The current and prevailing paradigm of intensive agricultural production is a straightforward example of the mainstream way of doing business. Mainstream enterprises are based on a negativistic view of human nature that leads to counter-productive and unsustainable behaviours producing negative impact for society and the natural environment. If we want to change the course, then different players are needed, which can flourish thanks to their capacity to serve others and creating values for all the participants in the network (...) in which they are embedded. In the article, through the analysis of the Slow Food movement and the use of recent theoretical and empirical contributions in behavioural sciences and psychology, we support the collaborative enterprise model as an alternative to the still prevailing, mainstream business models. Evidence shows that caring and responsible efforts of economic agents are acknowledged and reciprocated even in highly competitive markets. (shrink)

Employee buy‐in is a key factor in ensuring small‐ and medium‐size enterprise (SME) engagement with corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this exploratory study, we use participant observation and semi‐structured interviews to investigate the way in which three fair trade SMEs utilise human resource management (and selection and socialisation in particular) to create employee engagement in a strong triple bottomline philosophy, while simultaneously coping with resource and size constraints. The conclusions suggest that there is a strong desire for, but tradeoff (...) within these companies between selection of individuals who already identify with the triple bottomline philosophy and individuals with experience and capability to deal with mainstream brand management – two critical employee attributes that appear to be rarely found together. The more important the business experience to the organisation, the more effort the organisation must expend in formalising their socialisation programmes to ensure employee engagement. A key method in doing this is increasing employee knowledge of, and affection for, the target beneficiaries of the CSR programme (increased moral intensity). (shrink)

This paper seeks to explain why mainstream analytic philosophy lost interest in the philosophy of history. It suggests that the reasons why the philosophy of history no longer commands the attention of mainstream analytical philosophy may be explained by the success of an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn and a view of philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis. In brief I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophy of history attracted the interest of (...) class='Hi'>mainstream analytical philosophers because the defence of the autonomy of historical explanation championed by the likes of Collingwood, Dray, Melden, Winch, Von Wright and others was in tune with the predominant conception of philosophy as a conceptual enterprise concerned primarily with clarifying different explanatory practices. As this conception of philosophy as an essentially conceptual enterprise became recessive, the purely methodological non-reductivism advocated by defenders of the autonomy of history was accused of ontological escapism and the discussion concerning the autonomy of psychological explanations became the province of the philosophy of mind and action. (shrink)

Employee buy-in is a key factor in ensuring small- and medium-size enterprise (SME) engagement with corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this exploratory study, we use participant observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate the way in which three fair trade SMEs utilise human resource management (and selection and socialisation in particular) to create employee engagement in a strong triple bottomline philosophy, while simultaneously coping with resource and size constraints. The conclusions suggest that there is a strong desire for, but tradeoff (...) within these companies between selection of individuals who already identify with the triple bottomline philosophy and individuals with experience and capability to deal with mainstream brand management – two critical employee attributes that appear to be rarely found together. The more important the business experience to the organisation, the more effort the organisation must expend in formalising their socialisation programmes to ensure employee engagement. A key method in doing this is increasing employee knowledge of, and affection for, the target beneficiaries of the CSR programme (increased moral intensity). (shrink)

In this paper, I critique a recent claim made by Stokhof and van Lambalgen (2011) (hereafter S&vL) that linguistics and science are at odds as to the models and constructions they employ. I argue that their distinction between abstractions and idealisations, the former belonging to the methodology of science and the latter to linguistics, is not a real one. I show that the majority of their arguments are flawed and evidence they cite misleading. Contrary to this distinction, I argue that (...) linguistics, like some variants of the scientific enterprise, uses a minimalist method of idealisation (Weisberg, 2007b), one which includes abstractions (as defined by S&vL) and other idealisations not uncommon to scientific model-building. Finally, I offer an alternative account of the problems cited by S&vL as a direct result of the modelling choices of linguists as opposed to the methods they use to define such models. I do so through the use of the specific example of the treatment of tense and aspect in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

Science is a global phenomenon that knows no frontiers. But in the real world, production and efficient utilization of scientific knowledge are highly concentrated in a few countries. A large majority of countries—those on the periphery, contribute precious little to the growth of scientific knowledge. Indeed, the distribution of science is even more skewed than is the distribution of wealth among nations. As a result, peripheral countries are left out of the intellectual discourse that is at the very foundation of (...) the knowledge enterprise. The extent of this skewness and the relative neglect of the perihpery can be seen in some quantitative form from publication and citation data. However, while it may be true that mainstream science has not greatly benefitted from the efforts of the periphery, scientifically advanced societies are certainly benefitting from the traditional medical and agricultural knowledge base of the peripheral societies. Countless numbers of plants used in the traditional medical systems of India, China, Africa and Latin America are being drafted into the western system of medicine. A number of multinationals are learning from folk medicine and are gathering tons of plant material from these regions for the manufacture of modern medicine. Ironically, very little transfer of knowledge from ancient to modern systems takes place in the pheripheral countries themselves. Even when it does occur, it does not result in the manufacture and marketing of products for profit. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemology is a highly theoretical and abstract enterprise. Traditional epistemologists rarely present their deliberations as critical to the practical problems of life, unless one supposes—as Hume, for example, did not—that skeptical worries should trouble us in our everyday affairs. But some issues in epistemology are both theoretically interesting and practically quite pressing. That holds of the problem to be discussed here: how laypersons should evaluate the testimony of experts and decide which of two or more rival experts (...) is most credible. It is of practical importance because in a complex, highly specialized world people are constantly confronted with situations in which, as comparative novices, they must turn to putative experts for intellectual guidance or assistance. It is of theoretical interest because the appropriate epistemic considerations are far from transparent; and it is not clear how far the problems lead to insurmountable skeptical quandaries. This paper does not argue for flat-out skepticism in this domain; nor, on the other hand, does it purport to resolve all pressures in the direction of skepticism. It is an exploratory paper, which tries to identify problems and examine some possible solutions, not to establish those solutions definitively. (shrink)

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a mainstream issue for many organizations, most of the research to date addresses CSR in large businesses rather than in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), because it is too often considered a prerogative of large businesses only. The role of SMEs in an increasingly dynamic context is now being questioned, including what factors might affect their socially responsible behaviour. The goal of this paper is to make a comparison of SME and large (...) firm CSR strategies. Furthermore, size of the firm is analyzed as a factor that influences specific choices in the CSR field, and studied by means of a sample of 3,680 Italian firms. Based on a multi-stakeholder framework, the analysis provides evidence that large firms are more likely to identify relevant stakeholders and meet their requirements through specific and formal CSR strategies. (shrink)

Mainstream academic debate on the ethics of human gene editing is currently not as inclusive as it should be. For example, it currently does not give due consideration to Indigenous groups and cultures, such as those living in rural and remote areas of Canada. Once such people are given due consideration, then several important points emerge, which have so far gone unnoticed or under‐emphasized in the debate. This article focuses on two of those points: (a) Some vulnerable people who (...) are currently being ignored in the debate may not desire to use gene editing, even if it is safe, effective and affordable, and they will have compelling reasons for making this decision; and (b) even if such people do decide to use the technology, the gene editing enterprise itself is unlikely to do much good for them (and may even be harmful to them), as it alarmingly misses the point regarding the underlying contributing causes of the most pressing problems that those people are facing. Therefore, the promise of the gene editing enterprise is a hollow one for some groups of vulnerable people. These considerations should be used more prominently to guide debate on the ethics of human gene editing. (shrink)

