External auditors owe a professional duty to the company''s stockholders and to society in general. However their remuneration is determined by management. The resulting conflicts of interest are particularly acute in distressed companies where the auditors are required to disclose uncertainties regarding future survival. We focus on the consequentialist self-fulfilling prophecy argument whereby auditors may fail to disclose such uncertainties due to the belief that the disclosure itself would precipitate the company''s bankruptcy. We find no empirical support for such beliefs (...) for a sample of distressed U.K. companies with audit reports published between 1986 and 1993. Companies whose auditors disclose going concern uncertainties are no more likely to fail than those without such disclosures; indeed three out of four reports containing going concern uncertaintiesare not followed by failure before publication of a subsequent set of accounts. Instead we find that it is the degree of financial distress that drives both bankruptcy and the auditor''s going concern disclosure rather than that the disclosure itself causes failure. Belief in the self-fulfilling prophecy effect nevertheless persists, and this despite the profession''s clear ethical guidelines that audit opinions should provide an objectively true and fair view, paying no regard to possible consequences. It may be that the continued attractiveness of the self-fulfilling prophecy belief is due to its providing a means of resolving intense auditor/management conflict in what is a particularly complex decision situation. We argue that, if the profession''s clear ethical guidelines are to play a greater role in this area, issues such as enforcement will need to be addressed. (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of evil (...) and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

The functional basis of disgust in disease avoidance is widely accepted; however, there is disagreement over what disgust is. This is a significant problem, as basic questions about disgust require...

Recognized as America's most original philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a practicing scientist, a logician, and a student of medieval philosophy and the history of science.

Ricoeur’s reading of Freud is one of the most comprehensive, perceptive and judicious explications of Freudianism—one that begins with his early “Project” of 1895 and culminates with the last book that Freud published, Moses and Monotheism. Ricoeur is successful in exposing some of the weaknesses in Freud, and even more importantly, why we need to move beyond Freud. I am deeply sympathetic with his claim that there is a dialectical relationship between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a restorative hermeneutics of (...) meaning—and that they are integral to each other. And I also think he is successful in showing how, if we relentlessly pursue the logic of Freud’s thinking, we are led beyond Freud. But, even though he gives some indications of how such dialectic is to be developed, this remains a task (an Aufgabe ) that lies before us. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for (...) a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: The following comments are from a psychologist, involved in the study of complex human information processing such as problem-solving, in which overt behaviour cannot be isolated from the subject's representation, since it is the prototype of goal-directed activity. In that respect perception, i.e. interpretation of the situation, is intrinsically linked to action, i.e. to changing the situation so as to complete the goal. In that field representation cannot be assimilated to consciousness, and it is very important, in my (...) opinion, to understand what makes a representation become conscious and what is changed in behaviour when an implicit representation becomes explicit and reportable; and to develop a precise methodology for obtaining and analysing verbal reports, which are in those situations the only ways of access to the subjective experience of other people. (shrink)

Martin Guggenheim, What's Wrong with Children's Rights Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 320.

The present article has three sections. The first one discusses the relationship of the theological theory of transubstantiation to that of transignification and transfinalization , ideas that were introduced just before the time of Vatican II by northern European theologians. The second section develops a holistic view of the nature of matter. Our present scientific knowledge seems to require that we abandon the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism in favor of a theory in which real beings of a certain level ‘sublate’ (...) real but subordinate beings of lower levels. For example, a human being is a substance that includes within itself many smaller substances. When he was in the flesh, the physical body of Christ included within itself a vast number of interconnected atoms and molecules. The third section discusses ideas of Teilhard de Chardin about the relationship of Christ to matter. (shrink)

There has been no attempt in this introduction to put forward a particular method for dealing with these challenges nor to assess the full contribution of the articles in this issue. This outline and discussion has been intended merely to stimulate interdisciplinary debate and provide some of the background to assist in making this possible. A full account would at least have involved a broader review of the background of McLoughlin and Aicholzer and Schienstock in developments within the industrial sociology (...) or industrial relations discipline. Their contributions do, however, provide a good introduction to the traditions within which they are working and so it is not necessary to provide more information here. It is nevertheless important to note in McLoughlin's case that his analysis of “technological systems” and “system architectures” is based on earlier work by McLoughlin and his colleagues, cited in the article, on the complex nature of “engineering systems” and the importance of taking this complexity into account in any discussion of “the impact” of “technology” on organisation. If the result of this issue is the stimulation of system designers to read further in such areas or the encouragement of industrial sociologists to become more involved in research directed towards human-oriented system design then it will have served its purpose. (shrink)

This book explores the moral dimensions of public policy from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective. Regan begins with a thorough exposition of natural law theory and proposes ways in which ethical conclusions can be drawn from it. He then goes on to link natural law theory to an analysis of particular areas of public policy as diverse as public morals, social justice, and the morality of warfare.

Erdelyi's version of repression is no longer recognizably Freudian. Erdelyi fails to cite directed forgetting experiments involving psychiatric patients that indicate that the motivation to forget threatening material seldom translates into an ability to do so. The early Freud of the seduction theory of hysteria did inspire the recovered memory fiasco.