“Responsible lobbying” is an increasingly salient topic within business and management. We make a contribution to the literature on “responsible lobbying” in three ways. First, we provide novel definitions and, thereby, make a clear distinction between lobbying and corporate political activity. We then define responsible lobbying with respect to its content, process, organization, and environment, resulting in a typology of responsible lobbying, a conceptual model that informs the rest of the paper. Second, the paper provides a thematic overview of the (...) current literature underpinning lobbying and the responsible firm, and the underlying paradigms informing this literature. Third, the paper makes specific suggestions for a future research agenda, ending with a consideration of methodological implications of such research. (shrink)

Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems; the same problems look different when we change the lens. There has recently been a shift to "postmodal" conceptual tools: concepts of ground, essence, and fundamentality. This shift transforms the debate over structuralism in the metaphysics of science and philosophy of mathematics. Structuralist theses say that patterns are "prior" to the nodes in the patterns. In modal (...) terms this would mean that the nodes cannot vary independently of the pattern. But its postmodal meaning is unclear. Does it mean, e.g., that a fundamental account of reality somehow speaks only of patterns? What would that mean? Three structuralist positions are examined through a postmodal lens: nomic/causal/dispositional essentialism, structuralism about individuals (e.g., structural realism, e.g., ante rem mathematical structuralism), comparativism about quantities. The question of when theories are equivalent, and how that impacts the debate over structuralism, is also discussed. (shrink)

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the 68 Movement : a Difficult Relationship The article examines the relationship between the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School and the student and youth movement of the Sixties. In the course of the decade, it was precisely the young radicals who rediscovered the body of critical theory of the decade of the Thirties which had fallen into total oblivion, even for the leader of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer. Many of (...) the key issues of the 68 movement have a strong connection with the theories developed by Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse : the critique of the authoritarian personality, the critique of the consumer society and of the culture industry, the fight against sexual repression and for a new kind of liberation, one which is both collective and individual. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School would thus seem to be the only philosophical perspective to emerge from within Marxism and to have developed a theoretical analysis of the new dimensions of conflict and of the new forms of subjectivity which emerged through the 68 movement. (shrink)

Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on “The (...) Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)

In examining how reform-leading supranational institutions respond to public criticism, this article advances current theory on their institutional accountability mechanisms and extends research on this topic by focusing on their responses to public criticism of alleged reform failures. We consider the case of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) involvement in the Greek economic crisis, as the structural adjustment reforms it imposed to stabilize the economy. We show how these controversial and, by many accounts, failed policies have profoundly impacted the well-being (...) of the recipient country by reducing social cohesion and impoverishing the most vulnerable groups. In explaining the IMF’s institutional response mechanism for fending off such criticism, we offer moral regulatory appropriation (MRA) as a processual framework and present the IMF’s organizing logic of institutional legitimation processes in four domains of action: agentic mission, reform policies, institutional policy negotiations, and moral appropriation. We argue that this enables institutions to maintain moral legitimacy despite evidence of their reforms’ policy failure and various negative consequences for their populations. The proposed framework has theoretical implications for conceptualizing the rhetorical deployment of moral legitimation to secure and defend institutional accountability. We also highlight the limitations and boundaries of such an approach by the IMF and similar reform-leading institutions. (shrink)

In this paper, our goal is to survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, and discuss whether neuropredictive models of violence create any unique legal or moral problems above and beyond the well worn problems already associated with prediction more generally. In Violence Risk Assessment and the Law, we briefly examine the role currently played by (...) predictions of violence in three high stakes legal contexts: capital sentencing, civil commitment hearings, and sexual predator statutes. In Clinical vs. Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment, we briefly examine the distinction between traditional clinical methods of predicting violence and more recently developed actuarial methods, exemplified by the Classification of Violence Risk software created by John Monahan and colleagues as part of the MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder and Violence [1]. In The Neural Correlates of Psychopathy, we explore what neuroscience currently tells us about the neural correlates of violence, using the recent neuroscientific research on psychopathy as our focus. We also discuss some recent advances in both data collection and data analysis that we believe will play an important role when it comes to future neuroscientific research on violence. In The Potential Promise of Neuroprediction, we discuss whether neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict future violence. Finally, in The Potential Perils of Neuroprediction, we explore some potential evidentiary, constitutional, and moral issues that may arise in the context of the neuroprediction of violence. (shrink)

