In this study, we propose considering membership in the Ethics Officer Association (EOA) as a proxy for the firm's commitment to ethical decision making, and we analyze the influence of firm- and CEO-specific characteristics on this commitment. While we observe a positive relationship between membership and firm size, we also document a negative relationship between EOA membership and the executive's time in position and, to a more modest extent, accounting returns. Pursuing this further, we present evidence that firms with past (...) legal issues may seek EOA membership as a signal of their intention to be compliant in the future. (shrink)

We describe herein an introductory STS course, designed for large numbers of students, which uses a large number of faculty instructors. Its content and style has evolved continuously for 20 years in a major research university and been adapted for use in small two-year and four-year campuses.

One of the main reasons for providing formal semantics for languages is that the mathematical precision afforded by such semantics allows us to study and manipulate the formalization much more easily than if we were to study the relevant natural languages directly. Michael Tye and R. M. Sainsbury have argued that traditional set-theoretic semantics for vague languages are all but useless, however, since this mathematical precision eliminates the very phenomenon (vagueness) that we are trying to capture. Here we meet this (...) objection by viewing formalization as a process of building models, not providing descriptions. When we are constructing models, as opposed to accurate descriptions, we often include in the model extra ‘machinery’ of some sort in order to facilitate our manipulation of the model. In other words, while some parts of a model accurately represent actual aspects of the phenomenon being modelled, other parts might be merely artefacts of the particular model. With this distinction in place, the criticisms of Sainsbury and Tye are easily dealt with—the precision of the semantics is artefactual and does not represent any real precision in vague discourse. Although this solution to this problem is independent of any particular semantics a detailed account of how we would distinguish between representor and artefact within Dorothy Edgington's degree-theoretic semantics is presented. (shrink)

In “The Runabout Inference Ticket” AN Prior (1960) examines the idea that logical connectives can be given a meaning solely in virtue of the stipulation of a set of rules governing them, and thus that logical truth/consequence.

The ArgumentIn the minds of many, the Bourbakist trend in mathematics was characterized by pursuit of rigor to the detriment of concern for applications or didactic concessions to the nonmathematician, which would seem to render the concept of a Bourbakist incursion into a field of applied mathematices an oxymoron. We argue that such a conjuncture did in fact happen in postwar mathematical economics, and describe the career of Gérard Debreu to illustrate how it happened. Using the work of Leo Corry (...) on the fate of the Bourbakist program in mathematics, we demonstrate that many of the same problems of the search for a formalstructurewith which to ground mathematical practice also happened in the case of Debreu. We view this case study as an alternative exemplar to conventional discussions concerning the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in science. (shrink)

Do we need light to see? I argue that the black experience of a man in a perfectly dark cave is a representation of an absence of light, not an absence of representation. There is certainly a difference between his perceptual knowledge and that of his blind companion. Only the sighted man can tell whether the cave is dark just by looking. But perhaps he is merely inferring darkness from his failure to see. To get an unambiguous answer, I switch (...) the focus from perceptual knowledge to non-epistemic seeing. My conclusion is that we see even in the limiting case of absolute darkness - regardless of whether we believe we are seeing. We see little of pratical interest. But in terms of basic information, we see about as much as we do when the lights are on. Depending on what has gone before and after, we may even see ordinary objects. (shrink)

A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities is a collection of puzzles, paradoxes, riddles, and miscellaneous logic problems. Depending on taste, one can partake of a puzzle, a poem, a proof, or a pun.

