlate to the firm's financial performance. (shrink)

Psychological interest in Meritocracy as an important social norm regulating most of the western democratic societies has significantly increased over the years. However, the way Meritocracy has been conceptualized and operationalized in experimental studies has advanced in significant ways. As a result, a variety of paradigms arose to understand the social consequences of Meritocracy for intergroup relations; in particular, to understand the adverse consequences of Meritocracy for disadvantaged group members. The present research seeks to understand whether there is strong support (...) for the idea that (manipulated) Meritocracy disproportionally affects members of low status groups, and also to understand which specific components of this norm have been successfully manipulated and to what consequences. And this is particularly important given the recent call for greater transparency in how the success of experimental manipulations is reported. Thus, we carried out a systematic review examining the content of different prime tasks, summarizing prime manipulation checks’ effectiveness, and analyzing whether priming Meritocracy leads to less favorable orientations toward low status groups. Results across 33 studies revealed that despite the existing differences in the components highlighted, the salience of any of the Meritocracy dimensions facilitates the use of internal causal attributions, negative evaluations and stereotyping towards low status groups, affecting negatively decisions involving low-status group members, particularly in specific domains, as organizational contexts. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on the role of Meritocracy in intergroup settings. (shrink)

The complexity of the human mind and its interaction with the environment is one of the main epistemological debates throughout history. Recent ideas, framed as the 4E perspective to cognition, highlight that human experience depends causally on both cerebral and extracranial processes, but also is embedded in a particular sociomaterial context and is a product of historical accumulation of trajectory changes throughout life. Accordingly, the human microbiome is one of the most intriguing actors modulating brain function and physiology. Here, we (...) present the 4E approach to the Human Microbiome for understanding mental processes from a broader perspective, encompassing one's body physiology and environment throughout their lifespan, interconnected by microbiome community structure and dynamics. We review evidence supporting the approach theoretically and motivates the study of the global set of microbial ecosystem networks encountered by a person across their lifetime (from skin to gut to natural and built environments). We furthermore trace future empirical implementation of the approach. We finally discuss novel research opportunities and clinical interventions aimed toward developing low‐cost/high‐benefit integrative and personalized bio‐psycho‐socio‐environmental treatments for mental health and including the brain‐gut‐microbiome axis. (shrink)

John F. Henry is an eminent economist who has made important contributions to heterodox economics drawing on Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes. His historical approach offers radical insights into the evolution of ideas (ideologies and theories) giving rise to and/or induced by the changes in capitalist society. Essays collected in this festschrift not only evaluate John Henry's contributions in connection to Marx's and Veblen's theories, but also apply them to the socio-economic issues (...) in the 21st century. In Part I leading heterodox economists in the traditions of Marxism, Post Keynesianism, and Institutionalism critically examine Marx's and Veblen's theoretical frameworks (and their connections to each other) that have become the foundations of heterodox economics. Chapters in Part II showcase alternative theoretical explanations inspired by Marx, Veblen, and Henry. Topics in this Part include financial crisis, financialization, capital accumulation, economics teaching, and the historical relationship between money and class society. Part III is devoted to John Henry's heterodox economics encapsulated in his "farewell" lecture, interview, and bibliography. Essays in this book, individually and collectively, make an important point that the history of economic thought (or historical analysis of economic theory and policy) is an integral part of developing heterodox economics as an alternative theoretical framework. Anyone who is troubled by the recurring failure of capitalism as well as mainstream economics will find this book well worth reading. (shrink)

This commentary cites several findings of neuromuscular research that are consistent with aspects of Plamondon's kinematic theory. In addition, we point out certain biomechanical properties of the limb that influence the requirements for the production of accurate movement, and might thus compromise the global applicability of any law governing speed/accuracy trade-offs.

Regional Perspectives in Bioethics" illustrates the ways in which the national and international political landscape encompasses persons from diverse and often fragmented moral communities with widely varying moral intuitions, premises, evaluations and commitments.

Written by a highly respected scholar of Thomas Aquinas's writings, this volume offers a comprehensive presentation of Aquinas's metaphysical thought. It is based on a thorough examination of his texts organized according to the philosophical order as he himself describes it rather than according to the theological order. -/- In the introduction and opening chapter, John F. Wippel examines Aquinas's view on the nature of metaphysics as a philosophical science and the relationship of its subject to divine being. Part (...) One is devoted to his metaphysical analysis of finite being. It considers his views on the problem of the One and the Many in the order of being, and includes his debt to Parmenides in formulating this problem and his application of analogy to finite being. Subsequent chapters are devoted to participation in being, the composition of essence and esse in finite beings, and his appeal to a kind of relative nonbeing in resolving the problem of the One and the Many. Part Two concentrates on Aquinas's views on the essential structure of finite being, and treats substance-accident composition and related issues, including, among others, the relationship between the soul and its powers and unicity of substantial form. It then considers his understanding of matter-form composition of corporeal beings and their individuation. Part Three explores Aquinas's philosophical discussion of divine being, his denial that God's existence is self-evident, and his presentation of arguments for the existence of God, first in earlier writings and then in the "Five Ways" of his Summa theologiae. A separate chapter is devoted to his views on quidditative and analogical knowledge of God. The concluding chapter revisits certain issues concerning finite being under the assumption that God's existence has now been established. -/- John F. Wippel, professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, was recently awarded the prestigious Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. In addition to numerous articles and papers, Wippel has coauthored or edited several other works, including Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, both published by CUA Press. (shrink)