No enterprise as laborious and long-drawn out as the writing of history can be pursued without deeply held convictions as to its purpose and significance. With this in mind, Historians on History addresses the nature of historical enquiry by bringing together in one volume the key writings of many of the best known 20th century historians including Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Samuel, Scott, and Zeldin. This new edition begins with a substantial survey by John Tosh charting historiographical developments (...) over the past sixty years. Each section of readings that follow includes a brief scene-setting introduction and illuminates the political, social and personal assumptions which have governed and sustained historical practice and theory. The selection of readings has been carefully revised to reflect the latest trends. The anthology strikes a balance between the academic mainstream and recent, more radical voices within the discipline. Students thus have access to a wide range of themes and debates. (shrink)

The authors of this article contend that traditional corruption, which was largely blamed for the current situation in the Icelandic economy, was perhaps not the most fundamental reason for the ensuing crisis. The weak business culture and a symbiosis of business and politics have actually allowed for the bulk of self-erving and unethical decisions made by the Icelandic business and political elite. In order to illustrate this point, 10 expert interviews have been conducted within the period of 6 months in (...) 2009 to support in-depth research carried out by the authors. The article also discloses questionable business practices that have recently come to the attention of the public both in Iceland and abroad and that ultimately facilitated the downfall of the Icelandic economy. While traditional corruption has probably played its role in this downfall, the measures currently employed to determine its level did not account for various peculiarities of Icelandic society. The article thus argues that there was a high level of corruption in Iceland, but it was outside of the traditional definition. This other corruption has ultimately prevented the government from acting appropriately upon the questionable business practices mentioned above. The article also offers some general recommendations which should be useful to both policy makers and business leaders wishing to engage in business activities in a transparent, ethical manner and learn from the tragic Icelandic experience. Among these recommendations are the necessity to recognize the limitations of current definitions of corruption, as well as a word of caution to commercial enterprises to pay a close attention not only to commonly accepted indices and mainstream reports but also to a country's history, culture, and political environment, prior to making any sort of investment decisions in that country. (shrink)

This book gives an account of work that I have done over a period of decades that sets out to solve two fundamental problems of philosophy: the mind-body problem and the problem of induction. Remarkably, these revolutionary contributions to philosophy turn out to have dramatic implications for a wide range of issues outside philosophy itself, most notably for the capacity of humanity to resolve current grave global problems and make progress towards a better, wiser world. A key element of the (...) proposed solution to the first problem is that physics is about only a highly specialized aspect of all that there is – the causally efficacious aspect. Once this is understood, it ceases to be a mystery that natural science says nothing about the experiential aspect of reality, the colours we perceive, the inner experiences we are aware of. That natural science is silent about the experiential aspect of reality is no reason whatsoever to hold that the experiential does not objectively exist. A key element of the proposed solution to the second problem is that physics, in persistently accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical assumption about the universe: it is such that a unified pattern of physical law runs through all phenomena. We need a new conception, and kind, of physics that acknowledges, and actively seeks to improve, metaphysical presuppositions inherent in the methods of physics. The problematic aims and methods of physics need to be improved as physics proceeds. These are the ideas that have fruitful implications, I set out to show, for a wide range of issues: for philosophy itself, for physics, for natural science more generally, for the social sciences, for education, for the academic enterprise as a whole and, most important of all, for the capacity of humanity to learn how to solve the grave global problems that menace our future, and thus make progress to a better, wiser world. It is not just science that has problematic aims; in life too our aims, whether personal, social or institutional, are all too often profoundly problematic, and in urgent need of improvement. We need a new kind of academic enterprise which helps humanity put aims-and-methods improving meta-methods into practice in personal and social life, so that we may come to do better at achieving what is of value in life, and make progress towards a saner, wiser world. This body of work of mine has met with critical acclaim. Despite that, astonishingly, it has been ignored by mainstream philosophy. In the book I discuss the recent work of over 100 philosophers on the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of science, and show that my earlier, highly relevant work on these issues is universally ignored, the quality of subsequent work suffering as a result. My hope, in publishing this book, is that my fellow philosophers will come to appreciate the intellectual value of my proposed solutions to the mind-body problem and the problem of induction, and will, as a result, join with me in attempting to convince our fellow academics that we need to bring about an intellectual/institutional revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to solve problems of living, including global problems, and make progress towards as good, as wise and enlightened a world as possible. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Metaphysics is once again a thriving subdiscipline within philosophy, despite a long tradition of challenges to the very viability of the metaphysical enterprise. The criticisms have not so much been satisfactorily answered, as shouldered aside by the vigorous development of the field. Some focused meta-theoretic discussion has recently arisen within mainstream metaphysics.1 The present paper is written more from an outsider's vantage point. I attempt to give a new meta-theory for some parts of metaphysics. The central claim is (...) that much metaphysical work, especially of the contemporary systematic kind, might best be understood as model-building, in a specific sense of this term that draws on recent philosophy of science. (shrink)

Research on the normative aspect of leadership is still a relatively new enterprise within the mainstream of leadership studies. In the past, most academic inquiry into leadership was grounded in a social scientific paradigm that largely ignored the ethical substance of leadership. However, perhaps because of a number of public and infamous cases of failure in business leadership, in recent years there has been renewed interest in the ethical side of leadership in business. This paper argues that ethical (...) issues of leadership actually arise at number of different levels, and that it is important to distinguish between various diverse kinds of ethical issues that arise in the study of leadership. The three levels identified are the level of the individual morality of leaders, the level of the means of their leadership, and the level of the leadership mission itself. We argue that only by fully understanding all of the different levels of ethical analysis pertinent to business leadership, and the distinctive kind of issues that arise at each level, can we fully integrate normative studies of leadership into the field of leadership studies. As such, this paper offers a model that incorporates three different levels of ethical analysis that can be used to study normative issues in leadership studies. Such a model can be used to better understand and integrate ethical issues into research, teaching, and training in leadership. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit card. (...) As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the intersecting histories of psychiatry and psychology (particularly in its clinical guise) in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. It suggests that there have been three major shifts in the ideological and intellectual orientation of the “psy complex.” The first period sees the dominance of the asylum in the provision of mental health care, with psychology, once it emerges in the early twentieth century, remaining a small enterprise largely (...) operating outside the clinical arena, save for the development of psychometric technology. It is followed, between 1945 and 1980, by the rise of psychoanalytic psychiatry and the emergence of clinical psychology. Finally, the re-emergence of biological psychiatry is closely associated with two major developments: an emphasis that emerges in the late 1970s on rendering the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses mechanical and predictable; and the long-term effects of the psychopharmacological revolution that began in the early 1950s. This third period has seen a shift the orientation of mainstream psychiatry away from psychotherapy, the end of traditional mental hospitals, and a transformed environment within which clinical psychologists ply their trade. (shrink)

