It is common wisdom in intellectual history that eighteenth-century science of man evolved under the aegis of Newton. It is also frequently suggested that David Hume, one of the most influential practitioners of this kind of inquiry, aspired to be the Newton of the moral sciences. Usually this goes hand in hand with a more or less explicit reading of Hume’s theory of human nature as written in an idiom of particulate inert matter and active forces acting on it, i.e. (...) essentially that of Newton’s Principia. Hume’s outlook on the mental world is thus frequently described in terms of conceptual atoms whose association is compared to interparticulate attractions analogous with Newtonian forces in general, and gravity in particular. In the present paper I argue that Hume’s theory can indeed be understood in Newton’s wake, but not in the context of the Principa’s reception but that of the Opticks, which exerted a more significant influence on natural inquiry in eighteenth-century Scotland. I intend to show that Hume speaks a language and represents an outlook on human matters convergent with “philosophical chemistry” in Scotland at that time, and particularly to his later friend and physician William Cullen. (shrink)

We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a (...) ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive. Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together. (shrink)

The theory of consciousness proposed by O'Brien & Opie is open to the Sorites paradox, for it defines a consciousness system internally in terms of computationally relevant units which add up to consciousness only if sufficient in number. The Sorites effect applies on the assumed level of features.

Wish-fulfilment as a singular means of satisfying ineluctable desire is a pivotal concept in classical psychoanalysis. Freud argued that it was the thread that united dreams, daydreams, phantasy, omnipotent thinking, neurotic and some psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, art, myth, and religious illusions. The concept's theoretical exploration has been largely neglected within psychoanalysis since, but contemporary philosophers have recognised it as providing an explanatory model for much of the kind of irrational behaviour so problematic for psychiatry, social psychology (...) and the philosophy of mind. Although critically neglected in contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic thought, the concept remains clinically fundamental, under different labels: it encompasses the processes of omnipotent phantasy, symbolic or substitutive satisfaction, actualisation in transference and acting out, symptom formation and defenses such as projective identification. Wish-fulfilment can be shown to be a specifically psychoanalytic compartment of a common-sense psychological theory of action that illuminates not just clinical material but also the paradoxes of irrationality – such as weakness of will and self-deception – that preoccupy philosophers. The first half of this book develops a comprehensive and novel theory of wish-fulfilment, explores its radical implications for the structure of mind, and locates it against the backdrop of both contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thought. In the second half, the book applies the theory to illuminate important features of self-deception and delusion, religion, insanity defences, creative writing and the exclusion of mind and intention in the biological drift of modern psychiatry. The book will be essential to philosophers of mind, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, social theorists, and students in these disciplines; as well as readers interested in understanding how the mind works in mental illness, self-deception, religion, and creative writing. (shrink)

Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories. This was a in thought and in fact, recurring motive of European thought from the earliest self-aware beginnings, and Tamas knows that history well, as his critical respect (...) demonstrates. Ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers appear in this book, set forth in their own words; and likewise we see that Tamas has built upon the historians and commentators, upon the pioneering historical investigation of the categories by Trendelenburg a century ago and by Bochenski in our days. Tamas has two principal goals here: to investigate the logic, which is to say the structure and the relations, of the philosophical categories; and to set forth the logic of thought which may then be based upon the critically established system of categories obtained by that investigation. Ancillary but of striking value is his style of historical relevance which enables the reader to engage in a discussion that is both analytically sharp and developmentally insightful. Furthermore, Tamas draws upon his contem porary colleagues with similar critical respect: Lukasiewicz, Quine, Patzig, Menne, Tavanets and others. (shrink)

Unethical behavior in organizations has garnered more and more attention in the last decades but most of the scholarly work has used a static approach relying on methodological individualism and a mechanistic worldview when studying this topic. The process of moral disengagement and organizational culture have been linked to the prevalence of unethical behavior earlier, but this paper uses a complexity-informed systems perspective to explore the dynamic relationship of these concepts and aims to improve our understanding of the often unnoticeable, (...) step-by-step process through which organizational cultures can become conducive to unethical behavior. Organizations are conceptualized as complex adaptive systems in which transformative and stabilizing processes based on feedback loops take place continuously. It is discussed how these processes can lead to a phase transition driving organizations towards a state where unethical behavior is the general norm. The process is illustrated through real-life examples. (shrink)

It is essential for social robots to fit in the human society. In order to facilitate this process we propose to use the family dog’s social behaviour shown towards humans as an inspiration. In this study we explored dogs’ low level social monitoring in dog-human interactions and extracted individually consistent and context dependent behaviours in simple everyday social scenarios. We found that proximity seeking and tail wagging were most individually distinctive in dogs, while activity, orientation towards the owner, and exploration (...) were dependent on the context and/or the activity of the owner. The functional analogues of these dog behaviours can be implemented in social robots of different embodiments in order to make them acceptable and more believable for humans. Keywords: dog-owner interaction; social robotics; low-level social monitoring; greeting behaviour; individually distinctive behaviours. (shrink)

_Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy_ is presented for the 60th birthday of professor Christoph Nyíri. The essays presented here for the first time are focused on Austrian intellectual history, and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy – the two main areas of Professor Nyíri’s interests. Typically, the contributors are outstanding scholars of the field, including among others David Bloor, Lee Congdon, Newton Garver, Wilhelm Lütterfields, Joachim Schulte, Barry Smith. The volume is of primary interest for Wittgenstein scholars and those studying the 19th (...) and 20th century Austrian intellectual history. As the volume is presented for Professor Nyíri, the papers collected here reflect his interests in Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy. Beginning with an introductory chapter on Nyiri’s achievements in this field of scholarship, the volume is in four parts. The first part contains essays on Austrian philosophy broadly understood, more precisely on its socio-historical context (Barry Smith and Wolfgang Grassl), on the relation between Marxism and Arnold Hauser’s philosophy and sociology of art (Lee Congdon), and Neurath’s connection to naturalistic epistemologies (Thomas Uebel). The second part presents Wittgenstein's philosophy in context. Jaakko Hintikka’s paper argues that Wittgenstein’s probable dyslexia can be seen as an external influence on and a source of his philosophy. David Bloor discusses Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the context of Edmund Burke’s conservatism, which can be read as a background of Nyiri’s influential interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative philosopher. Newton Garver also touches on the problem of conservatism while discussing passages of _On Certainty_ in the context of Kant, Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Klaus Puhl’s essay connects Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following to Freud’s concept of retroactivity, and argues that rules emerging from empirical regularities can be seen as retroactive constructions. The papers in the third part of the volume offer close readings of Wittgenstein’s works. Rudolf Lüthe offers two readings of Wittgenstein’s criticism of philosophy in the _Tractatus_ can be read in two ways with different consequences, among them is the appearance of philosophy inspired by art rather than the sciences. Joachim Schulte offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of ’natural history’ that can accommodate all of his remarks containing this concept. Herbert Hrachovec discusses the relation of pictorial and linguistic representations in Wittgenstein’s _Nachlass, _arguing that there is no pronounced opposition between the two. The forth part of the book, containing three papers in German, continues the close inspection of Wittgenstein’s later works. Wilhelm Lütterfelds reconstructs Wittgenstein’s philosophy of time as pointing out memory being the very source of time. Katalin Neumer inspects Wittgenstein’s frequent references to photographs in the context of aspect-seeing and compares them with other remarks on theatre, painting, and music. She concludes that there are no philosophically important structural differences between them. Peter Keicher’s paper offers a comprehensive view on Wittgenstein’s prefaces in the context of his various book-projects. The volume ends with a select bibliography of Professor Nyiri’s works. (shrink)

The Hungarian health care system is scheduled to undergo dramatic structural changes, emphasizing preventive medicine, health education, and competition among providers. Keywords: cost control, health care reform, health education, Hungary, market system, preventive medicine CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

The shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom brought by modernity challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life. All these led to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a neutral reason-governed space. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many others that (...) offer an opinion on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an. (shrink)

The paper contrasts Robert Brandom’s account of rationality with that of Daniel Dennett. It argues that neither of them is tenable, and sketches an alternative outlook that avoids the problems. In spite of their fundamental differences, both Brandom and Dennett employ a robust, i.e. explanatory and predictive notion of rationality, and for different reasons they both fail to offer a plausible theory supporting it. The lesson offered here is that rationality should not be treated alongside other norms prescribing behaviour, as (...) it cannot be accounted for in the same terms. Instead of ascribing rationality a robust role in a philosophical understanding of behaviour, it should be assigned a more modest one: its function should be located not in the context of explaining and predicting behaviour, but in the context of narratives folk psychological interpretation offers. (shrink)

Explores the impact of Enlightenment philosophers in Scotland on the development of sociology The first collection to look at the significance of the Scottish Enlightenment for sociological thought, this book explores how and what sociological ideas were developed during this period. It also analyses how the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment would emerge and develop in subsequent traditions of sociology. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed and refined a descriptive-explanatory approach and methodology to explore social and economic processes, an approach that was (...) different from the normative and justificatory aspirations of 17th- and 18th-century social and political philosophies. This distinct contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment is frequently overlooked, even if some of its central figures - Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Adam Smith, to name but three - are acknowledged as important forerunners of contemporary social sciences. This book offers both a synoptic perspective on individual contributions and a connective view of theoretical achievements that are otherwise typically treated in isolation. Tamás Demeter is Professor of Philosophy at the Corvinus University of Budapest and Senior Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the widely held view which associates Hume’s philosophy with mechanical philosophies of nature and particularly with Newton. This view presents Hume’s account of the human mind as passive receiver of impressions which bring into motion, from the outside, a mental machinery whose functioning is described in terms of mechanical causal principles. Instead, I propose an interpretation which suggests that for Hume the human mind is composed of faculties that can be characterized by their active contribution (...) which frequently results in qualitative change. This anatomy of the mind is explored from a physiological perspective focused on the normal functioning and interaction of the mind’s various organs. While pursuing this enterprise, I suggest that Hume’s outlook is closer to eighteenth-century “philosophical chemistry” and vitalistic physiology than to the heritage of mechanical philosophies. (shrink)