Medicine is faced with a number of intractable modern challenges that can be understood in terms of hyper-intellectualization; a compassion crisis, burnout, dehumanization, and lost meaning. These challenges have roots in medical philosophy and indeed general Western philosophy by way of the historic exclusion of human emotion from human reason. The resolution of these medical challenges first requires a novel philosophic schema of human knowledge and reason that incorporates the balanced interaction of human intellect and human emotion. This schema of (...) necessity requires a novel extension of dual-process theory into epistemology in terms of both intellect and emotion each generating a distinct natural kind of knowledge independent of the other as well as how these two forms of mental process together construct human reason. Such a novel philosophic schema is here proposed. This scheme is then applied to the practice of medicine with examples of practical applications with the goal of reformulating medical practice in a more knowledgable, balanced, and healthy way. This schema’s expanded epistemology becomes the philosophic foundation for more fully incorporating the humanities in medicine. (shrink)

The reason for physics’ failure to find a final theory of the universe is examined. Problems identified are: the lack of unequivocal definitions for its fundamental elements (time, length, mass, electric charge, energy, work, matter-waves); the danger of relying too much on mathematics for solutions; especially as philosophical arguments conclude the universe cannot have a mathematical basis. It does not even need the concept of number to exist. Numbers and mathematics are human inventions arising from the human predilection for measurement. (...) Following Aristotle, a single fundamental cause is proposed to explore the efficacy of using pure non-mathematical philosophy to explain the universe, contrary to current quantum physical views. The cause is taken as Time, which is then defined, surprisingly leading automatically to a definition of a three-dimensional space answering the question into what can a universe be placed (space before space seems non-sensical). This enables the philosophical arguments to derive a universal rule giving clear-cut descriptions (definitions) of force (both gravitational and electromagnetic), motion, energy, and particles. The formation of atomic nuclei and atomic properties together with an unexpected role for neutrinos follow. In particular, a Popper-test can be prepared by introducing the concept of measurement to allow the philosophy arguments to be tested in another discipline - mathematics. The solution agrees with human physical observations to a remarkable degree of accuracy, automatically explaining and predicting values for Planck’s and the fine-structure constants. Although mathematical, it is included as confirming the efficacy of philosophy in attaining a final theory. (shrink)

Inspired by a discussion about whether John Paul II grounded human dignity in a Kantian way, viz., emphasizing the person as an end unto itself, the author considers: (1) the relations between Kant and Aquinas on the topic of the philosophical basis of human dignity, and (2) John Paul II’s remarks on Kant’s ethics. He concludes that: (1) both Kant and Aquinas ground human dignity upon human freedom, but both understand the human freedom differently; (2) for Kant, human (...) freedom is self-legislating and so exercised without rational direction; (3) the Thomistic notion of freedom is compatible with rational direction which consists, e.g., in the human understood as an intellector of being or as a willer of the good, though neither seem to be exploited by Wojtyla. (shrink)

The address presents the recently discovered second, Roman commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Peter Lombard’s Liber sententiarum and offers some reflections on work to be done by scholars in the study of this text. The first part of the address presents the manuscript and its circumstances to argue for the authenticity of the text. The second part briefly describes the character and content of Thomas’ Lectura romana. The third part addresses a concern expressed by Frs. Dondaine and Torrell that (...) a rationalist tendency in the text’s consideration of the Trinity raises questions of its authenticity. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the structure and language of More's letter to William Gonell, the tutor to More's children, so as to understand what More takes to be most important in the education of his children. Indeed, the circumstances of the letter's composition suggest that More writes in reply to Gonell's objection to More's educational directives. More's reply from court suggests that he viewed Gonell's opposition as a family crisis that required More to articulate his fundamental principles of humanist (...) education. (shrink)

Canada has followed the pattern of Benelux nations by legislating sufferingSuffering as the pivotal eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for euthanasiaEuthanasia/assisted death without requiring terminal prognosis as is needed in most permissive jurisdictions. This chapter will explore the relationship between sufferingSuffering and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and the ways in which sufferingSuffering is understood in the Supreme Court of Canada, the federal Criminal Code legislation and by health care assessors. Based on this analysis, we will argue that the resulting sufferingSufferingeligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion leaves the law (...) open to unintended forms of interpretation, thus instituting perhaps the most unbounded and risk-prone form of assisted death in the world. A review of the literature on sufferingSuffering, the wish to dieWish to die, and reasons for MAIDReasons for MAID requests found sufferingSuffering of severe illness to be frequently associated with unstable mental health, social, and existentialExistential variables that are often amenable to therapy or remediation. While sufferingSuffering remains a powerful motivating force to seek opportunities to relieve distress, its use as an eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for MAID has significant ambiguity in its’ characterization of ‘enduring’ and ‘irremediable’ and thus fails to protect against abuse for the vulnerable. (shrink)

