Multi-stakeholder initiatives have become a vital part of the organizational landscape for corporate social responsibility. Recent debates have explored whether these initiatives represent opportunities for the “democratization” of transnational corporations, facilitating civic participation in the extension of corporate responsibility, or whether they constitute new arenas for the expansion of corporate influence and the private capture of regulatory power. In this article, we explore the political dynamics of these new governance initiatives by presenting an in-depth case study of an organization often (...) heralded as a model MSI: the Forest Stewardship Council. An effort to address global deforestation in the wake of failed efforts to agree a multilateral convention on forests at the Rio Summit in 1992, the FSC was launched in 1993 as a non-state regulatory experiment: a transnational MSI, administering a global eco-labeling scheme for timber and forest products. We trace the scheme’s evolution over the past two decades, showing that while the FSC has successfully facilitated multi-sectoral determination of new standards for forestry, it has nevertheless failed to transform commercial forestry practices or stem the tide of tropical deforestation. Applying a neo-Gramscian analysis to the organizational evolution of the FSC, we examine how broader market forces and resource imbalances between non-governmental and market actors can serve to limit the effectiveness of MSIs in the current neo-liberal environment. This presents dilemmas for NGOs which can lead to their defection, ultimately undermining the organizational legitimacy of MSIs. (shrink)

Most expressions in natural language are vague. But what is the best semantic treatment of terms like 'heap', 'red' and 'child'? And what is the logic of arguments involving this kind of vague expression? These questions are receiving increasing philosophical attention, and in this book, first published in 2000, Rosanna Keefe explores the questions of what we should want from an account of vagueness and how we should assess rival theories. Her discussion ranges widely and comprehensively over the main (...) theories of vagueness and their supporting arguments, and she offers a powerful and original defence of a form of supervaluationism, a theory that requires almost no deviation from standard logic yet can accommodate the lack of sharp boundaries to vague predicates and deal with the paradoxes of vagueness in a methodologically satisfying way. Her study will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy of language and of mind, philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Philosophers concerned with the question ‘ what is a person?’ have often appealed to the claim that persons are essentially rational beings. Those who make this appeal, though, tend to develop it by spelling out the key notion of rationality in terms of practical rationality: to be a person, one must be able to deliberate, choose a course of action and intentionally act according to one's chosen course. In this book, Simon Evnine argues that epistemic rationality is essential to being (...) a person: personhood requires that one must possess certain logical concepts and live up to certain epistemic norms. This is a novel suggestion – one that I am sure many theorizers about personhood would agree with, but which has not been worked out in this level of detail before. The book promises, then, to be a valuable addition to the literature on personhood, and also promises to be an interesting read – weaving a set of interesting connections between our notion of a person and logical and epistemic notions and norms. In fact, though, the book does not live up to its promise, for reasons I will elaborate later in this review. Getting into more detail, Evnine argues that it …. (shrink)

Logical Pluralists maintain that there is more than one genuine/true logical consequence relation. This paper seeks to understand what the position could amount to and some of the challenges faced by its formulation and defence. I consider in detail Beall and Restall’s Logical Pluralism—which seeks to accommodate radically different logics by stressing the way that they each fit a general form, the Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT)—arguing against the claim that different instances of GTT are admissible precisifications of logical consequence. I (...) then consider what it is to endorse a logic within a pluralist framework and criticise the options Beall and Restall entertain. A case study involving many-valued logics is examined. I next turn to issues of the applications of different logics and questions of which logic a pluralist should use in particular contexts. A dilemma regarding the applicability of admissible logics is tackled and it is argued that application is a red herring in relation to both understanding and defending a plausible form of logical pluralism. In the final section, I consider other ways to be and not to be a logical pluralist by examining analogous positions in debates over religious pluralism: this, I maintain, illustrates further limitations and challenges for a very general logical pluralism. Certain less wide-ranging pluralist positions are more plausible in both cases, I suggest, but assessment of those positions needs to be undertaken on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms -- such as 'tall', 'red', 'bald', and 'tadpole' -- have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate.This anthology collects for the first time the most important papers in the field. After a substantial introduction that surveys (...) the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent the best recent work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a social conception of subjectivity, via a philosophical reading of first-person accounts of recovery from schizophrenia, published in the _Schizophrenia Bulletin_. Following the hypothesis that these accounts exemplify a more general tension between, on the one hand, normative and social dimensions of the self, and on the other, experiential and psychological dimensions, the first section of the paper formulates the problem from a philosophical perspective inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's grammatical approach. The second section explores (...) and rejects different possible readings (sociologistic, phenomenological, or narrativist readings), as conceiving the subject in too passive a relationship with him or herself, and as leading to overly skeptical conclusions about the claims in the first-person accounts insisting on the notion of recovery as a restoration of a sense of self and as empowerment. The third section suggests that a more positive answer can be given via the idea of a certain _grammar of recovery_ governing these narratives, and sketches out how this relates to the more general philosophical question on subjectivity. (shrink)

