"Written in a racy, persuasive style, the book impresses the reader as a work of significant scholarship...I encourage students of comparative religions- and especially those of Islamic economics- to read it with great care."&$151; Islamic Studies The worlds of economics and theology rarely intersect. The former appears occupied exclusively with the concrete equations of supply and demand, while the latter revolves largely around the less tangible concerns of the soul and spirit. Intended as an interfaith clarification of the relationship between (...) the material and the spiritual worlds, this volume first inspects secular beliefs about the relationship between economics and ethics. Exploring the differences and similarities between the treatment of economic issues in each of the great monotheistic religions, Rodney Wilson reveals how each tradition considers such subjects as individual wealth, lending, economic regulation, usury, insurance capitalism, socialism, and banking. He concludes with an intriguing epilogue on the rapidly expanding field of business ethics. (shrink)

The challenge that confronts corporate decision-makers in connection with global labor conditions is often in identifying the standardsby which they should govern themselves. In an effort to provide greater direction in the face of possible global cultural conflicts, ethicistsThomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee draw on social contract theory to develop a method for identifying basic human rights: Integrated Social Contract Theory (ISCT). In this paper, we apply ISCT to the challenge of global labor standards, attempting to identify labor rights that (...) could serve as guides for corporations producing or outsourcing outside of their home country. In addition to identifying areas of universal agreement, we also examine whether ISCT is, in fact, a sufficient basis for determining worker rights; we seek to define the parameters of the “sweatshop” problem; we include the application and results of our ISCT analysis as applied to labor standards: the global labor rights hypernorms; and conclude that ISCT is sufficient only for rights that are universal. We also discuss whether market-driven decisions can identify the boundaries of labor rights, or at least assure that market outcomes are compatible with maintaining labor rights, in order to respond to the shortcomings of ISCT. We conclude with some comments on directions of analysis for labor rights determination. (shrink)

Democracy faces threats from an emerging right-wing movement in democratic governments around the world. This may be even more prevalent in the United States because there is an evil that uses rhetorical tropes to undermine the anchor institutions of democracy: press, courts, universities, and Congress. This evil has a personification--former President Donald Trump. All the rhetorical critiques of Trump, that he is a demagogue, an authoritarian, a serial liar, a populist on steroids, fail to take into account the evil that (...) is fomented by his angry and vengeful rhetoric. Pictures of evil in Scripture, philosophy, and rhetoric bear a striking resemblance to Trump. It is not enough to say that he is dangerous to democracy. Kennedy claims that he is the evil seed in democracy that is even now sprouting new versions of the Trump rhetoric as each acolyte attempts to outrage the next. Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy screams at the evil, fights against the evil, and then attempts to sing the songs of goodness and democracy from poets, prophets, and rhapsodes. For the health of democracy these words have been written. (shrink)

In this paper I shall outline the approach to consciousness adopted by ethnomethodology and its `associate'conversation analysis. I shall attempt to do this by taking a minimalist stance, namely a basic formulation of the elements of these approaches, trying to strip away the ornate superstructures which have been erected upon that basis. I shall proceed in two ways. First, I shall seek to define ethnomethodology and conversation analysis by contrasting them to varying degrees with a variety of other approaches: symbolic (...) interactionism and, derivatively, the work of Goffman, the -social psychology of Rom Harre and his associates and with Norbert Wiley. Secondly, I shall give some examples of the use of the notion of `self'held by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts that take a definitive turn towards a non-ironic, non-mentalist, non-essentialist and non-cognitivist approach to knowledge, consciousness and self. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity (...) producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporateeverything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and _ The Phenomenology of Mind_." Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work. (shrink)

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Muller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in (...) emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Muller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come. (shrink)

