Socrates is famous for claiming that ‘I know one thing: That I know nothing’. There is one subject that Socrates repeatedly claims to have expertise in, however: ta erôtika. Socrates also refers to this expertise as his erôtikê technê, which may be translated as ‘erotic expertise’. I argue that the purposes this expertise serve are, to a significant extent, educational in nature: Socrates has certain erotic educational methods that participate in his expertise on erôs. In addition, I suggest that Socrates (...) uses two kinds of psychological techniques while practicing his erotic expertise through these erotic educational methods. (shrink)

Familial clustering of a disease is defined as the occurrence of the disease within some families in excess of what would be expected from the occurrence in the population. It has been demonstrated for several cancer types, ranging from rare cancers as the adenomatosis-coli-associated colon cancer or the Li-Fraumeni syndrome to more common cancers as breast cancer and colon cancer. Familial clustering, however, is merely an epidemiological pattern, and it does not tell whether genetic or environmental causes or both in (...) combination are responsible for the familial clustering. Familial clustering may be due to genetic predisposition to the disease, but exposure to environmental factors — shared by members of some families, but not by members of other families — may also cause familial clustering and hence mimic genetic inheritance in the study of nuclear families. Based on assumptions regarding the individual steps in the biological process starting with exposure to carcinogens and ending with death from disseminated cancer we suggest that genetic and environmental factors may both be involved in most of these steps. The present paper focuses on research methodologies necessary to discriminate between the effect of genes and family environment in the development of cancer. (shrink)

The most innovative and important parts of Bertrand Russell's Human Knowledge were the result of his first attempt in three decades to come to grips with the problem of induction, or, more generally, ‘non-demonstrative inference’. My purpose here is to argue that that work constituted giant progress on the problem; if I succeed, something will have been done to restore this work to its proper place in the history of philosophy and, correlatively, to rearrange that history.

Radical skepticism, the view that no human being has any contingent knowledge of any external world there may be, has few adherents these days. But many who reject it concede that such skeptical arguments as SA require some sort of response, since they are obviously valid and their premises are, at the very least, highly plausible.

Righting Epistemology defends an unrecognized Humean conception of epistemic justification, showing that he is no skeptic, and an argument of his that refutes all extant alternative conceptions. It goes on to trace the development of his thought in Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

No country has yet implemented a pilot to ensure access to or the innovation of new antibiotics for multi-drug infections. A team from national health agencies in Norway, with the support of the Innovative Medicine Initiative-funded project DRIVE-AB, designed a model suitable for the national context, including the selection of the antibiotics, the potential value, and the operational model.

To study how populist sentiments have increasingly influenced businesses in society, we examine how German and Swedish corporations addressed the refugee situation in their 2015 and 2016 annual reports. We find that corporations changed their communication once refugee migration became subjected to populist political sentiments, but that they did so without subscribing to those sentiments. Although populism is based on such sharp oppositions as welcoming refugees or closing borders, our analysis shows that corporations have found ways to communicate about the (...) refugee migration beyond these oppositions. Rather than taking a political stance, the corporations studied have primarily articulated the refugee situation as it pertains to their business operations. We identify four modes of articulation: the refugee as someone needing international aid, as a factor for economic analysis, as a benefit recipient, or as a potential stakeholder. These findings help nuance our understanding of how corporations navigate contested political issues. (shrink)

This article provides an ISCT analysis of commercial bribery focused on transaction cost economics. In the language of Antitrust, commercial bribery is a form of vertical arrangement subject to the same efficiency analysis that has found other vertical arrangements potentially beneficial to consumers. My analysis shows that actions condemned as commerical bribery in the Honda case may well have benefited Honda's dealer network once promotional free riding and other forms of rent seeking by dealers are considered. I propose that the (...) term "commercial bribery" should be avoided until after an ISCT analysis shows that the community is likely to have been harmed. The term "third-party payments" is a more ethically neutral term with which to begin the analysis. (shrink)

Early in Outlines of Pyrrhonism Sextus Empiricus writes.

One of the most difficult supply network challenges facing companies today is how to diffuse sustainability not only among their direct (first-tier) suppliers but also throughout their supply networks. Although a growing body of research has been dedicated to addressing this challenge, the role of purchasing and supply management (PSM) in sustainable supply network development remains underexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the literature on the role of PSM in the diffusion of sustainability in supply networks. (...) We analysed 133 peer-reviewed papers published in 21 journals in the field of PSM. We scrutinized the theories, methods and levels of analysis used in sustainable PSM research, classified the practices for diffusing sustainability in supply networks and identified the role of PSM in the diffusion of sustainability. Accordingly, we put forward a set of propositions that link diffusion practices—and the role of PSM in these practices—with embedded and peripheral sustainability and suggest future research directions. (shrink)