AbstractDespite the evident importance of imagination in both ethical decision-making and entrepreneurship, significant gaps remain in our understanding of its actual role in these processes. As a result, scholars have called for a deeper understanding of how imagination impacts value creation in society and how this critical human faculty might more profoundly connect our theories of ethics and business decision-making. In this paper, we attempt to fill one of these gaps by scrutinizing the underlying philosophical foundations of imagination and applying (...) them to the challenges facing entrepreneurs attempting to create new value in an increasingly unpredictable and kaleidic world. Accordingly, we apply a view of imagination developed by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to the radically subjective economic philosophy of G.L.S Shackle. As a result, we develop a concept of imagination which we believe can be both significant and hopeful for research at the intersection of business ethics and new value creation. (shrink)

Has Darwinian science made natural theology obsolete, as many Christian scholars now believe? In this article, the author assumes that natural theology does not take place in a religious vacuum but instead borrows its sense of god from this or that specific faith tradition. Its task is not to arrive at an understanding of the divine mystery different from that of systematic or doctrinal theology. As the author shall argue here, however, the empirical grounding essential to natural theology must be (...) considerably more comprehensive and more profound than that provided by the natural sciences, mainly because the latter usually leave out any mention of the most striking of all natural phenomena – the human mind and its mysterious operations.The author maintains that an exclusively Darwinian narrative cannot fully explain why your mind is restless for truth or why you should trust your mind. The point of natural theology is to ask whether nature as a whole is intelligible apart from the reality of God. The author’s point is that an empirical survey of nature that restricts itself to following the modern scientific method’s habitual exclusion of thought from its survey of nature cannot succeed in making nature intelligible.Contribution: This article argues that evolutionary explanations alone are not enough to account for all that is happening in human understanding and knowing. In the light of evolutionary biology, we must note that even human intelligence, which formerly seemed to elevate our species to a perch above nature, now appears to be an unexceptional product of chance, deep time and natural selection. ‘Thought’, the name we may give to the most splendid of all evolutionary outcomes, is taken to be a product of impersonal natural selection and so also are our moral instincts. (shrink)

Many physics parameters need to be precisely set in order for life to exist in our universe. Or so says the fine-tuning argument. That the actual values are just right for life, the argument concludes, is a fact in need of deep physical or metaphysical explanation. Perhaps, the story goes, the parameter values settings are a matter of divine design. Or perhaps they result from a selection effect given our place in the “multiverse”. However, a very different approach to the (...) problem is possible. One may argue that the fine-tuning is an artefact of theorizing: it is explicable as the precise balancing act necessary for compact, systematic representation in science. Given such an explanation and drawing on earlier work from a number of sources, this essay shows how fine-tuning is best understood as evidence for a non-governing conception of laws rather than for design or multiverse. (shrink)

Conscious recollection appears to be governed by seven principles: elaboration, organization, time‐dependency, cue‐dependency, encoding specificity, schematic processing, and reconstruction. However, these same principles may not apply to unconscious, or implicit, memory. Implicit memory is most commonly reflected in priming effects which occur in the absence of conscious recollection. Dissociations between explicit and implicit memory have been observed in patients suffering various sorts of brain damage, in other forms of amnesia, in behavioral performance of neurologically intact subjects, and in brain‐imaging studies (...) of memory. The most popular interpretation of these dissociations holds that explicit and implicit memory are mediated by separate and independent brain systems. However, there are also compelling interpretations in terms of dual processes operating on the contents of a single memory system. (shrink)

The goal of a logic is to define a consequence relation between a set of formulas Γ and, in most cases, an individual formula A. This definition generally takes one of two forms. From a proof theoretic standpoint, A is said to be a consequence of Γ whenever there is a deduction of A from the set Γ, viewed as a set of premises; from a model theoretic standpoint, A is said to be a consequence of Γ whenever A holds (...) in every model that satisfies each formula in Γ. (shrink)

Inspired by the 'reflexive monism' of Max Velmans, this paper considers four problems of mind and body. (1) The traditional mind–body problem, including the 'easy' problem of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, and the 'hard' problem of determining just how neural processes generate conscious states. (2) The distinction between automatic (unconscious) and controlled (conscious) processes, raising the question about the relative roles they play in experience, thought, and action, as well as the question of free will. (3) Psychosomatic effects, (...) including the stress–disease connection, placebo effects, and hypnotic suggestion, in which beliefs appear to have consequences for bodily processes outside the nervous system. (4) Whether mind can exist in the absence of a bodily host, as exemplified by spiritualism and parapsychology. As challenging as the easy and hard problems are, psychology can advance as a science of mental life without ever solving them. (shrink)