What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, (...) and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. In a new preface, the author sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy. (shrink)

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout (...) Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender. (shrink)

This paper develops an immanent ecological ethics that locates human flourishing within sustaining ecological relationships. I outline the features of an immanent ethics drawn from Spinoza, and indicate how this model addresses gaps left by approaches based in moral considerability. I argue that an immanent ecological ethics provides unique resources for contesting anthropogenic harm, by 1) shifting the focus from what qualifies as a moral subject to what bodies can or cannot do under particular relations, 2) emphasizing the constitutive role (...) of interaction and interdependence in ecosystemic existence, and 3) extending ethical regard to ecologically-ramified scales. (shrink)

The correspondence between the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and his politically active graduate student Elisabeth Lenk offers fresh insights into both Adorno's view of surrealism and its relation to the student uprisings of 1960s France and Germany. Written between 1962, when Lenk moved to Paris and persuaded an initially reluctant Adorno to supervise her sociology dissertation on the surrealists, and Adorno's death in 1969, these letters reveal a surprisingly tender side of the distinguished professor. The correspondence is accompanied by a (...) selection of documents that bring additional depth and context to the letters and their engagement with the art and politics of the period. Filling in the background of Adorno and Lenk's lively exchange, the volume includes new translations of classic essays by Walter Benjamin ("Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia") and Adorno ("Surrealism Reconsidered"), along with a collection of short prose readings by Adorno and the writer-scholar Carl Dreyfus and three original essays by Lenk: her afterword to Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, her Introduction to the German edition of Charles Fourier's The Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, and her incisive essay "Critical Theory and Surreal Practice." An Introduction by Lenk's student, the contemporary writer and critic Rita Bischof, points to the continuing challenge of surrealist politics. This remarkable body of correspondence appears here in English for the first time, as do Adorno and Dreyfus's surrealist readings and the essays by Lenk. Together, they provide a rich mine of critical material for reassessing the significance of the surrealist movement and its successors. (shrink)

This paper argues that Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher committed to the pure immanence of the natural world and the location of human striving firmly within that natural order, provides unlikely resources for addressing our current ecological crisis. My central claim is that Spinoza's views on power grasp the amoral striving characteristic of all natural beings, while simultaneously offering an immanent basis for normative critique. This, I will argue, is especially potent for the work of addressing ecological harm and fashioning (...) ways of human life consistent with planetary survival. Spinoza's central insight—that the conatus, or characteristic striving to persevere in one's being, actually powers... (shrink)

Codex Parisinus graecus 1601 preserves an anonymous family chronicle covering the years 1446–1458 which records in some detail the dates of its author's marriage and the birth of his children. Apart from restoring some readings from its previous recent edition, this article proposes an identification of the anonymous author with Ioannes Kanaboutzes. A scholar with historiographical interests, he is documented as a native of Phocaea and close associate of the Gattelusio, the Genoese rulers of the adjacent island of Lesbos. He (...) is mostly known for his Commentary on Dionysios of Halicarnassus which he dedicated to Palamede Gattilusio, lord of Ainos and of Samothrace. (shrink)

In einem Brief nennt Adorno die "Negative Dialektik" kurz nach ihrem Erscheinen unter seinen Schriften "das philosophische Hauptwerk, wenn ich so sagen darf“. Dieser herausgehobenen Bedeutung, die das Werk für Adorno hatte, entspricht nicht nur die lange Zeit, die er mit der Abfassung des Buchs beschäftigt war, sondern auch die lange Geschichte, die ihre zentralen Motive in seinem Denken haben. Philosophische Begriffsklärung, die Arbeit an "Begriff und Kategorien“ einer negativen Dialektik, versteht Adorno dabei als dialektischen Übergang in inhaltliches Denken – (...) und so betreibt er sie auch hier. Das hat Konsequenzen für die Form des kooperativen Kommentars, der in diesem Band versucht wird. Adornos "Negative Dialektik" zu kommentieren, kann nur in dem Bewußtsein der unüberbrückbaren Kluft gelingen, die den Kommentar von diesem Text trennt. (shrink)