Of late, two contrasting departures from the analytic mainstream have become fashionable: the displacement of philosophy by the natural sciences, epitomized by the Churchlands' theme of "neurophilosophy," and the displacement of philosophy by the literary, epitomized by Rorty's theme of philosophy as "just a kind of writing," as "carrying on the conversation" of Western culture. Both are disastrous. My purpose here is to articulate a metaphilosophy which, avoiding both scientism and literary dilettantism, allows a more robustly plausible account of (...) the relation of philosophy to the sciences, and of its relation to literature, than either. In this enterprise, my starting point will be the work of C. S. Peirce. This may come as something as a surprise; for Peirce's avowed aspiration "to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the lawless rovers of the sea of literature" (5.449, 1902), not to mention his unkind remarks about "studying in a literary spirit" (1.33, 1869), might suggest that he is as scientistic, and as hostile to literature, as Rorty is dilettantish, and hostile to science. But, as I shall show, far from being a precursor of those "lawless rovers of the sea of science" among our contemporaries, Peirce points the way to just such a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 473-492 [Access article in PDF] Sainte-Beuve between Renaissance and Enlightenment Paul Nelles For a period of eight years in the 1840s Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve held a post of conservateur at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. 1 Each day he traversed the gallery of hommes illustres which decorated the reading room. This held busts of major figures from history and literature. In one of (...) his portraits littéraires from these years Sainte-Beuve pretended to derive inspiration from this legion of intellectual heroes. Among the busts stood one of Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's first librarian in the 1640s. Sainte-Beuve dreamt, he wrote at the time, of placing Naudé's bust beside that of Charron, or even better, between those of Montaigne and Bayle. Through Naudé, Sainte-Beuve avowed to discover the genius loci of the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yet whatever local reasons there were for the presence of Naudé's bust at the Mazarine, Sainte-Beuve set out in this essay to find a place for Naudé among the pantheon of French thinkers on his own merits. Such playfulness with a biographical conceit of both the literary and visual arts belied serious purpose. If it fuelled Sainte-Beuve's claim to have found in the seventeenth-century thinker "un sceptique moraliste sous masque d'érudit," 2 it was also expressive of a critical campaign devoted to the revision of a received tradition of French thought and learning. Sainte-Beuve [End Page 473] juxtaposed a seventeenth-century tradition of "literary" skepticism independent of formal philosophy with an Enlightenment inheritance he was eager to disown. Central to this task was a disciplinary turn away from philosophical inquiry and the history of philosophy to literary history. This in turn entailed a full embrace of the shadowy inhabitants of the margins of pre-Enlightenment thought from the late Renaissance to Bayle.Sainte-Beuve's discovery of seventeenth-century precursors, as he clearly regarded them, was first sketched in a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1830s and 1840s. Naudé was thus somewhat more than a random sighting in Sainte-Beuve's critical galaxy. Together with Bayle and a handful of other figures Naudé occupied a key position within the constellation of thinkers Sainte-Beuve charted in plotting a course for the practice of literary history and criticism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The context of the development of Sainte-Beuve's enterprise illuminates an intriguing aspect of the historiography of skepticism in modern intellectual history. While functioning in part to legitimize literary history as a discipline, the circumstances of Sainte-Beuve's undertaking are rooted in wider contemporary currents of historiography and the philosophy of history. There is, then, a crucial disjuncture between the tradition Sainte-Beuve set out to describe and that established in the twentieth century under the rubric of libertinage. Sainte-Beuve did not seek to establish seventeenth-century origins for Enlightenment free thought. Rather, he turned to the seventeenth century in an effort to exhume a tradition of criticism and literary skepticism with which, on his account, the Enlightenment had openly broken. 3Sainte-Beuve's interest in Naudé, Bayle, and other figures derived from a need to differentiate the orientation and method of literary history from contemporary mechanisms for assessing the significance of France's intellectual and cultural heritage. For all concerned this was a heritage unquestioningly viewed through the prism of the political events of 1789 and their aftermath. According to Sainte-Beuve, la critique emerged in the seventeenth century with thinkers such as Charron, Naudé, and Bayle. From his standpoint, the significance of such figures inhered entirely in their pre-Enlightenment status. They vividly illustrate how the Enlightenment had deviated from a well-established tradition of la critique. The degree to which they served as a foil to the Enlightenment becomes evident when contrasted with Sainte-Beuve's characterization of mainstream Enlightenment figures. [End Page 474]For Sainte-Beuve and his contemporaries literature was not yet restricted to a narrow canon... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Till Death Do Us Part”? Buddhist Insights on Christian MarriageWioleta PolinskaHigh divorce rates and declining marriage rates in Western societies draw the attention of many scholars to the fragility of contemporary marriages.1 Rampant individualism, permissive divorce law, and softening stance on divorce by mainstream Christian denominations are all listed as culprits responsible for the current marriage crisis.2 These conventional accounts, however, overlook important insights gathered by historians of (...) marriage, insights that point to a dramatic shift in the concept of marriage that occurred more than two hundred years ago. According to Stephanie Coontz, “the invention of the historically unprecedented idea that marriage should be based on love and mutual affection” 3 is responsible for greater fragility, but also for creating good, satisfying marriages that bring much happiness to people’s lives.4 Thus, the very source of fragility (the search for love and mutual affection) is also a source of deep connections and lasting relationships. While the fragility accompanying contemporary marriage is here to stay, our efforts to build strong unions need to be carefully evaluated. In what follows, I will address Christian and Buddhist approaches that aim at protecting the stability of marriage. To strengthen marriage, Christianity, from early on, focused on the permanence of marriage whether understood as a sacrament or, later on, as a covenant. Christian wedding vows that promise love, care, and enduring partnership “till death do us part” capture well the prevailing theology of Christian marriage. In contrast, Buddhism employs a concept of impermanence that implies an ever-changing reality that warrants no finality. Recent studies in psychology of mindfulness meditation show that such Buddhist concepts can translate well into effective skills for those in loving relationships. I will suggest that Christian theology might become more successful at preserving the stability of marriage by becoming less focused on the finality of couples’ bonds, and instead attending to the present reality of couples’ relationships.It is well documented that before the seventeenth century marriages were arranged by parents and fulfilled primarily political, economic, and social functions rather than individual needs. Marriage was seen as a means of enlarging one’s economic enterprise, acquiring powerful in-laws, strengthening military alliances, or (for the less [End Page 29] privileged) enlarging the family’s labor force.5 This is not to say that the notion of romantic love was unknown until the seventeenth century, but that it was not closely associated with marriage.6 In aristocratic courts of southern France, for example, romantic love appeared between an unmarried man and a married woman, and it should have been either unconsummated or adulterous.7 As late as the eighteenth century, a “sudden falling head over heels in love, although a familiar enough psychological phenomenon, was thought of as, a mild form of insanity” and an unreasonable basis for marriage.8 Romantic love became widely accepted only in the nineteenth century under the influence of Enlightenment thought, ideals of the French and American Revolutions and of the romantic movement.9Romantic love as an expression of an individual’s desire for fulfillment has its dark side, as it can unleash selfish concerns. Thus, Robert A. Johnson, a Christian theologian, defines romantic love as “airy, fantasy, projections, and an evanescent high. It is fundamentally egotistical—fixated on its own wants and whims. It can never lay the foundation for personal commitments.” 10 The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (b. 1926) states that love can become a kind of sickness when it forms an attachment, similar to drug dependency. When we are under its spell, we are preoccupied with the object of our love and we desire to control and possess the other. To Ven. Hạnh, this is not true love since “it is only the willingness to make use of the other person in order to satisfy our own needs.” 11 Both Johnson and Ven. Hạnh while criticizing romanticized concepts of love are not giving up on possibility of intimate love. Johnson calls this intimate connection with another person a “human love,” a love that affirms and appreciates another person as she or he actually is, in their totality. Instead of prizing... (shrink)