The article analyses Dante’s explanatory paraphrase and exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, which opens the eleventh canto of Purgatory. The author reminds us that the prayer is the only one fully recited in the entire Comedy and this devotional practice is in line with the Franciscan prescription to recite it in the sixth hour of the Divine Office when Christ died on the cross. The prayer is reported by the poet on the first terrace of Purgatory, where the proud and (...) vainglorious must learn the virtue of humility, and therefore it symbolizes the perfect reciprocity between man and Godhead. Dante collates and amplifies the two complementary Latin versions of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6: 9–13 and Luke 11: 2–4. The two synoptic texts are supplemented by the Gospel of John, from which Dante takes the concept of celestial bread – the flesh and the blood of Christ – which nourishes, liberates and sanctifies Christians. Apart from the Bible, Dante also draws upon the Augustinian and Tomistic traditions. However, the main hypotext behind the prayer, which is neither cited nor acknowledged in any explicit form in the Comedy, is the Franciscan Laudes creaturarum, also known as the Canticle of the Brother Sun. Written in vernacular by St. Francis himself, who is also the author of the Expositio in Pater noster, the Canticle was still recited and sung together with the Lord’s Prayer in the Franciscan communities in Dante’s time. Moreover, following the parallel readings popular nowadays in Dante studies, the author argues that Purgatorio 11 may be elucidated in the context of Paradiso 11, which is the Franciscan canto par excellence, and taken together they both offset cantos 10, 11, 12 of Inferno, which are based on the sin of pride. The denunciation of pride in and around canto 11 of Inferno alludes to humility – the remedy of such pride in Purgatory 11, which in turn prepares the reader for the encounter with St. Francis – the paragon of humility – in Paradiso 11. The author concludes that the Dantean paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer is no less than an elaborate exegesis and homage to Christ and His teachings, something which is encompassed in a nutshell in the Sermon on the Mount. (shrink)

A number of colleges and universities offer writing intensive courses that emphasize writing as a primary means of learning. This paper presents an approach to teaching undergraduate philosophy courses that makes an effective use of writing as a means to teach students philosophy. The paper begins by discussing the aims and requirements of writing intensive philosophy courses and the nature of philosophical writing. In addition, five course activities (classroom discussion, in-class writing assignments, paper assignments, in-class peer review, tutorials) are discussed (...) along with a summary of the work required by both the student and the instructor. (shrink)

We evaluate the effectiveness of impact investing from the perspective of the market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Under the MFA, businesses are ethically obligated to contribute to market efficiency by mitigating market failures. The MFA ethics literature emphasizes a negative externality interpretation of market failures, with ethical practice as self-regulation. We argue that the MFA also obligates businesses, and investors, to produce positive externalities, a form of private provision of public goods. We develop a graphical MFA ethical framework (...) addressed to impact investing. The framework is based on impact projects’ dual financial and social returns. Dual returns trade-offs originate in market failures and increase with positive externalities. In practice, a key determinant of market failure and the size of returns trade-offs is the availability of intermediate public goods. This varies systematically across sectors and country-markets. We identify the market circumstances under which impact investing is feasible. We show how provision of positive externalities mitigates market failures. We show that the effectiveness of impact investing depends on the interaction of the determinants of feasibility and of the size of project trade-offs. We show how government supporting intervention, through blended finance vehicles, can improve impact investing effectiveness. Finally, we show that evidence of actual patterns of impact investing across sectors and countries supports our analysis. (shrink)

We give a systematic technical exposition of the foundations of the theory of computably compact metric spaces. We discover several new characterizations of computable compactness and apply these characterizations to prove new results in computable analysis and effective topology. We also apply the technique of computable compactness to give new and less combinatorially involved proofs of known results from the literature. Some of these results do not have computable compactness or compact spaces in their statements, and thus these applications are (...) not necessarily direct or expected. (shrink)

This book aims to help answer two questions that Western philosophy has paid relatively little attention to - what is injustice and what does justice require when injustice occurs? Injustice and Rectification offers a taxonomy of justice, which sets forth an initial framework for a moral theory of justice and focuses on framing a conception of rectificatory justice. The taxonomy is ground for this book's eleven other essays, in which a diverse group of authors brings philosophical analysis to bear on (...) the idea of injustice itself and on some important conceptual and normative issues concerning the rectification of injustice. (shrink)

