Faut-il chercher un principe de la morale, quelque chose qui serait là, en nous, pour qu'elle puisse exister? La morale ne nous vient-elle pas aussi de l'extérieur, d'une contrainte sociale? Les protagonistes de la troisième partie de l'Alciphron s'engagent dans un vif débat sur cette question. Toutefois l'attention est détournée du « bien » vers le beau, objet du sens moral. L'exposé de cette thèse, les objections qui lui sont faites, sont le levier qui permet d'envisager la place de l'intérêt, (...) de nos sentiments de crainte et d'espoir, et de l'obéissance à la loi divine. L'enjeu, c'est la possibilité d'une morale autonome. Should one try and find some principle of ethics, i.e. something that would be herein, within us, so that it may be liable to exist? Do not ethics also come from outside, i.e. from a social constraint? The protagonists of Alciphron's third part start an acute debate on the topic. However attention is turned from the « good » towards the beautiful which is the object of the moral sense. This thesis and objections made to it are the lever enabling to grasp the part played by interest, by our feelings both of fear and of hope and by obedience to the divine law. What is at stake is the liability of autonomous ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend and justify the hypothesis that Perelman’s New Rhetoric can enable the French school of Discourse Analysis to readjust its theoretical positions concerning the ethics of discourse. While it is no longer necessary, in the wake of linguists such as Benveniste and Kerbrat-Orecchioni, to point out the founding role of the inscription of subjectivity in language, it is, paradoxically, still necessary to justify the legitimacy of choosing the axiological dimension of discourse and its (...) ethical issues as a scientific object. Indeed, very few linguists view Perelman’s New Rhetoric as a logic and a “pragmatics” of values; most of them prefer to view it as a technical reservoir of types of arguments (Cf. concerning the critical enumeration and classification of references to the NR, raised in approximately forty linguistic works, Koren 2002: 197–228). So far, the notions of “guarantee” and “commitment” are integrated in pragmatic linguistic theories; but these notions have mostly to do with a “commitment” vis-à-vis a referential truth. Truth is still considered as the ultimate value, as the normative reference to every questioning on discursive rectitude. We are thus left with an epistemological lacuna, namely the integration of the responsibility for value judgments in linguistic theories, that could be partially answered for by the New Rhetoric. An editorial from Le Monde will be analyzed to illustrate this point of view. (shrink)

Les valeurs faisant sens pour le locuteur jouent un rôle central dans la justification des décisions. Le jugement de valeur est cependant suspect d'être prescriptif et inique. Sa réhabilitation est l'objet de cet ouvrage. On y démontre que rhétorique et rationalité axiologique sont indissociables.

We propose a construct, the Trust Triangle, that highlights three primary mechanisms that provide ex post accountability for opportunistic behavior and motivate ex ante trust in economic relationships. The mechanisms are a society’s legal and regulatory framework, market-based discipline and reputational capital, and culture, including individual ethics and social norms. The Trust Triangle provides a framework to conceptualize the relationships between trust, corporate accountability, legal liability, reputation, and culture. We use the Trust Triangle to summarize recent developments in the empirical (...) finance literature that examine how trust is formed and how trust, or its absence, affects financial markets, firm performance, and the incidence of financial fraud. To date, most studies examine only one leg of the Trust Triangle in isolation. The evidence, however, indicates that all three legs of the Trust Triangle have first-order effects on a wide range of financial outcomes and that they are interrelated. Attempts to model trust and trustworthiness that do not incorporate all three aspects of the Trust Triangle will therefore miss essential aspects of the basic economic problem of how counterparties overcome the risks of moral hazard, asymmetric information, and opportunism to engage in mutually beneficial exchange and production activities. We focus especially on culture-related mechanisms, a recently developed area in empirical finance research that has potential to influence the more established research on laws and reputation. (shrink)

Diderot’s reading of Le Camus’ Médecine de l’Esprit may occupy a prominent position in his research for the Eléments de physiologie, but his thoughts on the matter are not restricted to a criticism of this work, which appeared in 1753. In his edition of the Eléments de physiologie, Jean Mayer showed that Diderot had instigated an ongoing debate with other physicians who were also concerned with the issue of a ‘medicine of the mind’: Bonnet, Marat, Le Cat, not to mention (...) Bordeu and Haller. In view of the poignancy of Le Camus’ questions, however, his Médecine de l’Esprit may be taken as the hidden clue to a series of questions ranging from the perfectibility of the human mind to the curing of insanity, and thus spanning the limits of the human spectrum—from idiot to genius. The open possibility of creating a medicine of the mind is in fact a restatement of the problem of the respective weight of ‘organization’ and education, understood here in the broadest sense. This problem forms an essential part of the Réfutation d’Helvétius. Furthermore, this possibility leads one to inquire into the physician’s ability to intervene in the organization itself. Thus the question of the ‘innate’ and the ‘acquired’ shifts in some sense, so that it is now located within the problem of organization, which now means more than just the material organ of thought. Ultimately, it is this expression, ‘organization’, which I wish to elucidate further. (shrink)