This brief, affordable text helps students to think critically, using examples from the weird claims and beliefs that abound in our culture to demonstrate the sound evaluation of any claim. It explains step-by-step how to sort through reasons, evaluate evidence, and tell when a claim is likely to be true. The emphasis is neither on debunking nor on advocating specific assertions, but on explaining principles of critical thinking that enable readers to evaluate claims for themselves. The authors focus on types (...) of logical arguments and proofs, making How to Think about Weird Things a versatile supplement for logic, critical thinking, philosophy of science, or any other science appreciation courses. (shrink)

The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most important, central and popular scriptures of Hinduism. A medieval Sanskrit text, its influence as a religious book has been comparable only to that of the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Ithamar Theodor here offers the first analysis for twenty years of the Bhagavata Purana often called the (Fifth Veda) and its different layers of meaning. He addresses its lyrical meditations on the activities of Krishna (avatar of Lord Vishnu), the (...) central place it affords to the doctrine of bhakti religious devotion and its treatment of older Vedic traditions of knowledge. At the same time he places this subtle, poetical book within the context of the wider Hindu scriptures and the other Puranas, including the similar but less grand and significant Vishnu Purana. The author argues that the Bhagavata Purana is a unique work which represents the meeting place of two great orthodox Hindu traditions, the Vedic Upanishadic and the Aesthetic. As such, it is one of India's greatest theological treatises. This book illuminates its character and continuing significance. (shrink)

This article argues that the study of biblical prophets offers a profound contribution to understanding the experience, role and attributes of whistleblowers. Little is known in the literature about the moral triggers that lead individuals to blow the whistle in organisations or why whistleblowers may show persistence against the harshness experienced as a result of their actions. This article argues that our understanding of the whistleblower’s work is highly informed by appreciating how moral values and norms are exercised by prophets (...) in seeking to become agents for change. This article identifies three core implications that have practical and theoretical relevance. The first concerns how the whistleblowing activity challenges the established order of an organisation as this is comprised of institutional structures, policies and procedures. Institutions display an unusual fragility against the seemingly powerless individual who helps reveal the wrongdoing. By disclosing ‘hidden’ knowledge concerning illegitimate intentions and actions, the seemingly powerless individual creates tension that has implications for the stability and order of the organisation. The second implication concerns the degree of social concern and the individual’s interpretation of morality. Whistleblowers, like prophets, display concern for moral values that have implications for the welfare of others, and which they seek to promote through their whistleblowing act. The third implication concerns the importance of agency. By taking a moral stance, the whistleblower assumes an important agentic role facilitating change through his/her intervention. Although such change is sudden and unpredictable it brings about new conditions for the organisation and its members. (shrink)

This paper argues that ontological immanence involves but is not reducible to substance monism. Attending to immanence in Spinoza’s ontology, I provide a creative exegesis of the defining features of Spinoza’s immanent ontology, arguing that it recasts the concept of substance itself, from a term of transcendence and totalization to one of immanence and differentiation. In critical conversation with Deleuze’s influential reading, I identify five interconnected features which, taken together, elaborate Spinoza’s ontology of immanence: substance monism, univocity of attributes, immanent (...) causality, the identification between G-d and Nature, and the status of finite modes as explications of substance rather than its extrinsic effects. I argue that, taken together, these features refashion the concept of substance, such that substance becomes not a term of totalization but rather one of ongoing production of diversity. Attending to the role of finite modes in this ontology, I emphasize the ways in which immanence can lend force to vital reconfigurations of ethical and political life: by defining beings and systems in terms of their capacities, which are augmented, diminished, or maintained depending on how they converge in relation. (shrink)

This paper offers a fresh examination of a salient distinction located at the beginning of the Affinity Argument between the composite (τὸ σύνθετον) and the incomposite (τὸ ἀσύνθετον). I offer reasons for why Plato may have intended for us to assume that the soul is an incomposite unity in its essential nature. I then substantiate this claim by reviving an ancient interpretation to the Affinity Argument according to which the soul is of the same metaphysical kind as the Forms. I (...) thus suggest that the argument may be seen as supporting the basic indestructibility cum immortality of all souls. (shrink)