In his highly insightful and wide-ranging rebuttal article “Doing Phenomenology on the Things,” van Manen makes the important claim that “the mission of modern phenomenology transcends foundational and exegetical philosophical theorizing”. I take this claim seriously and put forward this article as an exercise in practical lifeworld phenomenological reflection. By lifeworld I refer to the environing world in which we are enmeshed and in which we live and breathe and have our being; it penetrates our awareness of things while at (...) the same time offering the possibility of reprieve from complete enmeshment in the form of existential reflection on the things, events, doings, goings-on, etc., that collectively constitute the phenomenological concept of world. By phenomenological reflection I refer to written analyses that approach mundane lifeworld phenomena in a manner or style that seeks to show or reveal aspects of the lifeworld that in the ordinary course of everyday life remain hidden from view…aspects of the lifeworld that while they may be glimpsed fleetingly from time to time, remain largely hidden, i.e. in a state of unrealized concealment. The article thus takes seriously the Husserlian call for a return “to the things themselves.” And while the ostensible topic is an old used car, the defacto topic is “us,” or perhaps better stated, the actual topic arises at the meeting place where the “us” and “an older car” arrive and conjoin. It is at the place of this meeting between self and world that the phenomenological analysis can begin. The article emphasizes the practical import of this meeting, this engagement—it is not regarded as a matter of purely abstract philosophical theorizing nor as a purely descriptive matter, although it is also that in part too. (shrink)

. The accounting profession’s image and reputation is built upon the members of the profession acting with the “highest sense of integrity” in “the public interest” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). The Enron debacle initiated the latest crisis facing the profession regarding its image and reputation. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is the largest professional body representing the accounting profession and the one to which regulators have looked in establishing and upholding professional standards relating to the public practice of (...) accounting and auditing. One of the AICPA’s responsibilities is to “promote public awareness and confidence in the integrity, objectivity, competence and professionalism of CPAs ....” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). We analyze the public statements issued by the AICPA (i.e., press releases, speeches of officers, testimony, published articles) during this ethical and identity crisis beginning with the AICPA’s first public statement on the Enron debâcle (AIPCA 2001) and concluding with the AICPA recognizing the need for a “new accounting culture” (Melancon 2002). In order to better understand the public discourse, we use image restoration theory (Benoit, 1995), because it provides a typology of strategies for dealing with the public face of crises. We identify the three most common strategies the AICPA employs during this period. Proposals for taking corrective action represent the most commonly employed strategy, but the analysis also indicates an attempt to evade responsibility by claiming defeasibility and to reduce the offensiveness of the situation by employing a bolstering strategy. A second analysis using DICTION, a software package useful in revealing latent dimensions in a text, indicates that early statements tend to use language related to accomplishing specific action while the later statements tend more toward general language that relates to peoples’ everyday lives. The findings raise questions as to substantive nature of the changes proposed by the AICPA, and thus, the extent to which the public interest is being served by them. (shrink)

"Structure and Sentiment is an important book. Reading it may make an anthropologist more keenly aware of certain issues that are crucial in social anthropology, and this awareness may make one's field work as well as one's reading of published ethnographies more perceptive."—F. G. Lounsbury, American Anthropologist "A theoretical and methodological essay of first importance. As such, the book should be of interest to all social scientists interested in the development of specific and general theory in social anthropology."—Southwestern Social Science (...) Quarterly. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of some of the things faculty do to maximize their Student Evaluation of Teachers scores. It examines 28 practices that are claimed to be unethical methods for maximizing SET scores. The paper offers an argument concerning the morality of each behavior and concludes that 13 of the 28 practices suggest unethical behavior. The remaining 15 behaviors are morally permissible.