In the wake of a series of corporate scandals, there has been a growing call for authentic leadership in order to ensure ethical conduct in contemporary organizations. Authentic leadership, however, depends upon the ability to draw a distinction between the authentic and inauthentic leader. This paper uses Deleuze’s discussion of Platonism as a point of departure for critically scrutinizing the problem of authenticating the leader—drawing a distinction between authentic and inauthentic leaders. This will be done through a reading of Bill (...) George’s book Authentic Leadership. Informed by Deleuze’s inverted Platonism, the paper challenges the practice by which authentic leaders are distinguished from inauthentic leaders. In conclusion, the paper suggests that an adequate concept of authentic leadership should consider how ethics can occur when the authentic leader is able to critically reflect his or her own value-commitments. (shrink)

This article argues that we should not abandon the noun ‘organization’ in favour of the verb ‘organizing’ in order to capture processes of change, flow and movement, but instead explore how such processes reveal themselves when the concept of organization diverges from the objects it is supposed to encapsulate. Here I make use of Adorno’s critique of identity thinking in order to show how the experience of organizational phenomena remains trapped within a contradiction: concepts are needed to describe objects even (...) though concepts can never fully exhaust the objects they describe. However, I maintain that it is precisely this discrepancy between concepts and objects that provides us the opportunity to experience the elusive state of organizations and their processual nature. Consequently, this article shows how organizational phenomena are always more complex, temporal and dynamic than what the concept of organization permits us to grasp. (shrink)

The emergence of key concepts in Reinhart Koselleck’s sense has been much discussed in conceptual history, but mainly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article documents a post–World War II emergence of the concept of health, from relative anonymity to becoming a key concept, comparable to concepts such as politics, democracy, and culture. While previous research has emphasized conceptual mobility, this article focuses on conceptual aggregation, where the concept of health assembles and assimilates meanings, becoming essential to discourse. This (...) is explained with reference to the development of the welfare state and the political use of a positive, expanded health concept. The article utilizes a collocation analysis of Norwegian digitized newspapers 1950–2010, culled from the uniquely extensive database of the Norwegian National Library. (shrink)

This paper investigates how coercive and non-coercive power impacts on the successful diffusion of sustainability within supply networks. The paper reports on four in-depth case studies of the development of sustainability initiatives, each case based on data collection from focal companies and suppliers. The four case studies are based on 38 semi-structured interviews in total and supported by secondary data. The case studies indicate that both coercive and non-coercive power impact suppliers’ engagement in sustainability initiatives and its wider diffusion in (...) supply networks. However, where the use of coercive power facilitates diffusion to immediate suppliers, the use of non-coercive power leads to sustainability diffusion beyond the dyadic level into wider supply networks. The study provides rich insights into understanding sustainability diffusion in supply networks and the perceptions of multiple supply network actors on the role of different types of power on the diffusion process. We elaborate existing theory and formulate propositions to guide future research into the role and coexistence of different types of power in diffusing sustainability in supply networks. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop a new theory of reflexive democracy, based on practical cases of action research in regional development, with particular reference to regional development coalitions. Reflexive democracy is located in the context of the debate on Scandinavian worklife, emphasising knowledge, dialogue, and legitimacy.

In research on organizational environmentalism, there has been a repeated call for ways to go beyond the business case for sustainability frame. While the business case frame assumes that developing eco-friendly solutions can benefit firms financially, this article highlights the importance of challenging established understandings of sustainability. To this end, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between morality and ethics. Morality involves passing judgements on the basis of values. Ethics provides an immanent evaluation of the principles by which specific solutions are considered (...) sustainable. Analysing interviews with architects, building engineers and business developers, the article shows how these actors reflect on the values that form the basis of their practice, but also try to imagine new ways of working with sustainability. In conclusion, the article suggests that an immanent ethics of organizational environmentalism can allow for the values that inform environmental efforts in organizations to be evaluated as well as alternative visions of sustainability to be created. (shrink)

In research on organizational environmentalism, there has been a repeated call for ways to go beyond the business case for sustainability frame. While the business case frame assumes that developing eco-friendly solutions can benefit firms financially, this article highlights the importance of challenging established understandings of sustainability. To this end, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between morality and ethics. Morality involves passing judgements on the basis of values. Ethics provides an immanent evaluation of the principles by which specific solutions are considered (...) sustainable. Analysing interviews with architects, building engineers and business developers, the article shows how these actors reflect on the values that form the basis of their practice, but also try to imagine new ways of working with sustainability. In conclusion, the article suggests that an immanent ethics of organizational environmentalism can allow for the values that inform environmental efforts in organizations to be evaluated as well as alternative visions of sustainability to be created. (shrink)