This piece gives an overview of the supervaluationist theory of vagueness. According to that theory, a sentence is true if and only if it is true on all ways of making it precise. This yields borderline case predications that are neither true nor false, but yet classical logic is preserved almost entirely. The article presents the view and some of its merits and briefly compares it with other theories of vagueness. It raises issues about higher-order vagueness and the definitely operator (...) and about the supervaluationist's accounts of truth and validity. (shrink)

There are a number of strands to the knowledge we have of our own minds; two strands are these: we often know with ease what we are thinking and we often know with ease what it is we believe. This paper concerns the knowledge of what we are thinking; it pursues questions as to what kind of judgment subjects make about their own thoughts, how those judgments are formed and why they constitute knowledge; it also asks how these judgments relate (...) to the judgments subjects make about their own beliefs when they know with ease what they believe. It focuses on the account developed by Tyler Burge as part of his project of reconciling externalism about thought content with privileged self-knowledge. Burge's account is well known and influential; as such it is a fitting target for examination and criticism. (shrink)

Degree theories of vagueness build on the observation that vague predicates such as 'tall' and 'red' come in degrees. They employ an infinite-valued logic, where the truth values correspond to degrees of truth and are typically represented by the real numbers in the interval [0,1]. In this paper, the success with which the numerical assignments of such theories can capture the phenomenon of vagueness is assessed by drawing an analogy with the measurement of various physical quantities using real numbers. I (...) argue that degree theories of vagueness are undermined by the failure of the necessary connectedness principle. Moreover, the semantics for the connectives entail that there must be a uniquely correct numerical assignment for the sentences, and this is implausible. Different senses of 'coming in degrees' are then distinguished; I argue that a confusion between them could be the source of the degree theorist's error, and the distinction illuminates the problem cases described earlier in the paper. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the inter-relationship between moral theory and the unpredictable and complex world of primary health care, where the values of patient and doctor, or groups of patients and doctors, may often clash. We introduce complexity science and its relevance to primary care; going on to explore how it can assist in understanding ethical decision making, as well as considering implications for clinical practice. Throughout the article, we showcase aspects and key concepts using examples and a case (...) study developed from our day-to-day experience working as clinical practitioners in primary care. (shrink)

People with higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI: adaptive emotional traits, skills and abilities) typically achieve more positive life outcomes, such as psychological wellbeing, educational attainment, and job-related success. Although the underpinning mechanisms linking EI with those outcomes are largely unknown, it has been suggested that EI may work as a ‘stress buffer’. Theoretically, when faced with a stressful situation, emotionally intelligent individuals should show a more adaptive response than those with low EI, such as reduced reactivity (less mood deterioration, (...) less physiological arousal), and faster recovery once the threat has passed. A growing number of studies have begun to investigate that hypothesis in respect to EI measured as both an ability (AEI) and trait (TEI), but results are unclear. To test the ‘stress-buffering’ function of EI, we systematically reviewed experimental studies that explored the relationship between both types of EI and acute stress reactivity or recovery. By searching 4 databases, we identified 45 eligible studies. Results showed that EI was only adaptive in certain contexts, and that findings differed according to stressor type, and how EI was measured. In terms of stress reactivity, TEI related to less mood deterioration during sports-based stressors (e.g. competitions), physical discomfort (e.g. dental procedure), and cognitive stressors (e.g. memory tasks), but did not appear as helpful in other contexts (e.g. speeches). Furthermore, effects of TEI on physiological stress responses, such as heart rate, were inconsistent. Effects of AEI on subjective and objective stress reactivity were often non-significant, with high levels detrimental in some cases. However, data suggest that both higher AEI and TEI relate to faster recovery from acute stress. In conclusion, results provide mixed support for the stress-buffering effect of EI. Limitations and quality of studies are also discussed. Findings could have implications for EI training programmes. (shrink)

This paper asks whether a good philosophical account of something can ever be circular. It explores the kind of circumstances in which an account of F might involve F itself while still serving the functions of and meeting the requirements on a philosophical account. The paper discusses two criteria for acceptable circularity, based on ideas from Humberstone 1997. And it illustrates the surprisingly wide variety of kinds of accounts in which circularity need not be bad.