This papers explores the diversity of pilgrim expressions in the Celtic Christian sources, focusing largely upon scriptural and theological images-namely, the image of Jerusalem, the example of Abraham, and journey as a metaphor for the earthly life. Discussion on Celtic interest in Jerusalem will focus on the text, De locis sanctis, by Adomnán of Iona. Central to Abrahamic pilgrimage is the ideal of being a stranger, foreigner, exile and alien in the world. Columbanus and Columba are both described as pilgrims (...) in the tradition of Abraham. The life of Patrick raises the question of the relationship between Abrahamic pilgrimage and the missionary life. The phenomenon of the seafaring monks, most famously St Brendan, will also be discussed through the lens of Abraham, while the corresponding text, The Voyage of St Brendan, will lead to a short discussion of liturgy as a form of pilgrimage. Finally, the lifelong journey of the Christian life-expressed through the metaphors of road and journey in the writings of Columbanus-will be discussed. (shrink)

The uncanniness of Freud's uncanny -- Alligators, crocodiles and the monstrous uncanny -- The uncanny urban underside -- The uncanniness of Schelling's uncanny -- The uncanny and the work of Walter Benjamin -- The uncanny cyborg -- The uncanny and the fictional -- The uncanny and the modern adult literary fairy tale -- The uncanny and the gothic vampire romance -- The uncanny and the detective story -- The uncanny and the weird horror story -- The uncanny and the dystopian (...) science fiction novel -- The uncanny and the historiographic metafictional novel -- The uncanny commonwealth of Christianity -- The living Polytheism of the Fung Loy Kok institute of Taoism/Taoist Tai Chi. (shrink)

The late eleventh and twelfth centuries were Europe's first age of pamphlet warfare, of invective and satire. The perceived failure, or at least hypocrisy, of its new institutions-the new monastic orders and the reformed papacy-gave rise to the phenomenon, and it was shaped by the study of grammar and rhetoric in the new Schools. The central figures in the texts in the present book are Bernard of Clairvaux, the powerful ostensible founder of the Cistercian order, and the popular and influential (...) teacher Peter Abelard, leader of the radical faction in the Schools of Paris. The event which sparked this controversy was the Church council at Sens in 1141 which had led to the condemnation of Abelard's doctrines. Abelard proposed to use reason to explain the mysteries of faith, and this had led him into all kinds of difficulties with established church doctrine. The leading light in the atttack on his ideas was Bernard, the famous abbot of Clairvaux, a group of whose letters, written to gather support for it before and after the Council, are presented here. A little while later Abelard was defended by the vituperative but otherwise unknown Berengar, who wrote an outrageous Apology attacking Bernard; we also edit his remaining polemical works: his Letter to the Carthusians, and his Letter to the Bishop of Mende. None of Berengar's works has been translated before. An extensive introductory essay describes the course of the debate and the personnel, and analyses the invective employed by both Bernard and Berengar. There is full annotation identifying the writers' sources and clarifying the issues."-- Back cover. (shrink)

The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, politics, sociology and (...) law. (shrink)

In this book R. G. Peffer tackles the challenges of finding in Marx's work an implicit moral theory, of answering claims that Marxism is incompatible with morality, and of developing the outlines of an adequate Marxist moral and social ...

This is an exciting time for brain science. Recent progress has been such that it now seems realistic to look toward an explanation of mind in terms of the brain's anatomy and physiology. Models based on artificially symmetrical arrays of idealized neurons are now being superseded by ones which properly take into account the brain's actual circuitry. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of brain modeling, containing contributions from many leading researchers in this field. It will (...) be of interest not only to researchers in the fields of brain science and neurobiology, but also to psychologists and those involved in the study of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In modern scholarship, Confucianism has only with some difficulty been placed among the religious traditions of the world, being viewed as more a form of humanism than religion. The question is revisited here whether Confucianism can be described as a religion by employing a definition of religion that focuses on both the identification of an Absolute and the transformation of the individual toward the Absolute. Arguing that the religious basis for the tradition can be found in the identification of an (...) Absolute, T'ien, Heaven, or T'ien-li, Principle of Heaven, this essay identifies sagehood as the transformative process that leads the individual toward the realization of its Absolute. (shrink)

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous (...) one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented. the robot’s performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. (shrink)