This paper argues that many so-called digital technologies can be construed as notational technologies, explored through the example of Monegraph, an art and digital asset management platform built on top of the blockchain system originally developed for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. As the paper characterizes it, a notational technology is the performance of syntactic notation within a field of reference, a technologized version of what Nelson Goodman called a “notational system.” Notational technologies produce abstracted entities through positive and reliable, or constitutive, (...) tests of socially acceptable meaning. Accordingly, this account deviates from typical narratives of blockchains, instead demonstrating that blockchain technologies are effective at managing digital assets because they produce abstracted identities through the performance of notation. Since notational technologies rely on configurations of socially acceptable meaning, this paper also provides a philosophical account of how blockchain technologies are socially embedded. (shrink)

Le champ de l’histoire naturelle, longtemps descriptif et classificatoire, connaît tout au long du xmf siècle, un ensemble de transformations dues au développement croissant d’un point de vue physiologique sur les êtres vivants. Si, dans un premier temps, les disciplines traditionnelles (botanique, zoologie) voient des aspects particuliers se développer en leur sein (physique végétale, anatomie et physiologie comparées), la question se pose peu à peu de l’émergence d’une sdence du vivant, dépassant le clivage traditionnel des trois règnes, consciente de l’unité (...) que représente le monde vivant par opposition au monde inorganique. L’apparition presque simultanée en Europe du terme biologie (Roze, Treviranus, Lamarck) ou de son substitut zoonomie (E. Darwin) ne constitue cependant qu’une naissance avortée, qui perturbe les classifications antérieures, sans aboutir immédiatement à la reconnaissance de la biologie comme discipline. L’objet de cet article est d’analyser les conditions conceptuelles qui permettent cette naissance, d’examiner les processus de redistribution des savoirs qu’elle entraîne et d’étudier les redéfinitions et les redécoupages qui s’opèrent dans les catégories utilisées dans les institutions académiques, les périodiques ou les dictionnaires. (shrink)

This work defines various stakeholder roles to overcome the barriers to implementing Education 4.0, which were recently identified in the domain literature. The stakeholder roles are evaluated against these barriers, and such evaluation is structured as a multicriteria sorting problem. To this end, an integrated entropy-based CRITIC-CODAS-SORT under a Fermatean fuzzy environment addresses epistemic uncertainties inherent in decision-making. The FF CRITIC assigns the priority weights of the barriers, while the FF CODAS-SORT determines the high-priority stakeholder roles. A case of an (...) HEI evaluating 57 possible roles of 5 stakeholders is demonstrated here. Findings suggest the lack of collaboration, apprehensive stakeholders, cybersecurity threats, health issues, and cost as crucial barriers to the HEI. The sorting process yields 13 high-priority roles, encompassing those within the influence of the government, university management, human resource function, and educators. Various managerial insights are offered as inputs to the design of initiatives in EDUC4 implementation. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to extend the previous research on ethics in retailing. Prior research of Dornoff and Tankersley, Gifford and Norris, Norris and Gifford, and Burns and Rayman examined the ethics orientation of retail sales persons, sales managers, and business school students. These studies found the college students less ethically-oriented than retail sales people and retail managers. The present study attempts to extend the research on ethics formation to a geographically and academically diverse sample, and to determine (...) if retail management experience in the form of a professional practicum or internship, or entry level management training programs, such as experienced by recent graduates, are critical factors in the formation of business ethics. The sample consisted of thirty-three students majoring in Human Ecology with a concentration in Retail Merchandising and 51 recent graduates of the retail Merchandising program. The series of fourteen vignettes developed by Dornoff and Tankersley was used. An acknowledged limitation of this study is the validity of the questionnaire developed by Dornoff and Tankersley due to the method of development and new laws concerning warranties and credit etc. which have occurred since 1976. The instrument was used, however, to maintain consistency with earlier studies for the purpose of comparison of groups. No significant differences were found in the students' perceptions of the fourteen actions presented in the vignettes, but the range of the responses in the post-internship tests increased in many cases. The alumni appeared to be slightly more ethical than the students but not as ethical as the managers surveyed in 1986 by Norris and Gifford. Indications are that the critical point of ethics formation may be at the mid-management level and that internships and management training programs have little effect on the ethical perceptions of participants. These findings are consistent with studies such as Gable and Topol, and Jordan and Davis which showed high Machiavellian scores among young retailing executives, often buyers, as opposed to upper level retailing management. Scales with measure Machiavellianism, or manipulativeness, have been used as an alternative method of examining business ethics. (shrink)