This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the idea of (...) moral truth in OPR: when it comes to social morality, moral truth is necessarily a function of what can be endorsed by some collectivity. Th is leads to a fundamental worry about theories of public reason: why is the endorsement of the public so important? And if some sort of public endorsement is really so terribly important, how can a theory of public reason withstand the fact that it advances its own controversial claims that cannot be publicly endorsed? After considering when public endorsement is necessary, and when public reason theories can make controversial claims, I close by considering in what way OPR does, and in what way it does not, employ a thought experiment, and the complexities of that. (shrink)

Does systems theory need rethinking? Most social scientists would probably say no. It had its run, was debated critically, and found wanting. If at all, it should be treated historically. Why then might systems theory need rethinking, as the title of this symposium claims? The reason is that, unlike in the natural and biosocial sciences, any conception of system in the social sciences has remained suspect in the wake of problematic Parsonian and cybernetic systems theories. The premise of this special (...) issue is that abandoning conceptions of systems has imposed a high price on the social sciences: a lack of ontologies and methodologies that are both philosophically profound and scientifically defensible. It has left social scientists who choose to ignore ontology in their theoretical and empirical work defenseless against enterprising settlers from a variety of humanities and social science disciplines who attack mainstream work with—often simplistic and naïve, but nevertheless fundamental—philosophical arguments, whether anti-scientific postmodernists or pseudo-scientific rational choice theorists. The goal of this special issue is to showcase new and original work that contributes to a rethinking of systems theory by taking the conception of systems seriously. This introduction offers a programmatic statement of a systemic ontology and methodology as well as a brief general outline and examples of what a systems-based approach in the social sciences entails. Key Words: systems theory • systemism • systemic approach • complexity theory • self-organization • emergentism • paradigms • social mechanisms • Mario Bunge. (shrink)

Purpose Many of the ethical issues of additive manufacturing are not well known or understood, and there remains a policy vacuum that needs to be addressed. This paper aims to describe an approach that has been applied successfully to other emerging technologies, referred to as the responsible research and innovation framework programme. A case is then made for the application of this approach in the AM industry with an illustration of how it might be used. Design/methodology/approach The research uses an (...) RRI approach referred to as AREA, an acronym for Anticipate, Reflect, Engage and Act, to assess the ethical implications of AM. For the anticipation phase, horizon scanning was done to explore the ethical issues of AM based on extant literature, while reflective analysis was carried out all through the work to reflect on the data being collected and the research process. The engage phase involved interviews with five participants from small- and medium-sized enterprises involved in 3D printing. Findings The findings indicate that although AM appears to pose a threat to intellectual property rights, many in the industry do not care about this issue. As AM becomes mainstream, intellectual property will likely become a big problem. Also, very little is known about the health impacts of AM. This study shows that AM can be hazardous. Research limitations/implications Only users at SME level were sampled. Other researchers might test the usefulness of AREA at the enterprise level. Practical implications The research demonstrates how the AREA framework may be useful in information systems and social science research by enabling a more anticipatory and reflective research process. Originality/value The paper responds to the need for a novel approach to identifying ethical issues of AM. (shrink)

This is a critical-hermeneutical and historical-comparative study on Political Economy, Economic History and Social Thought, applied to the American utopias in the 19th century and its role in the colonisation of the United States (US) west. This review is based on a heterodox economic approach, used in the disciplines of Religion and Economics. It gives a general view of religious and ideological utopias, as cooperative enterprises of intentional life in farms and workshop, making a comparative analysis of efficiency and sustainability. (...) This study attempts to explain the colonial paradox of American utopias because the last established, with more inversion, they were the first to fall. This study shapes the development of the western territories, from the Quaker’s Holy Experiment framework and its support for the utopias experiments in the expansion to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Contribution: This review offers a descriptive and explanatory study on the colonisation of the US west, under the hermeneutical turn from heterodox economic approaches, to deal with some current contradictions and anachronism in the mainstream view. Also, there is a systematisation of the American utopias, divided into religious and ideological experiments, with a comparison. (shrink)

Aniela Godecka was a co-founder of non-habit Congregation of Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate an active initiator of actions connected with social economy amongst the contemporary factory population. For Aniela Godecka in the sphere of the social economy above all a penetrating analysis and a correct identification of needs of social, professional and economic women were a base of her effective news. Growing disproportions and divisions of the society and the reaction to exclude larger groups from the mainstream of (...) the social life became the base of distinguishing principal areas of Godecka’s activity: service delivery for the society, educational activity, social welfare and health care. Socio-economic transformations taking place throughout the centuries have had a significant impact on the perception of femininity and shaping social mentality. It can therefore pose the question: Whether and to what extent the potential of historical experience Godecka can be used by women 21st century? Godecka’s activity can constitute the inspiration for women living in the 21st century. Aniela Godecka’ experience constitutes the incentive for contemporary women to take part in socio-economic integration, to propagate behaviours and enterprising attitudes and the behaviours in accordance with accepted system of values. (shrink)

As the Panama Canal approached its fiftieth anniversary in the mid-1960s, U.S. officials concerned about the costs of modernization welcomed the technology of peaceful nuclear excavation to create a new waterway at sea level. Biologists seeking a share of the funds slated for radiological-safety studies called attention to another potential effect which they deemed of far greater ecological and evolutionary magnitude – marine species exchange, an obscure environmental issue that required the expertise of underresourced life scientists. An enterprising endeavor to (...) support Smithsonian naturalists, especially marine biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, wound up sparking heated debates – between biologists and engineers about the oceans’ biological integrity and among scientists about whether the megaproject represented a research opportunity or environmental threat. A National Academy of Sciences panel chaired by Ernst Mayr failed to attract congressional funding for its 10-year baseline research program, but did create a stir in the scientific and mainstream press about the ecological threats that the sea-level canal might unleash upon the Atlantic and Pacific. This paper examines how the proposed megaproject sparked a scientific and political conversation about the risks of mixing the oceans at a time when many members of the scientific and engineering communities still viewed the seas as impervious to human-facilitated change. (shrink)