Ashrams in Europe twenty-five hundred years ago? Greek philosophers studying in India? Meditation classes in ancient Rome? It sounds unbelievable, but it’s historically true. Alexander the Great had an Indian guru. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plotinus all encouraged their students to meditate. Apollonius, the most famous Western sage of the first century c.e., visited both India and Egypt—and claimed that Egyptian wisdom was rooted in India. In Lost Masters, award-winning author Linda Johnsen, digging deep into classical sources, uncovers evidence of (...) astonishing similarities between some of the ancient Western world’s greatest thinkers and India’s yogis, including a belief in karma and reincarnation. Today ancient Greek philosophers are remembered as the founders of Western science and civilization. We’ve forgotten that for over a thousand years they were revered as sages, masters of spiritual wisdom. Lost Masters is an exploration of our long-lost Western spiritual heritage and the surprising insights it can offer us today. (shrink)

Two purported proofs of the incoherence of vague identity are considered. First gareth evans's attempt is criticized and reformulated to overcome certain formal difficulties. Despite the reformulation, However, Evans's proof is demonstrated invalid in accord with a supervaluational approach. Next nathan salmon's attempt is evaluated. Here the problem is salmon's implicit assumption of a version of leibniz's law which is stronger than that strictly guaranteed by the law as it is given in classical logic. The question is raised on what (...) grounds this stronger version is to be considered a logical law: without it the proof fails. (shrink)

IntroductionIt is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:What are qualia,exactly?This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author (“only half in jest”) by invoking Louis Armstrong's legendary reply when asked what jazz was: (...) “If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.” … If I succeed in my task, this move … will look as quaint and insupportable as a jocular appeal to the ludicrousness of a living thing-a living thing, mind you! -doubting the existence ofelan vital. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has offered two arguments to show that we cannotbe brains in a vat, and one to show that our cognitive situationcannot be fully analogous to that of brains in a vat. The latterand one of the former are irreparably flawed by misapplicationsof, or mistaken inferences from, his semantic externalism; thethird yields only a simple logical truth. The metaphysical realismthat is Putnam’s ultimate target is perfectly consistent withsemantic externalism.

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

Early in Outlines of Pyrrhonism Sextus Empiricus writes.

Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense. The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you are both seeing (...) the same object, even though your relevant brain states are physically identical and so are your environmental conditions; and that the entire material universe is moving undetectably at a particular uniform velocity with respect to absolute space. My own assessment of his efforts is that they are most successful against the third of these hypotheses, and that this is a function of the fact that of the three, it alone clearly employs a problematic concept- that of absolute location. However, my purpose here is not to engage in a comprehensive evaluation of Peacocke’s project; it is rather to defend the extreme inverted spectrum hypothesis against his attack. I shall argue not only that his argument against EISH fails, but that he is himself independently committed to its intelligibility. Beyond that, I shall point out some striking and, to my mind, welcome consequences of his plausible claims concerning the relations between his own proposal and certain other views concerning content theory; the consequences in question depend both on his positive proposal and on my reasons for rejecting his argument against the extreme inversion hypothesis. (shrink)

Young people around the world show considerable engagement with climate change. How can education draw on this engagement in order to benefit students and society? In this article, we discuss how inquiry-based dialogues can support students’ development in their societal engagement. We argue that such dialogues should include real-world problems involving disagreement, which promote students’ agency. We elaborate on qualities of dialogues, such as developing argumentation and perspectives together through respect, attentive listening and recognition of others’ viewpoints. Central theoretical perspectives (...) include inquiry-based dialogues and students’ lived democracy. This research draws on data from a classroom activity where 15–16-year-old students in Norway investigate controversial issues related to electrifying offshore oil platforms. The students are in a learning situation, and the teacher wants them to learn about climate change and the oil industry and the skills and attitudes needed to participate in inquiry-based dialogues. The dialogues show that students bring knowledge, opinions and attitudes from outside school, characteristics that are crucial for students’ engagement. We discuss how teachers can facilitate students’ further engagement by addressing multiple aims of inquiry-based dialogues. (shrink)

In several recent writings and in the 1980 Freemantle Lectures at Oxford, Alvin Plantinga has defended the idea that belief in God is ‘properly basic,’ by which he means that it is perfectly rational to hold such a belief without basing it on any other beliefs. The defense falls naturally into two broad parts: a positive argument for the rationality of such beliefs, and a rebuttal of the charge that if such a positive argument ‘succeeds,’ then a parallel argument will (...) ‘succeed’ equally well in showing that belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic. In this essay I shall argue both that Plantinga has partially misconceived the objection, and that he has not succeeded, indeed cannot succeed, in rebutting it, for the objection does in fact constitute a reductio ad absurdum of his position. For the sake of ease of exposition, I shall first provide a bare sketch of the positive argument, though I shall discuss it directly only as it bears on the attempted reductio. (shrink)