In 1962 a team of scientists conducted their first joint fieldwork in a Xavante village in Central Brazil. Recycling long-standing notions that living Indigenous people represented human prehistory, the scientists saw Indigenous people as useful subjects of study not only due to their closeness to nature, but also due to their sociocultural and political realities. The geneticists’ vision crystalized around one subject – the famous chief Apöwẽ. Through Apöwẽ, the geneticists fixated on what they perceived as the political prowess, impressive (...) physique, and masculine reproductive aptitude of Xavante men. These constructions of charismatic masculinity came at the expense of recognizing how profoundly colonial expansion into Mato Grosso had destabilized Xavante communities, stripping them of their land and introducing epidemic disease. The geneticists’ theorizing prefigured debates to come in sociobiology, and set up an enduring research programme that Apöwẽ continues to animate even four decades after his death. (shrink)

bildwechsel is one of the most prolific and longstanding video collectives established in Europe within the framework of the women’s movement. Founded in 1979 by students of the Hamburg College of Fine Arts, in 1986 the group became an umbrella organization with activities and agents spread all over Europe and the world sharing a common infrastructure. The purpose of bildwechsel is to strengthen women’s presence in the audiovisual media and to advance feminist and queer art. The group has been pursuing (...) its mandate initially through local workshops and exhibitions, then through archival practices and programming activities promoted on the organization’s website. This article examines bildwechsel as an example of women’s ability to maintain a niche presence within the European and the world art scene since the late 1970s via grassroots globalized practices, from within a theoretical framework drawing on transnational feminism and new media theory. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a critique of the recent popular strategy of giving a contextualist account of vagueness. Such accounts maintain that truth-values of vague sentences can change with changes of context induced by confronting different entities (e.g. different pairs through a sorites series). I claim that appealing to context does not help in solving the sorites paradox, nor does it give us new insights into vagueness per se. Furthermore, the contextual variation to which the contextualist is committed is (...) problematic in various ways. For example, it yields the consequence that much of our everyday (non-soritical) reasoning is fallacious, and it renders us ignorant of what we and others have said. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Social, the Outer and the ReflexiveSome More Dimensions of Subjectivity, Schizophrenia, and Its RecoveryThe author reports no conflicts of interest.First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, and the Karl Jaspers Award Committee for their recognition of my paper "Institution or individuality? Some reflections on the lessons to be learned from personal accounts (...) of recovery from schizophrenia" (Wannberg, 2024). I am also very thankful for Dr. Paul B. Lieberman's (2024) and Pr. Elizabeth Pienkos' (2024) stimulating comments on the paper.In the original paper, I used the case of the first person accounts of recovery from schizophrenia as a paradigm to elucidate the components of subjectivity more generally, as well as their logical relations. My main point was that considering the "recovery claim" as potentially endowed with a meaning sufficiently close to the official definition of the "personal" sense of recovery at stake—that is, in brief, having "become oneself" despite recurring or residual symptoms—invites us to question current phenomenological, narrative and constructionist approaches of the self in psychopathology. By contrast to these, I stressed the need of a conception of the self more sensible to its social and interpersonal dimensions, which I attempted to sketch out notably by resorting to Wittgenstein's (1953/1997) idea of "grammar." I am very happy that both Lieberman and Pienkos see the appeal to the social as a welcome move with regard to prevailing approaches to schizophrenia and its recovery. But what does it really mean for the subjective or the individual to be socially and interpersonally constituted, and how are we to account for that? [End Page 75]At a first glance, appealing to the social seems to be in line with current trends in psychopathology, including, as Pienkos points out, in the phenomenological tradition. She elsewhere announces a "shift in emphasis" currently taking place within phenomenological psychopathology, characterized by an increasing interest in the situated and dated aspects of subjectivity (Pienkos et al., 2023). This is a valuable turn. However, I am quite dubious that the well-known distinction between an "experiential" and a "narrative" self to which Pienkos appeals is apt to do all the conceptual work required to attain a satisfactory conception of the self and its social dimensions. In my original paper, I took the "recovery account" to challenge both these notions. As concerns the experiential dimension, I held that this type of account questions the phenomenologist's assumption that subjectivity is ultimately grounded in lived (self-)experience. Provided that typical symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., thought insertion) are expressions of a disorder situated at this most "fundamental" level of the self and provided that they are stemming, at least according to one of the most widespread phenomenological models, from a trait-like disposition present before the onset of psychosis (e.g., Henriksen et al., 2019), it is quite natural to think that these symptoms persist in some form in the context of recovery (e.g., as intrusive thoughts or as "thoughts spoken out loud"). This is indeed the case for several of the authors "in recovery" in the Schizophrenia Bulletin's archives (e.g., Greenblat, 2000), which provided the main source of my analysis. But if this is so, we cannot see their recovery claim as an expression of a "whole" self, so to speak. So we must either say that "personal" recovery from schizophrenia is an illusion or a contradiction, or else we must revise the foundational status of the experiential dimension (other possible options are left aside for the purposes of this brief comment). I argue for the revisionist option. For the equation between the subjective and the experiential does not only lead to an unwelcomed skepticism about the recovery account. There are also more straightforward philosophical reasons for refusing it. Wittgenstein (1980) made a first important step by inviting us to better take into account the variability of the psychological concepts. He notably made a crucial categorical distinction between "lived experiences" (like sensations and mental images) and "attitudes" (like beliefs and intentions) such that all concepts which, when used in the first person... (shrink)

Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers, and rejects, Schiffer’s claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of “Carla said that Bob is tall” implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of “tall”). The paper shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. Vague singular terms are no (...) particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, it is argued, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask whether we should see different logical systems as appropriate for different domains (or perhaps in different contexts) and whether this would amount to a form of logical pluralism. One, though not the only, route to this type of position, is via pluralism about truth. Given that truth is central to validity, the commitment the typical truth pluralist has to different notions of truth for different domains may suggest differences regarding validity in those different domains. Indeed, (...) as we’ll see, the differences between the proposed multiple notions of truth are often of a type that is clearly significant in relation to logical features, such as whether or not a constructive notion of truth is at issue. I criticise domain-based logical pluralism. Having done so I introduce a context-based framework that operates with a context-relative notion of validity. I show that this context-based framework can be employed by the domain-specific logical pluralist, but that framework also allows for logical pluralism that does not involve several domains. Different contexts may demand rules of classical logic, where others only justify intuitionistic rules, even when the same domain (e.g. mathematics) is at issue. (shrink)

In 1966, a team made up of Brazilian and foreign scientists spent a week carefully recording the body temperature and other clinical signs and symptoms of 110 Tiriyó Indigenous people in their communities along the Brazil-Suriname border. Led by the Yale University virologist and immunologist Francis Black, the researchers faced an "epidemic" with a special profile, distinct from those most common in Indigenous populations, which usually resulted in widespread illness, the collapse of subsistence activities, hunger, and as a rule, elevated (...) mortality.Rather, what was happening with the Tiriyó was a planned event, controlled and carefully... (shrink)

