Governments are widely viewed by academics and practitioners as the key societal actors who are capable of compelling businesses to practice corporate social responsibility. Arguably, such government involvement could be seen as a technocratic device for encouraging ethical business behaviour. In this paper, we offer a more politicised interpretation of government engagement with CSR where “CSR” is not a desired form of business conduct but an element of discourse that governments can deploy in structuring their relationships with other social actors. (...) We build our argument through a historical analysis of government CSR discourse in the Russian Federation. Laclau and Mouffe's social theory of hegemony underpins our research. We find that “CSR” in the Russian government’s discourse served to legitimise its power over large businesses. Using this case, we contribute to wider academic debates by providing fresh empirical evidence that allows the development of critical evaluation tools in relation to governments’ engagement with “CSR”. We find that governments are capable of hijacking CSR for their own self-interested gain. We close the paper by reflecting on the merit of exploring the case of the Russian Federation. As a “non-core”, non-western exemplar, it provides a useful “mirror” with which to reflect on the more widely used test-bed of Western industrial democracies when scrutinising CSR. Based on our findings, we invite other scholars to adopt a more critical, politicised stance when researching the role of governments in relation to CSR in other parts of the world. (shrink)

Academic interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be traced back to the 1930s. Since then an impressive body of empirical data and theory-building has been amassed, mainly located in the fields of management studies and business ethics. One of the most noteworthy recent conceptual contributions to the scholarship is Midttun’s (Corporate Governance 5(3):159–174, 2005 ) CSR-oriented embedded relational model of societal governance. It re-conceptualises the relationships between the state, business, and civil society. Other scholars (In Albareda et al. Corporate (...) Governance 6(4):386–400, 2006 ; Business Ethics: A European Review 17(4):347–363, 2008 ; Lozano et al., Governments and Corporate Social Responsibility, 2008 ) have recently successfully used the model as the basis for their analytical framework for researching CSR activities in a large number of western European countries. While this research offers valuable insights into how CSR is operationalised, it also suffers from a number of significant limitations. To develop a stronger analytical framework with which to explore CSR, this article draws more deeply on political science literature concerned with governance and public policy analysis. This represents the main purpose of this article. In addition, this article also addresses a second and more modest aim: to reflect on the ways in which relational governance-inspired frameworks could be adapted and applied to politico-economic systems where state-industry-third sector relations differ from those found in North America and Western Europe. Both lines of argument are illustrated using vignettes from a case study of the Evenkia Hydro-Electric Station building project in the Russian Federation. (shrink)

RésuméNotre identité sociale influe sur nos croyances. Mais comment évaluer cet impact doxastique d'un point de vue épistémique? Pour obtenir un portrait fiable de l'importance épistémique de l'identité sociale, nous devons explorer la jonction peu étudiée des influences non pertinentes et de l’épistémologie du point de vue, ce qui nous amène à des cas de double preuve d'ordre supérieur. Le fait d'envisager l'identité sociale sous l'angle des influences non pertinentes nous donne une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'erreur, tandis que l'examen selon (...) l'avantage du point de vue fournit une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'exactitude. Nous devons donc soupeser la force de chaque élément de preuve d'ordre supérieur au cas par cas afin d’évaluer épistémiquement l'impact doxastique de l'identité sociale. (shrink)

The paper aimed to reconstruct Twardowski's approach to the problem of free will and his analyses of the consequences of various solutions to this problem in ethics and criminal law. According to Twardowski, if we understand ‘free will’ as the possibility of making resolutions other than actually made, then (most probably) nobody has free will. Our resolutions are determined by a set of mental dispositions (character) and incentives that activate these dispositions. However, the existence of freedom of will such understood (...) is not a necessary condition for the correct functioning of ethical systems or criminal law. On the contrary, ethical systems and criminal law seem to assume that at least some of our resolutions are determined by our relatively stable dispositions. Only then can these resolutions and the actions that follow them be ascribed to certain agents. Twardowski's views on free will are presented here in the context of the metaphilosophical positions of the Lvov–Warsaw School, the central European branch of analytic philosophy. His position is also juxtaposed with Brentano's view of free will and Łukasiewicz's approach to the determinism/indeterminism debate. This juxtaposition illustrates the variety of philosophical positions and the diversity of the metaphilosophical toolkit applied in early analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Material artefacts consist of many smaller – and ultimately natural – objects such as molecules and atoms that have been intentionally rearranged in such a way as to take the shape of a particular artefact and fulfil its functions. Whenever the arrangement of several parts results in properties that go beyond the properties of the individual parts or their sum, it can be said that this arrangement has resulted in a new object. Once created, material artefacts may take part in (...) natural processes such as reproduction and evolution and cannot be fundamentally distinguished from fully natural objects. This article provides a number of – mainly biological – examples that show the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy between nature and artefacts to be highly problematic and suggest a continuum instead. Most importantly, it is argued that living beings and artefacts are equally capable – or sometimes incapable – of self-reproduction and that there are numerous objects which are both living beings and artefacts. (shrink)