This work investigates the early encounters of French philosophers and religious thinkers with the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Following an introductory chapter addressing context and methodology, Chapter 2 argues that Henri Bergson's insights into lived duration and intuition and Maurice Blondel's genetic description of action functioned as essential precursors to the French reception of phenomenology. Chapter 3 details the presentations of Husserl and his followers by three successive pairs of French academic philosophers: Léon Noël and Victor Delbos, Lev Shestov (...) and Jean Hering, and Bernard Groethuysen and Georges Gurvitch. Chapter 4 then explores the appropriation of Bergsonian and Blondelian phenomenological insights by Catholic theologians Édouard Le Roy and Pierre Rousselot. Chapter 5 examines applications and critiques of phenomenology by French religious philosophers, including Jean Hering, Joseph Maréchal, and neo-Thomists like Jacques Maritain. A concluding chapter expounds the principal finding that philosophical and theological receptions of phenomenology in France prior to 1939 proceeded independently due to differences in how Bergson and Blondel were perceived by French philosophers and religious thinkers and their respective orientations to the Cartesian and Aristotelian/Thomist intellectual traditions. (shrink)

At the end of the nineteenth century, approaches from experimental physiology made inroads into embryological research. A new generation of embryologists felt urged to study the mechanisms of organ formation. This new program, most prominently defended by Wilhelm Roux, was called Entwicklungsmechanik. Named variously as “causal embryology”, “physiological embryology” or “developmental mechanics”, it catalyzed the movement of embryology from a descriptive science to one exploring causal mechanisms. This article examines the specific scientific and epistemological meaning of the mechanistic approaches of (...) embryological development by focusing on Wilhelm His’ histogenetic work. Roux was neither the first, nor the only one to argue for an experimental exploration of causes in embryology. At the time of Roux, physiological explanations of the genesis of the anatomical forms were developing in parallel, not only in German-speaking countries, but in France, Switzerland and English-speaking countries as well. The experimental approach and the cellular descriptions of embryogenesis were already omni-present when Roux proposed his Entwicklungsmechanik. However, these approaches remained disjointed. It appears that it was Wilhelm His who first succeeded in combining the question of the causal factors determining epigenesis, which was closely connected with experimentation on, and cellular descriptions of, development, in a coherent and concrete synthesis, making him one of the true initiators of the developmental mechanics. (shrink)

Globalisation has triggered a proliferation of translation practises, many of which are mediated by machines. This development raises fundamental philosophical questions about language, writing, meaning, reference, and representation. This chapter builds a bridge between the ethics of machine translation and philosophy of technology. It starts by considering the activity of translation as such and argues that this is an inherently ethical activity because it involves sacrifice, establishes commonality between foreign elements, and invokes certain professional virtues. Consequently, the chapter asks what (...) machines ‘do’ to translation practises, arguing that they fundamentally transform the activity of translation into the transcription of notations. This raises the philosophical questions of logocentrism, the extent to which machines translate the ‘presence’ of lived experience, and phonocentrism, the extent to which machines transcribe the spoken word. Based on this analysis, the chapter turns to three ethical questions that pertain to machine translation. The first is about responsibility: while machines rely on retrospective responsibility, can they deal with prospective responsibility in translation? The second is about hospitality: can machines adapt to foreign worlds without having the lived experience attached to these worlds? And the third is about virtue: can the exchangeability inherent to machine translation cohere with the incommensurability of the work of translation? (shrink)

1. In his recent work entitled Augustine and the Mystery of the Church, James K. Lee notes that fragmented approaches to the study of Augustine have unfortunately resulted in unidimensional and red...

Richard Glauser mène dans cet ouvrage une enquête serrée sur le contexte philosophique dans lequel est née la philosophie de George Berkeley, cherchant contre quels sceptiques lutte précisément le jeune philosophe irlandais, en particulier dans les Principes de la connaissance humaine et les Trois Dialogues entre Hylas et Philonous qui leur font suite. La question se pose à la curiosité de l'historien des idées d'autant plus vivement que Berkeley est un philosophe avant tout argumentatif, qui préfère toujours exposer et démontrer (...) logiquement ses thèses, envisager les objections et les réfuter, ou encore en proposer une analyse serrée sous forme de dialogue. S'agissant des personnes, Berkeley se contente le plus souvent, de formules allusives ; il dit peu envers qui a il des dettes, et qui il attaque. (shrink)

The contributions of Alsatian philosopher and theologian Jean Héring to the early reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in France have been recognized by Spiegelberg, Monseu, and others. This essay probes and elucidates certain historical details to a greater degree than previous studies and also calls attention to the philosophical influences that Héring transmitted to his contemporaries, focusing in particular on his encounters with Emmanuel Levinas and Lev Shestov. It argues that while Héring’s role in facilitating the introduction of Levinas and others (...) to Husserl was important, his more significant contributions consisted in analysing and correcting Levinas’s and Shestov’s appraisals of Husserl’s teachings. (shrink)