This article attempts to fill a gap in International Relations literature on East Asian security. ‘East Asia’ appears to be mostly an indeterminate conceptual construct, allowing scholars to look selectively at those aspects and areas that could justify their security thesis, albeit security dynamics in the region are all too difficult to comprehend and predict. This problem has been frequently pointed out in IR literature, but its methodological implications and suggestions have neither been appropriately illuminated nor been systematically offered, and (...) the main solution commonly found in the literature was the tautological one of ‘better defining’ the region. As an alternative, this article suggests that one needs to tighten geographical focus and differentiate the subjects of analysis. When it comes to the study of East Asian security, one needs to aim to develop specific and differentiated generalizations as opposed to generalizations of a broad character. To showcase the fact that research outcomes can be more determinate when the target of analysis is more focused and specified, this article takes Northeast Asian security as an example and challenges the so-called ‘peaceful East Asia’ thesis, one of the mainstream perspectives on East Asian security. This article ultimately argues that while apprehending East Asian security dynamics through delimiting the scope of analysis and circumscribing the subjects of investigation is often deemed to be a modest enterprise―in particular, in terms of generalizability―the merits are substantial: research outcomes will be able not only to give us a truer mapping of the real world, but also bring us closer to building knowledge which satisfies the scientific criterion of ‘falsifiability.’Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris IMAGE AND PARABLE: READINGS OF WALTER BENJAMIN Marxist literary criticism is a house with many mansions, most of diem claiming a privileged access to the great central chamber of history and truth. Only the most blinkered polemicist could nowadays attack "Marxist criticism" as if it presented a uniform front or even a clearly delineated target. Differences of oudook have developed to a point where debates within Marxism (...) are often more highly charged and polarized man anything brought to bear by its downright opponents. These differences will seem a crippling liability only from the viewpoint of a hard-line determinist creed which insists both on the rightness of its own reductive methodology and on a one-track notion of historical necessity and reason. The alternative, as New Left theorists have argued, is to examine the diversity of present-day Marxist thinking and show how its manifold traditions take rise from various backgrounds of political and cultural development. Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism is one such attempt to "situate" the work of thinkers like Sartre, Almusser, and Adorno in terms of their beleaguered position as left intellectuals outside the active mainstream of any revolutionary movement.1 Another example is Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, a book which sets out to rethink the bases of a Marxist-theoretical approach to English literary history.2 Eagleton, like Anderson, takes it as axiomatic that no such critique can get underway without first coming to terms with the problems and dilemmas which others have faced in trying to make new sense of a communal enterprise. For Eagleton this means a diagnostic treatment of the gaps and significant sUences which have marked the texts of those — like Arnold or Leavis — engaged in a class-based mystification ofliterary history and values. The critique extends to what Eagleton sees as the inbuilt problems of a homespun British Marxism, whedier of the crudely determinist variety (Caudwell) or the "left-Leavisite" amalgam of radical mêmes and traditionalist assumptions represented by Raymond Williams. Eagleton's approach lays claim to a power of unmasking die 15 16Philosophy and Literature latent ideology at work both in literary and critical texts. Ramer than simply collapse that distinction — as desired by the current post-structuralists, with whom he is wholly out of sympadiy — Eagleton strives to articulate the different structures and relations of discourse which situate criticism vis-à-vis literary history. He proposes a Marxist "science of the text" which would bring out its ideological modes of production, inscribed in the twists and unconscious blind-spots of meaning where a project comes up against its own impossibility. Criticism "deconstructs" the literary text, but not (like the Yale deconstructors) with a view to breaking down all possible distinctions between literature and commentary, merging both in the infinite freeplay of signs. For Eagleton there is indeed a knowledge of die text which stands at a definite remove from its object, just as literature itself"works" and transforms the raw stuffoflived ideology, mus offering it up to critical knowledge. Eagleton's theory of literary production was worked out in response to a powerful new current of Marxist thought, associated mainly with the French philosopher Louis Akhusser. What mis program involved, very briefly, was a rigorous re-reading of Marx's texts, aimed at defining their precise theoretical structure and die place within mem of such concepts as "knowledge," "ideology," and "structure" itself. Only thus could Marxist science attain the clarity and grasp of its own first principles which would set it apart from other, deviant or "ideological" discourses. This meant drawing a firm critical line (or "epistemological break") between the early, humanist Marx and the later productions —including Das Kapital— where his thought took on the full rigor of its scientific basis. Such a theory, in Althusser^ words, "makes it possible to distinguish a word from a concept, to distinguish the existence or non-existence of a concept behind a word, to discern the existence of a concept by a word's function in the dieoretical discourse...." 3 This structuralist reading of the Marxist text is intended as an immanent critique, a means of salvaging the essential Marx from fhose elements in his... (shrink)

The American environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott argues that we human beings are ethically obliged to promote and protect the environment as an intrinsic value. To do so, we should adopt a scientifically and philosophically informed postmodern land ethic which protects and nurtures the great chain of being (pyramids of energy) from soil to civilization. The practice of this Leopoldian land ethic requires that we transform our modernist utilitarian and Cartesian ethics which instrumentalize and alienate nature. Two key works by (...) Callicott outline his position as a mainstream academic deep ecologist: Earth’s Insights (1994) and Beyond the Land Ethic (1999). The French cultural and political philosopher, Luc Ferry, argues that deep ecological ideologies, such as Callicott’s, threatenthe historical enterprise of modernist humanism. The appeal of deep ecologists lies in their romantic and anti-Cartesian ideologies. In his book, The New Ecological Order (1995; Le nouvel ordre écologique, 1992), Ferry criticizes the deep ecologists (and he includes Callicott in this group) for their unjustified attacks on the traditions of humanism. In the conclusion to his book, deep ecological radicalism is equated with an anti-cosmopolitan “barbarism”. Ferry feels that the ideals of the European enlightenment and its modernist anthropocentrism which privileges human autonomy, freedom, and democratic ideals, have been undermined by the forces of the political left. (shrink)

Although the literature on social innovation has focused primarily on social enterprises, social innovation has long occurred within mainstream corporations. Drawing upon recent scholarship on social movements and institutional complexity, we analyze how movements foster corporate social innovation (CSI). Our context is the adoption of green information systems (“green IS”), which are information systems employed to transform organizations and society into more sustainable entities. We trace the historical emergence of green IS as a corporate response to increasing demands for (...) sustainability reporting, a key social innovation that environmental activists helped to create. Drawing upon extensive survey data from more than 400 U.S. firms, we then examine how managers perceived environmental activism in relation to broader field pressures for change and how their perceptions of both were related to green IS adoption. The results reveal that activists were more effective at influencing adoption indirectly by transforming organizational fields than by directly influencing corporate managers. Combined with the historical analysis, these findings suggest that CSI emerged out of ongoing interactions between activists, corporate managers, and other influential actors within a broader social innovation system. Activists helped to create conditions for social innovation, but corporations took the lead in developing new practices. (shrink)

Corporate Social Responsibility is a label covering managerial checks and institutional balances introduced against the background of ethical values. Values are clearly formulated and organizational processes are designed with the inclusion of stakeholders and their voice in mind. In case of the post-communist societies designers of CRS cope with an additional level of complexity. Original sin of market reforms after the political fall of the communist regimes is the corrupt take-over of markets and democracies. Social institutions of capitalist markets and (...) democratic states have been subverted and invaded by the unpurged networks of the post-communist power elites. They privatized the wealth of state enterprises becoming new owners of economic resources and they drifted towards the top functions in state institutions becoming post-communist power brokers. Their long-term monopoly of the media left them in command of the mainstream PR communications long after their absolute political power was gone. Democratic institutions, and the right to free speech are daily challenged by influential image and market competition. They cannot be taken for granted. Some democratic institutions are undermined by subversive networks of the corrupt mafias often formed by ex-functionaries of the communist party and her secret services. Their tacit power is explicitly legitimized by media-clusters of cultural representatives of the communist ex-power elites exploiting leftist bias of media mainstreams. (shrink)