Suppose you have an infinite past. If you had banked the spare dollar you have always had, then the interest would have made you rich by now. Your procrastination is inexcusable. But what should you have done? At any time at which you invest the dollar you would regret not investing it earlier. Satisficers can solve prospective puzzles involving infinite choice but cannot solve this retrospective puzzle about regret. A moral version of the puzzle suggests that there can be inevitable (...) moral failure. It does so without appeal to moral luck, moral dilemmas or original sin. (shrink)

One familiar philosophical use of the term ‘evil’ just contrasts it with ‘good’, i.e., something is an evil if it is a bad thing, one of life’s “minuses.” This is the sense of ‘evil’ that is used in posing the traditional theological problem of evil, though it is customary there to distinguish between moral evils and natural evils. Moral evils are those bad things that are caused by moral agents; natural evils are those bad things that are not caused by (...) moral agents. Since the existence of evils of both sorts is usually taken to be indubitable, the problem of evil is then construed as the problem of how to square their existence with the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent God. (shrink)

In the physical sciences a realist ontology rests on our ability to demonstrate the actual and real nature of material entities. Realist metaphysics of social entities, most influentially Bhaskar's critical realism, attempt to provide a related philosophical foundation for the social sciences. This paper examines the central issue of what is real about society it concludes that social relations and the organisations they constitute do exist and discusses the conditions of their demonstration. Realist interpretations of Bourdieu's theories are given particular (...) attention in an argument that accepts the necessity of social realism but remains cautious about the development of methodologies able to provide effective demonstration. (shrink)

Positive thinkers love Watty Piper's The little engine that could. The story features a train laden with toys for deserving children on the other side of the mountain. After the locomotive breaks down, a sequence of snooty locomotives come up the track. Each engine refuses to pull the train up the mountain. They are followed by a weary old locomotive that declines, saying "I cannot. I cannot. I cannot." But then a bright blue engine comes up the track. He manages (...) to chug over the mountain by averring "I think I can. I think I can. I think can.". (shrink)

This chapter examines cultural issues related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as practiced by German firms operating in Poland. Recognizing the interdependence of a corporation’s social and financial performance, the chapter attempts to analyze how German firms can increase profit through good social performance. However, implementing CSR measures requires detailed knowledge of Polish society and culture. Behavior and attitudes must be considered to understand a company’s CSR target group andachieve the desired financial return from investments in CSR. The authors characterize (...) the most profitable types of CSR initiatives available to firms operating in Poland. (shrink)

The poster boy for my paper is the King's Messenger in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Recall that since the White Queen lives backwards, her memory works forwards. She pities Alice who can only remember things after they happen. Alice asks which things the Queen remembers best: `Oh, things that happened the week after next,' the Queen replied in a careless tone. `For instance, . . . there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial (...) doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.' (Chapter V) Is the King's Messenger being treated unjustly? Why not prepunish people for their future crimes? True, it is generally easier to have knowledge about past crimes than future crimes. But is unpredictability the only problem with prepunishment? (shrink)

Arguments favoring the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence nearly always contain an overt appeal to big numbers, often combined with a covert reliance on generalization from a single instance. In this paper I examine both motifs, and consider whether big numbers might actually make palatable otherwise implausible single-case inductions. In the end, the dispute between believers and skeptics is seen to boil down to a conflict of intuitions which can barely be engaged, let alone resolved, given our present state of knowledge.

Semantic indeterminacy is the ether of philosophy of language. It fills the interstices of our intentions and pervades accounts of presupposition, tense, fiction, translation, and especially, vagueness. Yet semantic indeterminacy is as impossible as ectoplasm. Indeed, more so! The demonstration need only borrow a few assumptions used elsewhere in widely accepted impossibility results. Since an impossibility is never a necessary condition for anything actual, semantic indeterminacy must be superfluous. Language is no more explained by semantic indeterminacy than calculus is explained (...) by (pre-Robinsonian) infinitesimals. (shrink)

The publication of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons in 1984 revived and reshaped the debate on personal identity in Western philosophy. Not only does Parfit argue forcefully and ingeniously for a revisionary Reductionist theory of persons and their diachronic identity, but he also draws radical normative inferences from such a theory. Along the way he also mentions Indian Buddhist parallels to his own Reductionist theory. Some of these parallels are explored here, while particular attention is also paid to the supposed (...) normative implications of Reductionism. (shrink)

Naiyāyikas are fond of a slogan, which often appears as a kind of motto in their texts: "Whatever exists is knowable and nameable." What does this mean? Is it true? The first part of this essay offers a brief explication of this important Nyāya thesis; the second part argues that, given certain plausible assumptions, the thesis is demonstrably false.