Recently, scholars across disciplines raised ethical, legal and social concerns about the notion of human intervention, control, and oversight over Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. This observation becomes particularly important in the age of ubiquitous computing and the increasing adoption of AI in everyday communication infrastructures. We apply Nicholas Garnham's conceptual perspective on mediation to users who are challenged both individually and societally when interacting with AI-enabled systems. One way to increase user agency are mechanisms to contest faulty or flawed AI (...) systems and their decisions, as well as to request redress. Currently, however, users structurally lack such mechanisms, which increases risks for vulnerable communities, for instance patients interacting with AI healthcare chatbots. To empower users in AI-mediated communication processes, this article introduces the concept of active human agency. We link our concept to contestability and redress mechanism examples and explain why these are necessary to strengthen active human agency. We argue that AI policy should introduce rights for users to swiftly contest or rectify an AI-enabled decision. This right would empower individual autonomy and strengthen fundamental rights in the digital age. We conclude by identifying routes for future theoretical and empirical research on active human agency in times of ubiquitous AI. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alcaics In Exile: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”Rosanna WarrenOn September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, a refugee from Nazi Austria. Within a month, Auden, who had been living in the United States since January of that year, wrote a friend in England that he was working on an elegy for Freud. 1 The poem appeared in The Kenyon Review early in (...) 1940. A stately public ode, the poem mourns not only the death of a publicly significant individual, but the collapse of a world. Hitler had overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland; assaults on Jews had intensified; England and France had just declared war on Germany. There would be, indeed, many who would have to be mourned:When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?...Someone encountering this poem for the first time, on the page or in the ear, might be pardoned for puzzling over its form. It sounds prosy. It seems to have some recognizable English cadences, pentameters (“[inline-graphic 01]”), tetrameters (“ ”), and even trimeters (“ ”). But the pattern seems unruly, with some [End Page 111] lines stretching out beyond five traditional beats, and ignoring any iambic order: “turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he.” Groping for a more satisfactory principle of organization, a reader with some knowledge of versification may be moved to count syllables. Such a reader will discover that the poem is indeed organized syllabically in lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 syllables. “Aha,” says the reader, alert to Auden’s intimacy with Classical civilization: “A Horatian ode. Not inappropriate for a formal elegy.” Reflecting further, and leafing through the pages of Horace, that reader will find, or remember, that two thirds of Horace’s odes are in these quatrains, the alcaic stanza. Auden, it appears, has composed his elegy in some version of the meter of Alcaeus, the 7th century b.c.e. Greek poet whose stanza became second nature to Horace. And we cannot enter the world of Auden’s poem without asking, why alcaics? And how do they work here?“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is sometimes said to be Auden’s first syllabic poem. 2 Others demur, proposing both earlier and later examples. 3 Whatever the spats about dating Auden’s early syllabic practice, scholars conventionally agree that his turn toward syllabic composition reflects his evolving interest in a discursive poetry; in the poet as a private intelligence with a public voice; and in the work, respectively, of Horace and Marianne Moore. Having identified the poem as syllabic, many critics move on to heftier topics like psychoanalysis versus Marxism, Auden more than most poets having laid himself open to an overridingly thematic criticism of Big Ideas. But if, having acknowledged the influence of Horace and Moore in Auden’s refusal of English iambic lyricism here, we stay with the question of meter, we are led back to the older progenitor, Alcaeus, a great poet of exile, whose stanza Auden adopts and adapts. I shall ask how it affects our reading to observe that the stanza itself has a genealogy, and brings its expressive burden to bear on Auden’s poem.“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” relies on a counterpoint of two metrical systems, the largely iambic accentual/syllabic system, traditional in English since Wyatt, and a flattened version of Greek quantitative meter, which was a musical notation of syllable length. For Auden, whose great prosodic facility was almost a handicap, the problem was, “not how to write in iambics but how not to write in them from automatic habit.” 4 Throughout his poetic life, he reached for cadences to interrupt the “natural” iambics, sometimes recalling the Old English alliterative beat, and often turning to ballads and popular tunes for rhythmical variation. By the late thirties, he was not only disillusioned [End Page 112] with the Spanish Civil War and his role as quasi-Socialist bard, but was seeking new compositional principles as well. Free verse was not an alternative: his ear required an evident... (shrink)

_Not exercising as much as you should? Counting your calories in your sleep? Feeling ashamed for not being happier? You may be a victim of the wellness syndrome._ In this ground-breaking new book, Carl Cederström and André Spicer argue that the ever-present pressure to maximize our wellness has started to work against us, making us feel worse and provoking us to withdraw into ourselves. The Wellness Syndrome follows health freaks who go to extremes to find the perfect diet, corporate (...) athletes who start the day with a dance party, and the self-trackers who monitor everything, including their own toilet habits. This is a world where feeling good has become indistinguishable from being good. Visions of social change have been reduced to dreams of individual transformation, political debate has been replaced by insipid moralising, and scientific evidence has been traded for new-age delusions. A lively and humorous diagnosis of the cult of wellness, this book is an indispensable guide for everyone suspicious of our relentless quest to be happier and healthier. (shrink)