This contribution to the Decennial volume brings together the insights of a seasoned business practitioner on the sustainability imperatives that corporations face, and a response from an academic who works in the field of sustainability and business ethics. Dr. Straub draws on Peter Drucker to reassert the importance of fulfilling the economic mission of the enterprise, but argues that it needs repositioning. Business must be responsive to customer and employee needs, and in order to do so, transformational leadership is (...) required. In her response, Prof. Mollie Painter-Morland argues that in order to succeed in building sustainable enterprises, an urgent evaluation of what is meant by “need” is required. She also contends that in mainstreaming the sustainability agenda, systemic leadership is needed in addition to transformational leaders. (shrink)

Sustainability as a narrative has mainstreamed, but practice is stuck in the ‘valley of death,’ with exemplary business action to internalize social and environmental externalities remaining ad hoc and small scale. Civil regulation has had significant impacts, but appears unable to act as a driver of systemic change. Addressing change at the system level requires the evolution of corporate governance away from intensive towards an extensive accountability, embedded within a ‘public fiduciary.’ Such a shift in fiduciary arrangements is needed to (...) institutionalize and leverage the growing involvement of the state in economic and industrial practice through direct enterprise ownership, the increasing importance of sovereign wealth funds and national development banks, and the significance of public-private partnerships. This re-emergence of the role of the state in economic governance will underpin the next generation of corporate responsibility, framed largely by an international political economy led by major emerging economies. (shrink)

While the idea of worker-owned cooperatives is centuries-old, the network of over 300 such enterprises in the Basque region of Spain and founded upon Catholic social justice teachings, is the most successful and impressive in history. The central claim of this paper is that the worker-owned, Mondragon cooperatives demonstrate not only how economic institutions can be structured so as to promote the common good but also how participation in them can engender a concern for the common good among individual participants (...) in those institutions, which spills over into their broader participation as citizens in the larger community. The paper advances this thesis by, first, providing a brief history of the Mondragon cooperatives, from their founding in the 1950s by Father Jose Arizmendiarrieta, the parish priest in the village of Mondragon, trained in economics. Second, it outlines the central principles of Catholic social justice teachings regarding economy that form the foundation for the Mondragon cooperatives and how those teachings have been institutionalized in the cooperatives’ democratic managerial practices and their creative financial structures. While Father Arizmendiarrieta drew mainly from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, this paper shows how Mondragon’s policies and practices are also in keeping with later Church teachings, as put forward especially by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis I. Third, the paper contrasts the understanding of the common good in Catholic social teachings and the Mondragon cooperatives, on the one hand, to the notion of the common good found in mainstream classical and neoclassical economics. The latter sees society as merely the sum of its individual members and hence the common good as but the sum of individual goods, or aggregate utility. The former, by contrast, sees society as a living organism, the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts, and hence it understands the common good as greater than the sum of individual goods, but also including the organic relationships among individuals. Fourth, the paper describes how participation in the cooperatives engenders, cultivates, and deepens worker-members’ sense and understanding of the common good and their commitment to it. (shrink)

The following essay is part of a body of work titled Signal to Noise: sound and fury in (post)apartheid South Africa. These are a collection of creative non-fiction essays set against the backdrop of my involvement with a small, independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg between 1983 and 1997. The metaphor of a drowning signal, pushing through and making itself heard above the noise, resonates throughout the collection. The complexities of the political versus artistic nature of what we were (...) involved with provide a setting for an anecdotal approach to what is part history, part biography, part memoir and part theoretical sonic exploration. The following essay falls into this approach and is constructed from memories enhanced by diaries, scrap-books, shards of notes, lyrics, photos and conversations. These have been employed in reconstructing a narrative arc that covers the recording of the first album made by the band Sankomota, who were banned from entry into South Africa and were based in Maseru, mostly playing to audiences at one of the leading hotels. Sankomota, then called Uhuru, experienced extraordinary, almost metaphysical, peaks and troughs throughout their nearly thirty-year existence hence the hauntological device in the title. The record was also the first made in our fledgling mobile studio using newly affordable equipment that kickstarted many such do-it-yourself projects worldwide. This was the first in a steady stream of technologies that would eventually break the hegemony of mainstream record companies. In apartheid South Africa, this was hugely significant, as being able to sideline the censorship of state-owned media enterprises meant immense freedom in the kind of projects one came to consider. Savage incidents of force and brutality were still common then, and our small venture has to be seen in the context of broader unrest and suffering. Frank Leepa was an uncompromising survivor. His words and melodies still move and inspire a younger generation. (shrink)

The growing commercialization of research with its effect on the ethical conduct of researchers, and the advancement of scientific knowledge with its effect on the welfare or otherwise of patients, are areas of pressing concern today and need a serious, thorough study. Biomedical research, and its forward march, is becoming increasingly dependent on industry-academia proximity, both commercial and geographic. A realization of the commercial value of academic biomedical research coupled with its rapid and efficient utilization by industry is the major (...) propelling force here. A number of well-intentioned writers in the field look to the whole development with optimism. But this partnership is a double-edged sword, for it carries with it the potential of an exciting future as much as the prospect of misappropriation and malevolence. Moreover, such partnerships have sometimes eroded public trust in the research enterprise itself. Connected to the growing clout of industry in institutions is concern about the commercialization of research and resolving the 'patient or product' loyalty. There is ambivalence about industry funding and influence in academia, and a consequent 'approach-avoidance' conflict. If academia has to provide the patients and research talent, industry necessarily has to provide the finances and other facilities based on it. This is an invariable and essential agreement between the two parties that they can walk out of only at their own peril. The profound ethical concerns that industry funded research has brought center-stage need a close look, especially as they impact patients, research subjects, public trust, marketability of products, and research and professional credibility. How can the intermediate goal of industry serve the purpose of the final goal of academia is the basic struggle for conscientious research institutions /associations. And how best the goal of maximizing profits can be best served, albeit suitably camouflaged as patient welfare throughout, is the concern of the pharmaceutical industry. A very great potential conflict of interest lies in the fact that academia needs the sophisticated instruments that only big funding can provide, while at the same time resists the attempts of the fund provider to set the agenda of research, protocol, design, publication, the works. Conflicts arise at many steps and levels of functioning, and are related to the expectations, competing interests, and conflicting priorities of the different entities involved, whether they are the academic medical centers, the funding agencies, the patients and their families, or the investors and venture capitalists. The public expects access to new treatments. Its appetite for innovation has been bolstered by the constant attention given by the press to new treatments and by the implicit promise from researchers of continuing advances. Similarly, patients demand privacy and control over information about themselves. It makes greater sense for genuine researchers to associate with large long-term industry players who have a track record of genuine hard-core discoveries, even if the process is slow , and the funding less . The element of control venture capitalists exert over the pharmaceutical industry is an under researched area for obvious reasons. But it needs further probing, for that will lay bare the pulls and pressures under which industry works. It makes sense for ethically minded researchers and institutions not to fall in the trap of stocks and equity investments in industry, howsoever attractive they appear, and get rid of them as soon as possible if they have them. If at all they want, it makes more sense to own stocks of larger well established concerns, for the stock upheavals being less, the pressure of the market-place, and of venture sharks, is likely to be lower too. While active participation by the researcher in the commercialization process may be greatly desired by industry, ostensibly in the name of creating value, academia must realize it is a bait it might find hard to swallow in the long run. It makes more sense for the researcher and institution to forego such temptations and/or walk out of such investments as soon as possible. While mainstream medicine and research are booming, as is connected industry, concerns about professional commitment to patient welfare are growing too. Increasing corporate influence is challenging certain long held and fundamental values of patient care, which will have far reaching implications for biomedical care and the future progress of mainstream medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen VintgesNancy BauerDebra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: (...) State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50.Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95.Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95.Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95.Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy.For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here.The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other.The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early... (shrink)