This paper will present a review of the approaches being taken to select the management of organizations resulting from mergers and the methods employed in determining the individuals who will be terminated when there are redundancies. Current approaches are ethically questionable and poor substitutes for a meaningful performance evaluation system.

Successful surgical treatment of patients with focal drug-resistant epilepsy remains challenging, especially in cases for which it is difficult to define the area of cortex from which seizures originate, the seizure onset zone. Various diagnostic methods are needed to select surgical candidates and determine the extent of resection. Interictal magnetoencephalography with source imaging has proven to be useful for presurgical evaluation, but the use of ictal MEG data remains limited. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether pre-ictal (...) variations of spectral properties of neural activity from ictal MEG recordings are predictive of SOZ location.We performed a 4 h overnight MEG recording in an 8-year-old child with drug-resistant focal epilepsy of suspected right fronto-temporal origin and captured one ~45-s seizure. The patient underwent a right temporal resection from the anterior temporal neocortex and amygdala to the mid-posterior temporal neocortex, sparing the hippocampus proper. She remains seizure-free 21 months postoperatively. The histopathological assessment confirmed frank focal cortical dysplasia type IIa in the MEG-defined SOZ, which was based on source imaging of averaged ictal spikes at seizure onset. We investigated temporal changes together with spatial differences in spectral parameters of background brain activity, namely the aperiodic broadband offset and slope, and assessed how they confounded the interpretation of apparent variations of signal power in typical electrophysiological bands. Our data show that the SOZ was associated with a higher aperiodic offset and exponent during the seizure compared to control regions. Both parameters increased in all regions from 2 min before the seizure onwards. Regions anatomically closer to the SOZ also expressed higher values compared to contralateral regions, potentially indicating ictal spread. We also show that narrow-band power changes were caused by these fluctuations in the aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity. Our results indicate that the broadband aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity cannot be reduced to background noise of no physiological interest, and rather may be indicative of the neuropathophysiology of the SOZ. We believe these findings will inspire future studies of ictal MEG cases and confirm their significance. (shrink)

Lake Tanganiyka has lefty and righty cichlid fish that show there can be natural selection for a trait over its mirror image counterpart.This raises the question Can there be biological selection of a whole organism over its mirror image counterpart? That is, could the fitness of a fish be altered by simply changing it into its own enantaniomorph? My answer is no. I present Flatlander thought experiment to demonstrate that mirror imagecounterparts are duplicates because they only differ in how they (...) happen to be oriented in space. The counterparts have the same intrinsic properties and are in the same environment,so there can be no difference in fitness. (shrink)

An entertaining history of the idea of nothing - including absences, omissions, and shadows - from the Ancient Greeks through the 20th century How can nothing cause something? The absence of something might seem to indicate a null or a void, an emptiness as ineffectual as a shadow. In fact, 'nothing' is one of the most powerful ideas the human mind has ever conceived. This short and entertaining book by Roy Sorensen is a lively tour of the history and philosophy (...) of nothing, explaining how various thinkers throughout history have conceived and grappled with the mysterious power of absence -- and how these ideas about shadows, gaps, and holes have in turned played a very positive role in the development of some of humankind's most important ideas. Filled with Sorensen's characteristically entertaining mix of anecdotes, puzzles, curiosities, and philosophical speculation, the book is ordered chronologically, starting with the Taoists, the Buddhists, and the ancient Greeks, moving forward to the middle ages and the early modern period, then up to the existentialists and present day philosophy. The result is a diverting tour through the history of human thought as seen from a novel and unusual perspective. (shrink)

In this book, Sorensen presents the first general theory of the thought experiment. He analyses a wide variety of thought experiments, ranging from aesthetics to zoology, and explores what thought experiments are, how they work, and what their positive and negative aspects are. Sorensen also sets his theory within an evolutionary framework and integrates recent advances in experimental psychology and the history of science.