En este artículo se argumenta que, para comprender las relaciones unificadas que son comúnmente predicadas de la koinōnía en las esferas ética, política y cosmológica respectivamente, uno debe apreciar primero ciertos “principios” o “reglas” que son prerrequisitos necesarios para la formación de koinōnía. Un principio que ha sido durante mucho tiempo objeto de una discusión intensa entre los intérpretes de Platón es la proporcionalidad. No obstante, en lugar de detenernos en el vínculo directo e inmediato entre proporcionalidad –en el sentido (...) más amplio posible– y las totalidades bien-ordenadas, sugiero que podemos obtener una explicación mucho más rica del interés platónico en la proporcionalidad y la formación de koinōnía si exploramos los diferentes modelos proporcionales que utiliza en diferentes contextos. Se argumentará que, para Platón, la proporcionalidad geométrica en particular es el principio vinculante par excellence para la formación de koinōnía al ser el modelo de orden más justo y permitir las totalidades complejas más duraderas. Abordar el punto desde este ángulo puede proporcionar una forma más decisiva de entender las diferencias políticas innegablemente obvias entre la República y las Leyes en términos de koinōnía. (shrink)

Not until the twentieth century did science come to be regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. A technical field, after all, meant not just a difficult one, but one relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists. The alternative, to identify science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late nineteenth century. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, scientists have more and more preferred the detached objectivity of (...) service to bureaucratic experts over the cultivation of an engaged public. This reshaping of science, which has been both celebrated and condemned, provided a stimulus to the incipient field of history of science, and it remains a key historical problem. (shrink)

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hölderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects, such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, with a (...) new introduction by Paul Kottman. (shrink)

Hofstadter [1979, 2007] offered a novel Gödelian proposal which purported to reconcile the apparently contradictory theses that (1) we can talk, in a non-trivial way, of mental causation being a real phenomenon and that (2) mental activity is ultimately grounded in low-level rule-governed neural processes. In this paper, we critically investigate Hofstadter’s analogical appeals to Gödel’s [1931] First Incompleteness Theorem, whose “diagonal” proof supposedly contains the key ideas required for understanding both consciousness and mental causation. We maintain that bringing sophisticated (...) results from Mathematical Logic into play cannot furnish insights which would otherwise be unavailable. Lastly, we conclude that there are simply too many weighty details left unfilled in Hofstadter’s proposal. These really need to be fleshed out before we can even hope to say that our understanding of classical mind-body problems has been advanced through metamathematical parallels with Gödel’s work. (shrink)

The philosophically rich David Bowie is an artist of wide and continuing influence. The theatrical antics of Bowie ushered in a new rock aesthetic, but there is much more to Bowie than mere spectacle. The visual belies the increasing depths of his concerns, even at his lowest personal moments. We never know what lies in store in a Bowie song, for there is no point in his nearly 30 albums at which one can say, "That's typical Bowie!" Who else has (...) combined techno and hard rock, switched to R&B love songs (with accompanying gospel) to funk to jazz-rock fusion and back again? Among the topics explored inDavid Bowie and Philosophy are the nature of Bowie as an institution and a cult; Bowie's work in many platforms, including movies and TV; Bowie's spanning of low and high art; his relation to Andy Warhol; the influence of Buddhism and Kabuki theater; the recurring theme of Bowie as a space alien; the dystopian element in Bowie's thinking; the role of fashion in Bowie's creativity; the aesthetics of theatrical rock and glam rock; and Bowie's public identification with bisexuality and hisinfluence within the LGBTQ community. (shrink)

It is widely claimed that climate change has increased the magnitude and the frequency of natural phenomena such as storms, droughts, and floods with the concomitant costs in terms of damages and victims. This paper using weekly data from global stock market indices in a Fama–French model, examines how and to what extent market agents and investors react to such events. As a yardstick for comparison purposes, the possible market impact of industrial accidents is also incorporated and examined in the (...) empirical investigation. The study uses in a comparative approach the STOXX Global ESG Environmental Leaders index and the STOXX Global index diversified across 1800 top companies. Results reported herein seem to indicate that natural and anthropogenic adversity have no immediate impact on the stock indices, while wildfires have an immediate reduction impact on market risk in the case of the ESG Environmental Leaders index. Moreover, wildfires and industrial accidents appear to cause a significant reduction of systematic risk over the next week following the incident. However, the magnitude of the effect is higher in the case of the ESG Environmental Leaders stock index. Finally, the effect on systematic risk by industrial accidents is temporarily without any lasting imprint. (shrink)