Cora Diamond is a powerful witness to the originality of Iris Murdoch's writings on ethics, showing how Murdoch is at variance with contemporary orthodoxy not just in respect of particular doctrines, but in her questioning of mainstream assumptions as to what constitutes the subject-matter of moral philosophy. Diamond celebrates Murdoch as an ally in her campaign against the ‘departmental’ conception of morality – the idea that moral thought is just one branch of thought among others – and highlights Murdoch's (...) enduring belief in the ‘ubiquity of the moral quality inherent in consciousness’. In keeping with this belief, both philosophers affirm the value of general humanistic reflection on experience, an enterprise in which traditions of imaginative literature as well as of self-conscious theory can invite us to participate. While welcoming this vindication of the claims of ordinary moral intelligence, I will explore some difficulties flowing from the associated idea that ‘morality’ is all-pervasive, and from the ‘perpetually-moralist’ account of our incentive to engage with fictional worlds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit card. (...) As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 concentrated attention on the morality of banking and financial activities. Just as mainstream businesses became increasingly defined by their financial performance, banks, it seemed, got themselves - and everyone else - into trouble through an over-emphasis on themselves as commercial enterprises that need pay little attention to traditional banking virtues or ethics. While the GFC had many causes, criticism was legitimately levelled at banks over the ethics of mortgage creation, excessive securitisation, (...) executive remuneration, and high-pressure customer sales tactics, amongst other things. These criticisms mirror those that have been levelled at the business more generally, particular in the last decade, although the backdrop provided by the GFC is more dramatic, and the outcomes of supposed wrongdoing more severe. This book focuses on business ethics after the GFC; not on the crisis itself, but how we should respond to it. The GFC has focused minds on the proper role of ethics in the understanding and conduct of business activity, but it is essential to look beyond the crisis to address the deeper challenges that it highlights. The aim of this volume is to present examples of the latest philosophically-informed thinking across a range of ethical issues that relate to business activity, using the banks and the GFC - the consequences of which continue to reverberate - as a point of departure. The book will be of great value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in business, ethics in general, and business ethics in particular. (shrink)

Sustainability as a narrative has mainstreamed, but practice is stuck in the ‘valley of death,’ with exemplary business action to internalize social and environmental externalities remaining ad hoc and small scale. Civil regulation has had significant impacts, but appears unable to act as a driver of systemic change. Addressing change at the system level requires the evolution of corporate governance away from intensive towards an extensive accountability, embedded within a ‘public fiduciary.’ Such a shift in fiduciary arrangements is needed to (...) institutionalize and leverage the growing involvement of the state in economic and industrial practice through direct enterprise ownership, the increasing importance of sovereign wealth funds and national development banks, and the significance of public-private partnerships. This re-emergence of the role of the state in economic governance will underpin the next generation of corporate responsibility, framed largely by an international political economy led by major emerging economies. (shrink)

Using an ethical approach to the study of employability, we question the mainstream approach to career self-direction. We focus on a specific category of employees that has been neglected in past research, namely vulnerable workers who have been unemployed for several years and who have faced multiple psychosocial problems. Building on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity model, we examine how establishing clear expectations, developmental inducements, and social organizational goals can foster employability competences of vulnerable workers. Our study took place in the particularly (...) relevant context of social enterprises, which have a primary goal to enhance the employability competences of vulnerable workers. Multilevel analysis of data from 38 CEOs of social enterprises, 121 leaders and 594 workers, demonstrated that establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements enable vulnerable workers to anticipate and optimize their employability competences. Furthermore, a positive association was found between establishing clear expectations and the balance dimension of employability, yet only in social enterprises that prioritize social organizational goals, suggesting the need to recognize the extent organizational goals shape opportunities for vulnerable workers. Establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements can therefore enhance vulnerable workers’ employability competences in supportive contexts; however, there may be detrimental side effects to drifting away from social organizational goals. (shrink)

My focus on vulnerability and bioethics – which acknowledges but goes beyond mainstream feminist ethics - will take a phenomenological perspective that understands the self as having no meaning or existence beyond its embodiment. As such we are always open, and therefore vulnerable, to the constant changes of embodied experience. The transformations in embodiment are both necessary for development and continuous over the life course, but it is only when something breaks the cycle of normative development that the intimation (...) of vulnerability and disorder arise. Corporeal disorder operates in a highly individual and differentiated way as it manifests, for example, in the experience of disability, pain, ageing and dying. These are not exceptional moments of vulnerability in a life otherwise secure and predictable, but they do clearly set out the limits of the western imaginary, and more particularly of modern western biomedicine and conventional healthcare. In offering a critique of the positivist enterprise of biomedicine, I want to suggest a different understanding of the embodiment that has radical implications for bioethics. (shrink)

Between Multiculturalism and Nationalism - A Discursive Construction of Britishness in the Spectator in the Wake of the London Bombings In his interdisciplinary work Ideology, Teun A. van Dijk proposes to study ideology as a cognitive, social and linguistic enterprise. Such an integrative approach is assumed to model interfaces between social structure and cognition through discourse. The notion of ideology it presupposes may be described as shared social representations, which become a group's defining attributes, and govern its ideological expression (...) in discourse. It seems that this approach can be productively applied to a study of ideological relations in the discourses of multicultural societies, such as Britain.In the wake of the London bombings in July 2005, the British rightwing quality weekly the Spectator published a series of articles raising alarming questions about the misguided ideological priorities of modern Britain, and envisioning a deepening crisis of national identity. According to the magazine, the heritage and values of mainstream British society are being endangered by the political promotion of multiculturalism. This in turn has instigated terrorist threats from Islamic extremists, who have been nurtured by the British welfare state and emboldened by its permissive policies. Thus the increasing ideological split between the militancy of the non-integrated Muslim minority in Britain and the decadence of national culture has become the subject of a number of articles. As a result, one of the pervasive discursive mechanisms emerging in the publication has been an ideological confrontation between "us" and "them"The aim of the present study is to survey the pragmatic and rhetorical devices used to construct the image of British society tied in a discursive struggle to define its modern identity-oscillating between the ideals of multiculturalism and the ideology of nationalism. The material for the study is taken from over fifteen articles that come from three subsequent issues of the Spectator published on 16, 23, and 30 July 2005. The methodological framework of the study draws on the research procedures of Critical Discourse Analysis accommodated to the analysis of ideological discourse in the press. (shrink)