This study examines the conditions under which apologies help to elicit forgiveness and restore trust following trust violations between leaders and followers. The intentionality and severity of violations are examined in a critical incident study and a laboratory study. The results support a model in which forgiveness mediates the relation of apology quality and trust. More importantly, the moderation–mediation model shows that apology quality influenced forgiveness and subsequent trust following violations that were moderate in severity–intentionality combination. The effect of apologizing (...) affects trust directly without forgiveness when the severity–intentionality combination held minor or extreme intensity. The results suggest a range in which apologies are effective and enrich understanding of the conditions under which trust can be recovered through an apology–forgiveness process in leader–follower relationships. The contribution of the study lies in elucidating that the combination of severity and intentionality of leaders’ trust violations has greater importance than either one separately. (shrink)

Augustine converted to Christianity in 386 and described his conversion in his Confessiones a decade later. Much ink has been spilled concerning the question of the specific nature of Augustine’s conversion and the ‘historical accuracy’ of his description thereof 10 years later. The Confessiones seem to describe a volte face: he radically embraced Christianity. But to what kind of Christianity did he convert? We will readdress this question, not by investigating his conversion, but by a close exegesis of Confessiones 9, (...) in which he describes the so-called Ostia-ecstasy. In the first part of our article, we discuss the description of the latter experience in Confessiones 9 and situate it within his conversion narrative, with attention to the symbolical language he used. The second part compares the Ostia-experience with the ascent of the soul as described in Plotinus’ Enneads, and with similar ‘Neoplatonic ascents’ present in the Confessiones and in writings penned by Augustine prior to or simultaneous with the Confessiones in order to elucidate the relationship between Augustine’s ‘Christian’ conversion and ‘Ostia-ecstasy’ with the Neoplatonic anabasis. (shrink)

L'idée de réforme en islam – ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler en français, depuis les années 1930, le « réformisme musulman » – reste couramment associée aux discours, systèmes de pensée et idéologies qui se développèrent dans les pays musulmans, en gros du milieu du xixe siècle au milieu du xxe siècle, à la fois en réaction à la domination économique, culturelle, militaire et coloniale européenne et grâce au développement des échanges et à la circulation plus rapide des personnes et (...) de l'information. Ce réformisme était constitutif de ce qui était alors perçu comme une renaissance de la pensée et de la production écrite, en arabe nahḍa. Combiné au nationalisme, l'idéal de renaissance plongeait les siècles antérieurs à la rencontre avec l'Europe dans l'obscurité et faisait de l’époque ottomane un temps de déclin. Ceci se traduisit longtemps, sur le plan scientifique, par une grande méconnaissance des xve, xvie, xviie et xviiie siècles. Au prétendu retard pris par le monde musulman à l’époque moderne répondit ainsi un retard historiographique, fort heureusement en voie de comblement depuis près de cinquante ans. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a strong push for binding human rights due diligence (HRDD) legislation, both at the national and European levels. As empirical evidence of such legislation's impact gradually emerges, it is time to take stock. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review to assess available empirical evidence on (1) how HRDD legislation affects the policies and practices through which companies engage with human rights; (2) how these policies and practices, in turn, affect different actors in companies’ (...) value chains. While it is too early to make conclusive judgements, existing evidence allows us to identify several worrying trends: most companies opt for managerialist and compliance-oriented approaches to HRDD; revert primarily to earlier (and flawed) private governance mechanisms; and try to cascade responsibilities and costs in their supply chain. This risks perpetuating or reinforcing marginalisation and exclusion dynamics. Based on these findings, we formulate some lessons for policy-makers. (shrink)

The task of this article is a two-fold approach to Augustine’s theory of knowledge, often called that of ‘divine illumination’, with particular attention to one of its seminal sources, his Soliloquia. The first approach is historical- and text-critical; we consider the text of the Soliloquia, its meaning and significance, the questions to which Augustine was implicitly responding at the time, and especially how this work broaches themes which are revisited and further developed in Augustine’s later works. In the second part, (...) we take the results of the foregoing analysis and apply to them a systematic-theological and philosophical method. First we contextualize Augustine’s theory of illumination, both in relation to his own works and beyond. We then argue for a distinction between two senses of illumination, namely ‘principal’ and ‘gradual’, which helps to account for the different ways in which illumination is applied by Augustine. Finally, we show how Augustine’s insights can be relevant to contemporary philosophy and theology, and how his ideas are implicated in contemporary debates. The upshot is an historical, philosophical, and theological consideration of Augustine’s theory of divine illumination, which aspires to strike a balance between doing justice to the text from an historical perspective and interpreting and applying it in the present day. (shrink)