Written for undergraduates, the educated layperson, and scholars in fields other than philosophy, _The Myth of Religious Neutrality _offers a radical reinterpretation of the general relations between religion, science, and philosophy. This new edition has been completely revised and updated by the author.

What have modern Buddhist ethicists to say about abortion and is there anything to be learned from it? A number of writers have suggested that Buddhism (particularly Japanese Buddhism) does indeed have something important to offer here: a response to the dilemma of abortion that is a 'middle way' between the pro-choice and pro-life extremes that have polarised the western debate. I discuss what this suggestion might amount to and present a defence of its plausibility.

Stewart Shapiro and Alan Weir have argued that a crucial part of the demonstration of Frege's Theorem (specifically, that Hume's Principle implies that there are infinitely many objects) fails if the Neo-logicist cannot assume the existence of the empty property, i.e., is restricted to so-called Aristotelian Logic. Nevertheless, even in the context of Aristotelian Logic, Hume's Principle implies much of the content of Peano Arithmetic. In addition, their results do not constitute an objection to Neo-logicism so much as a clarification (...) regarding the view of logic that the Neo-logicist must take. (shrink)

The lack of interest in history in ancient India has often been noted and contrasted with the situation in China and the West. Notwithstanding the vast body of Indian literature in other fields, there is a remarkable dearth of historical writing in the period before the Muslim conquest and an associated indifference to historiography. Various explanations have been offered for this curious phenomenon, some of which appeal to the supposed currency of certain Indian philosophical theories. This essay critically examines such (...) "philosophical explanations."I argue that it is not true that there was no history in ancient India, and it is not surprising that there was no developed historiography or scientific history. It is both true and surprising that there was no real importance attached to history in ancient India. An adequate philosophical explanation for this historical phenomenon, however, is not to be found in appeals to the influence of indigenous metaphysical theories about time and the self. A much more plausible philosophical explanation appeals instead to certain features of classical Indian epistemology. (shrink)

Using covariant derivatives and the operator definitions of quantum mechanics, gauge invariant Proca and Lehnert equations are derived and the Lorenz condition is eliminated in U(1) invariant electrodynamics. It is shown that the structure of the gauge invariant Lehnert equation is the same in an O(3) invariant theory of electrodynamics.

Do not pass by my epitaph, Wayfarer, but when you have stopped, hear and learn, then depart. There is no boat, To carry you to Hades, No ferryman Charon, No judge Aeacus, No Dog Cerberus. All of us below have become bones and ashes. Truly, I have nothing more to tell you. So depart, wayfarer, Lest dead though I am I seem to you to be a teller of vain tales.

This essay argues that sense depends on the circulation of nonsense. A realisation of the reciprocal relation can result in a micro-level praxis that helps us, as educators, to free ourselves from the polarisations that have occurred in the field of literacy, such as the phonics/whole language debate, replacing the antagonism with a more generative pragmatics.

It is posited that the initiating event of amphibian regeneration of a limb, is retrodifferentiation* of what are to become the developing cells of the blastema. These cells reiterate a larval or premetamorphic ontogenic repertoire, induced by elevated levels of prolactin with adequate innervation. Subsequent redifferentiation of the blastema cells occurs, controlled by thyroxine and innervation.This temporal displacement of cellular morphologic characters in regeneration should be looked upon as a function of the ability to reiterate larval characters and subsequently metamorphose. (...) If correct, this would explain why amphibians which metamorphose only once, lose the ability to postmetamorphically regenerate. An exception to this,Xenopus laevis, an anuran which can epimorphically regenerate, to some extent, will be discussed.[/p]. (shrink)

Our present actions can have effects on future generations - affecting not only the environment they will inherit, but even perhaps their very existence. This raises a number of important moral issues, many of which have only recently received serious philosophical attention. I begin by discussing some contemporary Western philosophical perspectives on the problem of our obligations to future generations, and then go on to consider how these approaches might relate to the classical Indian philosophical tradition. Although the Indian commitment (...) to pre-existence and rebirth precludes the arising of the Non-Identity Problem, this does not mean that there is not still a problem about justifying our obligations to future generations. The Indian Non-Reductionists about personal identity have difficulties with this that are comparable to the difficulties of their Western counterparts, but the Indian Buddhist Reductionists offer some provocative arguments for impartiality and the rationality of altruism. (shrink)

The properties of antisymmetry and linearity are easily seen to be sufficient for a recursively enumerable binary relation to be recursively isomorphic to a recursive relation. Removing either condition allows for the existence of a structure where no recursive isomorph exists, and natural examples of such structures are surveyed.