This volume provides a rigorous philosophical investigation of the rationales, challenges, and promises of the coming Space Age. Over the past decade, space exploration has made significant and accelerating progress, and its potential has attracted growing attention from science, states, businesses, innovators, as well as the media and society more generally. However, philosophical theorizing concerning the premises, values, meanings, and impacts of space exploration is still in its infancy, and this potentially immense field of study is far from mainstream (...) yet. This book advances outer space philosophy by integrating key scientific and societal debates sparked by recent developments in space research and activities with conceptual, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and political themes and concerns. It maps various regions of philosophical exploration, reflection, and speculation regarding humanity's present and future irradiation into outer space, to promote a broad, rich, and nuanced societal debate regarding this transformative enterprise, which is as stimulating as it can be disorienting. This book will be a fascinating philosophical and ethical exploration for academics, researchers and students interested in philosophy, space studies, science and technology studies, future studies, and sustainability. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson's new book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, has a number of central themes. The very idea that philosophy has a method which is different in kind from the sciences is one Williamson rejects. “… the common assumption of philosophical exceptionalism is false. Even the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori turns out to obscure underlying similarities”. Although Williamson sees the book as “a defense of armchair philosophy”, he also argues that “the differences in subject matter between (...) philosophy and the other sciences are also less deep than is often supposed. In particular, few philosophical questions are conceptual questions in any distinctive sense. …”. In addition, Williamson argues that “the current philosophical mainstream has failed to articulate an adequate philosophical methodology, in part because it has fallen into the classic epistemological error of psychologizing the data. … The picture is wrong; we frequently have better epistemic access to our immediate physical environment than to our own psychology. … Our understanding of philosophical methodology must be rid of internalist preconceptions”. I am tremendously sympathetic with all of these views.In this review, I want to raise a number of questions about philosophical methodology which Williamson does not address. While Williamson is wonderfully forthright on many important issues about philosophical methodology, the view he presents is compatible with a surprisingly wide range of approaches to philosophical questions. This may be precisely what Williamson wants. At this stage in our understanding of the philosophical enterprise, it may be premature to narrow the range of methodological options more than Williamson does. There are some hints, however, that Williamson may favor some of these options more than others, and, if that is so, it would be useful to make that clear and …. (shrink)

Current debates in the analytic mainstream about the existence of God have often an air of the fantastic about them. Discussions of the God question typically begin with an inventory of properties definitive of the disputed entity and then proceed to a consideration of the question whether there is anything that answers to the definition. The theist adduces arguments to show, not so much that God actually exists—an enterprise much to bold for anyone laboring in the shadow of (...) the Kantian Critiques—but that the divine existence is logically possible, or at best, of some degree of probability. His opponent presents arguments designed to impugn the rationality of belief in God by showing either that the existence of God is improbable or even logically impossible. Of course, theist and atheist also each work at discrediting the other’s positive arguments. Now all of this makes for a lively and instructive exchange, except that an important assumption common to both partners in the dialogue is seldom mentioned, let alone defended. This assumption, which is responsible for the aura of the fantastic mentioned above, is that God, if he exists, is a being among beings, albeit the highest being. It may seem that this assumption is so unproblematic as neither to require nor be capable of defense. If the affirmation of God is not the affirmation of a being, what could it be? Surely, if God is anything at all, God is a being. Or so it will seem to many. But as I shall argue, the assumption, far from being obvious, is in fact false: God is not an existent among other existents, but existence itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Production Determines CategoryAn Ontology of ArtMichael Weh (bio)1. Are There Singular Artworks?It is a mainstream view within the ontology of art that there are singular as well as multiple artworks, but it is also a view that is contested. In what follows, I will investigate whether the singular/multiple distinction can be sustained and will argue for a new way to determine the category to which an artwork belongs. (...) Though this seems to be an enterprise of rather theoretical concern, it has a direct practical dimension to it as well. Whether we are right to distinguish between singular and multiple artworks, and on what grounds such a distinction could be made, is of course affecting our treatment of artworks and our whole practice of exhibiting, selling, and appreciating works of art because it is based on the assumption that certain works are unique (and thus exhibited in museums and sold for considerable prices), whereas others exist in several instances (which make them widely available and not to be identified with a single object of appreciation). I hope to show that our practice of categorizing art is mostly appropriate but for different reasons than it has been suggested before.The first question to consider is, What defines a singular artwork? The most obvious characteristic is that it is singular—that is, it exists in only one instance. There is only one Mona Lisa, and there cannot be multiple instances of the Mona Lisa, whereas there can be multiple instances of Ulysses. But a little more precision is advisable. The criterion to decide whether a given work is singular cannot be if there actually is just one instance of the work.1 There might be a multiple artwork, say the novel x, of which there is only one instance—the manuscript. But this does not make x a singular artwork because there could be many copies of x, and they would all be instances of x if they fulfilled the necessary identity criteria between type and token.A copy of the Mona Lisa, on the other hand, would not—according to the common understanding of "singular artworks"—be an instance of the [End Page 84] painting but just that: a copy of the Mona Lisa. Thus, a singular artwork can only exist in one exemplar, and it is impossible that there is more than one. There can only be copies, reproductions, posters, forgeries, facsimiles, or pictures of the Mona Lisa but not an exemplar of the Mona Lisa other than the original. Talking of one exemplar or instance of the Mona Lisa might even be slightly misleading, as it is not supposed to suggest that there is some abstract entity Mona Lisa of which Leonardo's painting is the one and only possible instance. The claim is rather that in the case of singular artworks, there is no type the painting would be a token of at all but only the original physical object. The original is the work.The view that paintings and sculptures are singular artworks that are to be identified with physical objects is held by many ontologists of art, including Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The view is not unchallenged, however, and some people think that what would normally be considered as singular artworks can—at least in principle—exist in several instances as well. In other words, there are no singular artworks at all. And if there could be several instances of the Mona Lisa, this not only means that the Mona Lisa is not a singular work of art but also that it is not a physical object; rather, it is an abstract object like a literary or musical work.2 This view is defended by, amongst others, Gregory Currie, Maria Reicher, and Peter Strawson.But let us first look at some reasons why one might want to insist that some artworks are concrete particulars. To begin with, this is how we deal with and think about paintings and sculptures. The assumption that, say, paintings are singular artworks is implied in our social practices concerning paintings. We put the originals in museums and not copies of them. We buy and... (shrink)

The COVID-19 virus was unveiled to the world as a health crisis and later also as an economic crisis. For some organisations, it has become an ethical crisis. This is certainly the case for large organisations in Australia, where the way many enterprises handled a government wage subsidy called JobKeeper led to a public backlash, media pressure, and a variety of responses ranging from ‘We acted legally’ to the full return of the subsidy. Some organisations later reported profits, and the (...) public response indicated concern about this behaviour, many considering it immoral despite it being legally compliant. It is, we contend, a question to which stakeholder theory can be applied, examining how organisations view and respond to the public. We use content analysis of mainstream media to provide information about public reactions and information from official sources to confirm corporate action. We show that there is a significant ethical component in the public response to the behaviour of organisations as they respond to the crisis. COVID has been an ethical, health, and financial crisis for these organisations. Public pressure, exerted in and through the media, made the general public a definite stakeholder. (shrink)

In recent years the phenomenological approach to bioethics has been rejuvenated and reformulated by, among others, the Swedish philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus. Building on the now-relatively mainstream phenomenological approach to health and illness, Svenaeus has sought to bring phenomenological insights to bear on the bioethical enterprise, with a view to critiquing and refining the “philosophical anthropology” presupposed by the latter. This article offers a critical but sympathetic analysis of Svenaeus’ efforts, focusing on both his conception of the ends of (...) phenomenological bioethics and the predominantly Heideggerian means he employs. Doing so reveals certain problems with both. I argue that the main aim of phenomenological bioethics as set out by Svenaeus needs to be reformulated, and that there are important oversights in his approach to reaching this end. I conclude by arguing that to overcome the latter problem we should draw instead on the works of Max Scheler and Hans Jonas. (shrink)