It is essential for social robots to fit in the human society. In order to facilitate this process we propose to use the family dog’s social behaviour shown towards humans as an inspiration. In this study we explored dogs’ low level social monitoring in dog-human interactions and extracted individually consistent and context dependent behaviours in simple everyday social scenarios. We found that proximity seeking and tail wagging were most individually distinctive in dogs, while activity, orientation towards the owner, and exploration (...) were dependent on the context and/or the activity of the owner. The functional analogues of these dog behaviours can be implemented in social robots of different embodiments in order to make them acceptable and more believable for humans. Keywords: dog-owner interaction; social robotics; low-level social monitoring; greeting behaviour; individually distinctive behaviours. (shrink)

An evolutionary theory of socialization suggests that children from father-absent families will mature earlier, and form less-stable pair bonds, compared with those from father-present families. Using a sample of about 1,000 persons the recent study focuses on elements of father-absent children’s behavior that could be better explained by a Darwinian approach than by rival social science theories. As a result of their enhanced interest in male competition, father-absent boys were found to engage in rule-breaking behavior more intensively than father-present boys. (...) Compared with father-present children, adolescents from widowed households (both boys and girls) showed a higher intensity of various kinds of noncompliant behavior, which can be linked to their earlier maturation. School attendance, age at marriage, and marital success proved to be influenced by the children’s early family experiences, governed by adapted evolutionary strategies. Father-absent daughters conceived more children than those whose fathers were present during their childhood. As evolutionary theory predicts, reproductive behavior of individuals from divorced households differed from that of individuals who grew up in widowed households. Finally, the strong correlation found between spontaneous abortion/stillbirths and family arrangement indicates that father absence has certain direct impacts on the neurohormonal processes of child development. (shrink)

I argue that, despite recent attempts, the strong program in the sociology of knowledge cannot be applied as a general method of inquiry in the history of ideas. My main point is that its methodological commitments only allow the strong program to be fruitful in those fields of knowledge whose content can be given by truth conditions. But even in these fields sociological questions can be asked that are not sensitive to truth conditional content. In these cases, as I argue, (...) a hermeneutic method is more promising. (shrink)

In Opticks, Newton notes that by following the method of analysis and synthesis, ’the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged’. Hume’s Treatise fulfills this vision, albeit with significant caveats. The chapter argues: 1) Hume’s affinity with Newton is primarily methodological, and Hume’s project is closer to the Queries of Opticks than to the Principia. 2) For Hume, moral philosophy is an experimental study of moral beings qua moral beings which results in ‘an anatomy of the mind’ embodying an (...) epistemic ideal closer to Scottish philosophical chemistry than to any kind of mechanical philosophy. 3) Hume primarily inquires into qualitatively different active principles of human nature that explain why humans function as they do. 4) The knowledge that Hume’s project offers can be used normatively. 5) Thus, in Hume’s hands the boundaries of moral philosophy are enlarged. Yet, being entirely secular, it was not what Newton had envisioned. (shrink)

What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, (...) we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike. (shrink)

Chromatic induction is a major contextual effect of color appearance. Patterned backgrounds are known to induce strong chromatic induction effects. However, it has not been clarified whether the spatial extent of the chromatic surrounding induces a chromatic contrast or assimilation effects. In this study, we examined the influence of the width of a center line and its flanking white contour on the color appearance when the line was surrounded by chromatic backgrounds. A strong color shift was observed when the center (...) line was flanked by white contours with the L/M- and S-cone chromatic backgrounds. There was a difference between the optimal widths of the center line and the contour for the shift in color appearance for the L/M-cone chromaticity and the S-cone chromaticity. The optimal width of the center line for the L/M-cone was finer than the resolution-limit width of the chromatic contrast sensitivity and coarser than that of the luminance contrast sensitivity. Thus, the color appearance of the center line could be obtained by integrating broad chromatic information and fine luminance details. Due to blurring and chromatic aberrations, the simulated artifact was large for the darker center line and S-cone background, thus suggesting that the artifact could explain the luminance dependency of the induction along the S-cone chromaticity. Moreover, the findings of this study reveal that the dominant factor of the color shift is neural instead of optical. (shrink)

The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements in Working Memory and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: the probe was identical to the original sentence in the story, the focused (...) word was replaced by a semantically related word and the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems. (shrink)

Following on from Sources of British Feminism , the present six volumes contain primary source material on radicalism, marriage, motherhood, sexuality and militancy.

Some of the key primary source texts central to the history of British feminism are now being made available in the six volumes of Sources of British Feminism . These anthologies are intended to signal a tribute to the collective and collaborative efforts of writers whose work has effected profound social and political change. Writings compiled here include socialist manifestoes, miscellaneous pamphlets, personal reminiscences, full length biographies, histories of the various movements and impassioned treatises on the cause of women's rights (...) by leading advocates like Mary Astell, Barbara Bodichon and Emmeline Pankhurst. (shrink)