In questo articolo rifletto sulla nascita della grammatica araba e il suo sviluppo come fonte dell’esegesi coranica dall’VIII al XIV secolo. Il legame tra esegesi e grammatica è stato oggetto di diversi studi che esaminano le origini delle categorie grammaticali. Sebbene non ci sia evidenza di uno spiccato interesse per la grammatica da parte degli esegeti coranici, essi hanno comunque dovuto adoperarla per spiegare i significati del testo sacro. In particolare, nei commentari classici è data particolare attenzione alla lessicografia e (...) meno alla struttura grammaticale. A ogni modo, in alcuni passaggi, anche se sporadici, le categorie grammaticali stesse fungono da spiegazione, essendo portatrici di significati. Questo si evince dalla letteratura sufi dove le terminologie della grammatica araba sono simboli delle stazioni dell’anima nel cammino spirituale, come nella _Grammatica dei cuori_ di al-Qushayrī. In questo articolo, analizzo il ruolo della grammatica nelle Scienze Coraniche secondo il teologo al-Ghazālī e dopo una panoramica della storia della disciplina nel periodo classico della storia islamica, e evidenzio il modo in cui le terminologie grammaticali servono per la comprensione profonda del significato nella Sūra al-Fātiha nel commentario sunnita di Ibn Kathīr. In this article I reflect on the emergence of Arabic grammar and its development as a source for Qur’ān exegesis from VIII to XIV century. The connection between exegesis and grammar has been the subject of several studies examining the origin of grammatical categories. Although there is no evidence of a clear interest for grammar by Qur’ān exegetes, they necessarily used it to explain the meanings of the sacred text. In particular, in the classical commentaries there is a particular attention to lexicography and less to the grammatical structure. However, in some passages, even if sporadic, the grammatical categories themselves perform an explanatory function, being bearers of meanings. This is manifest in Sufi literature where Arabic grammar terminologies are symbols of the stations of souls in the spiritual path, like in the _Grammar of the heart_ by al-Qushayrī. In this article, I analyse the status of grammar in Quranic Sciences according to the theologian al-Ghazālī and after an overview on the history of the discipline in the classical period of Islamic History, and I highlight the way grammar terminologies serve as a key to understand profound meaning in sura al-Fātiha in Ibn Kathīr’s sunni commentary. (shrink)

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder (...) theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. (shrink)

Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit (...) theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity. (shrink)

A theory of vagueness gives a model of vague language and of reasoning within the language. Among the models that have been offered are Degree Theorists’ numerical models that assign values between 0 and 1 to sentences, rather than simply modelling sentences as true or false. In this paper, I ask whether we can benefit from employing a rich, well-understood numerical framework, while ignoring those aspects of it that impute a level of mathematical precision that is not present in the (...) modelled phenomenon of vagueness. Can we ignore apparent implications for the phenomena by pointing out that it is just a model and that the unwanted features are mere artefacts? I explore the distinction between representors and artefacts and criticise the strategy of appealing to features as mere artefacts in defence of a theory. I focus largely on theories using numerical resources, but also consider other, related theories and strategies, including theories appealing to non-linear structures. (shrink)

This paper explores several different accounts of validity within the supervaluationist framework that coincide in the absence of the D operator but differ once that operator is introduced. It argues that the alternatives have different advantages and suggests a form of a pluralism about notions of validity within the supervaluationist framework.

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and (...) diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

Taking a series of colour patches, starting with one that clearly looks red, and making each so similar in colour to the previous one that it looks the same as it, we appear to be able to show that a yellow patch looks red. I ask whether phenomenal sorites paradoxes, such as this, are subject to a unique kind of solution that is unavailable in relation to other sorites paradoxes. I argue that they do not need such a solution, nor (...) do they succumb to one. In particular, I reject the claim made by Fara and Raffman that looks the same is a transitive relation, which would allow us to solve phenomenal sorites paradoxes by denying the possibility of the required kind of sorites series. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the way appeals to pretheoretic intuition are used to support epistemological theses in general and the thesis of epistemic contextualism in particular. After outlining the sceptical puzzle and the contextualist's resolution of that puzzle, I explore the question of whether this solution fits better with our intuitive take on the puzzle than its invariantist rivals. I distinguish two kinds of fit a theory might have with pretheoretic intuitions--accommodation and explanation, and consider whether achieving either kind (...) of fit would be a virtue for a theory. I then examine how contextualism could best claim to accommodate and explain our intuitions, building the best case that I can for contextualism, but concluding that there is no reason to accept contextualism either in the way it accommodates nor the way it explains our intuitions about the sceptical puzzle. (shrink)

Evan's influential argument against vague objects (_Analysis<D>, 1978) has a parallel directed against contingent identity. I argue that Noonan failed in his attempt to accept Evans's argument but save contingent identity by establishing a disanalogy between the two arguments (in The Philosophical Quarterly 1991). Instead, I suggest an alternative way to block the argument against contingent identity and argue that its analogue provides a satisfactory response to Evans's original argument.

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's _The American Scholar_, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American (...) philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. _The American Philosopher_ explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy. (shrink)