Australia and India have had few reasons in the past to develop systematic and significant levels of economic engagement. This was due to very different positions they have held in the world-system since the Second World War. De-colonization, the fall of the British Empire, the weak status of the British Commonwealth, and the realpolitik of the Cold War saw India and Australia located on different parts of the geo-political and economic world map with small demographic and cultural flows, and insignificant (...) economic trade. Both countries developed similar economic policy regimes that were essentially state-led nationalist projects of economic development with concomitant policies of import-substitution, local industry-subsidization, highly-regulated financial systems, and high tariffs. The last quarter of the 20th century saw a radical revision of both nations’ economic strategies, with Australia moving first to drop many of its trade barriers in the 1970s and ’80s. It is now one of the most open economies in the world. India’s liberalization programme commenced much later in 1991 but nonetheless has had a dramatic impact on its economic fortunes and growing status in the world economy. With these changes there are increasing opportunities for bilateral trade and a greater economic enmeshment in regional engagements and alignments in the Indian Ocean and in wider Asian fora. One significant indicator of change in growing Australia-India economic engagement is to look at Foreign Direct Investment (hereafter FDI). Currently, the movement of FDI between these two countries is still not very large but has a strong potential to grow over the short to medium term. This paper looks at the future prospect of this growth and asserts that, by engaging in areas of comparative advantage, it will benefit both national economies. Moreover, economic flows are also indicators of great social and cultural traffic. The movement of FDI between the two countries will not only encourage greater flow of peoples, especially outward migration from India to Australia, but also trigger more Australian expatriates living in India (from a very low base). Greater economic trade promises more cultural exchange. (shrink)

Neuroleptic drugs disrupt the learning and performance of operant habits motivated by a variety of positive reinforcers, including food, water, brain stimulation, intravenous opiates, stimulants, and barbiturates. This disruption has been demonstrated in several kinds of experiments with doses that do not significantly limit normal response capacity. With continuous reinforcement neuroleptics gradually cause responding to cease, as in extinction or satiation. This pattern is not due to satiation, however, because it also occurs with nonsatiating reinforcement (such as saccharin or brain (...) stimulation). Repeated tests with neuroleptics result in earlier and earlier response cessation reminiscent of the kind of decreased resistance to extinction caused by repeated tests without the expected reward. Indeed, withholding reward can have the same effect on responding under later neuroleptic treatment as prior experience with neuroleptics themselves; this suggests that there is a transfer of learning (really unlearning) from nonreward to neuroleptic conditions. These tests under continuous reinforcement schedules suggest that neuroleptics blunt the ability of reinforcers to sustain responding at doses which largely spare the ability of the animal to initiate responding. Animals trained under partial reinforcement, however, do not respond as well during neuroleptic testing as animals trained under continuous reinforcement. Thus, neuroleptics can also impair responding (though not responsecapacity) that is normally sustained by environmental stimuli (and associated expectancies) in the absence of the primary reinforcer. Neuroleptics also blunt the euphoric impact of amphetamine in humans. These data suggest that the most subtle and interesting effect of neuroleptics is a selective attenuation of motivational arousal which is (a) critical for goal-directed behavior, (b) normally induced by reinforcers and associated environmental stimuli, and (c) normally accompanied by the subjective experience of pleasure. Because these drugs are used to treat schizophrenia and because they cause parkinsonian-like side effects, this action has implications for a better understanding of human pathology as well as normal motivational processes. (shrink)