In recent decades there has been an increased emphasis on non-technical skills in medical teams. One promising approach that relates teamwork to medical efficiency is the theory of Shared Mental Models. The aim of the present study was to investigate the suitability of the Shared Mental Model approach for teamwork between operators in emergency medical communication centers and the first line ambulance personnel in real-life settings. These teams collaborate while working from geographically dispersed positions, which makes them distinct from the (...) kinds of teams examined in most previous research on team effectiveness. A pressing issue is therefore whether current models on co-located teams are valid for medical distributed teams. A total of 240 participants from 80 emergency medical teams participated in the study. A team effectiveness model was proposed based on identified team coordinating mechanisms and the “Big five” team processes. Path analyses showed that SMM was positively associated with team effectiveness and negatively related to mission complexity. Furthermore, the coordinating mechanisms of SMM and Closed Loop Communication was positively related to “Big five” team scores. However, no effects were found for the “Big five” team processes on effectiveness, which could indicate that the model needs to be adjusted for application to geographically dispersed teams. Possible implications for team training of distributed emergency response teams are discussed. (shrink)

This book addresses the following question: What is a sustainable society, and how can higher education help us to develop toward it? The core argument put forward is that the concept of sustainability reaches much farther than just the direct aspects of environmental threats and carbon emissions. Using higher education as a point of departure, the book shows that sustainability involves a broad range of disciplines, from nursing and nutrition to technology and management. It argues that a sustainable society entails (...) a distinct perspective on society that influences our social thinking in terms of ethics, democracy and knowledge development. The book also discusses if (and if so, how) higher education can and should contribute to such a development based on the principles of the freedom of science in a liberal, democratic society. The book presents Mutual Competence Building as a concept higher education can adapt in order to contribute to a sustainable Society. (shrink)

Change can be difficult to achieve, and system inertia may be considered relevant. There is a tendency for dynamic systems to enter into specific states characterized by stabilizing factors. The present work attempts to define inertia processes and explores these with regard to pro-environmental behaviour and decision-making. Inertia processes can be considered both within an organizational context and from the level of the individual, and may involve a number of psychological processes and aspects of the decision-making process. A few suggestions (...) for research are also presented. (shrink)

Ernie Lepore: Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence: In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Quine characterizes and rejects three approaches to making sense of analyticity. One approach attempts to reduce putative analytic statements to logical truths by synonym substitution. A second approach is to identify analytic statements with “semantic rules,” or “meaning postulates.” A third approach relies on the verificationist theory of meaning. According to that theory, “every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience, (...) or, less radically, “each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or information.” Analytic statements are, then, those that are confirmed come what experiences may. If either version of the verificationist approach were correct, then there would be objective facts about the extensions of terms from intuitive semantics, for example, “‘…’ is synonymous with ‘___’” and “‘…’ is analytic,” across all languages. In this essay, I focus my discussion primarily on the third, verificationist, approach – though what I shall have to say will bear on the second approach as well. In particular, I explain the models of language contained in verificationism and the weaker confirmationism, and why most positivists abandoned the former for the latter. I explain the connection between confirmationism and intuitive semantics and why considerations of holism alone are incapable of severing that connection. (shrink)

This paper investigates how coercive and non-coercive power impacts on the successful diffusion of sustainability within supply networks. The paper reports on four in-depth case studies of the development of sustainability initiatives, each case based on data collection from focal companies and suppliers. The four case studies are based on 38 semi-structured interviews in total and supported by secondary data. The case studies indicate that both coercive and non-coercive power impact suppliers’ engagement in sustainability initiatives and its wider diffusion in (...) supply networks. However, where the use of coercive power facilitates diffusion to immediate suppliers, the use of non-coercive (reward and expert) power leads to sustainability diffusion beyond the dyadic level into wider supply networks. The study provides rich insights into understanding sustainability diffusion in supply networks and the perceptions of multiple supply network actors on the role of different types of power on the diffusion process. We elaborate existing theory and formulate propositions to guide future research into the role and coexistence of different types of power in diffusing sustainability in supply networks. (shrink)

In “Expectant Fathers, Abortion, and Embryos,” Dara Purvis evaluates the concepts of intent and gender stereotypes in connection with “expectational fathers” in the related contexts of abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. This comment seeks to build upon Purvis's own analysis to obviate her concern that abortion discourse promotes harmful stereotypes of men as disinterested fathers. To the contrary, for men — no less than for women — a desire to avoid or terminate pregnancy is fully consistent with loving and shared (...) parenthood of existing or future children. The same individuals who choose to become parents at other times in their long reproductive lives will use contraception and have abortions. In fact, most women who have abortions already have children. Policies that empower men and women to avoid unintended pregnancy are the sensible, win-win, front-line approach to avoid disputes over abortion. (shrink)