Ajdukiewicz called his article Problemat idealizmu transcendentalnego w sformułowaniu semantycznym [The Semantic Version of Transcendental Idealism], published in “Przegląd Filozoficzny” in 1937, a “turning point” of his philosophical development. The aim of the paper is to present various aspects of this turn. Firstly, the historical and philosophical background of the 1937 paper is sketched. It includes the metaphilosophical position of the Lvov‑Warsaw School, and the development of methods applied in this group. Secondly, Ajdukiewicz’s ideas up to 1937 are outlined in (...) order to present what the semantic turn consisted in. Next, the program of the semantic theory of knowledge is sketched, and the steps of Ajdukiewicz’s argumentation against transcendental idealism, with an emphasis on the use of metalogical and semantic results, are presented. Finally, Ajdukiewicz’s proposal is discussed from the methodological point of view. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 11, November 2024, Page 35-37.

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in (...) their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgngers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral fl[neur is reflected in Rortys model ironist, and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shustermans notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patternstropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and mythsonly to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wildes sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean fl[neurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Even if Lotman’s theory has often been presented as a semiotic theory based on categories of space, temporal categories are crucial as well. And as we can speak of polyglotism as one of the main features of culture, we should speak of polychronism as well. In each state of culture, in fact, we find many temporal codes, and the internal dialogue is not only based on codes coming from different spaces (in the normal sense of polyglotism), but also as (...) coming from different times (in the sense of a sort of polychronism). Lotman’s reflections about this aspect of culture could be very useful in order to understand some aspects of our society, where we find a form of presentism, the temporal dimension corresponding to localism within the spatial dimension, which globalization has produced. (shrink)

In the 21st century what the future holds for young learners is unclear, what is clear is that they need to be confident, capable and resilient. As wider communication about education is increasing there is a developing understanding that children in settings across the globe learn in the same ways and have the same needs. This book considers international and multicultural learning environments from both theoretical and practical perspectives, written by specialists in early years education in the UK and in (...) international contexts. The theoretical perspectives are supported by eight case studies, from Uganda, Indonesia, Mexico, Qatar, Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom and Romania. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed. This (...) collection includes essay which address from different and complementary points of view the issue of the social and political relevance of philosophical debates on realism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show the activities of the non-governmental organization ‘Memorial’ that are aimed at building historical memory and developing civic awareness of state terror and crimes committed by the communist regime. ‘Memorial’ also aims to show the politics of memory pursued by the Russian authorities after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We present a case study of grammatical constructions and how their function in a single language can be captured through semantic and syntactic classification. Since 2016 an on-going joint project of UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow has been collecting and analyzing multiword grammatical constructions of Russian. The main product is the Russian Constructicon, which, with over two thousand two hundred constructions, is arguably the largest openly available constructicon resource (...) for any language. The combination of this large size with depth of analysis, containing both syntactic and semantic tags, makes it possible to view the interrelation of constructions as families and to discover trends in their behavior. Our annotation includes 53 semantic tags of varying frequency, with three tags that are by far more frequent than all the rest, accounting for 30% of the entire inventory of the Russian Constructicon. These three semantic types are Assessment, Attitude, and Intensity, all of which convey a speaker’s evaluation of a topic, in contrast to most of the other tags. Assessment and Attitude constructions are investigated in greater detail in this article. Secondary semantic tags reveal that negative evaluation among these two semantic types is more than twice as frequent as positive evaluation. Examples of negative evaluations are: for Assessment VP tak sebe, as in Na pianino ja igraju tak sebe “I play the piano so-so [lit. thus self]”; for Attitude s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo, as in S menja xvatit “I’m fed up [lit. from me enough].” In terms of syntax, the most frequent syntactic types of constructions in the Russian Constructicon are clausal constructions [constituting an independent clause like s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo ] and constructions with the anchor in the role of adverbial modifier. Our semantic and syntactic classification of this large body of Russian constructions makes it possible to postulate patterns of grammatical constructions constituting a radial category with central and peripheral types. Classification of large numbers of constructions reveals systematic relations that structure the grammar of a language. (shrink)

Does the writing and reading of fiction affect long-term human social behavior? The question of how imaginative literature has impacted human nature is rather difficult to answer given, of course, the minute period of evolutionary time involved. One way it has been done is by linking creative text to oral storytelling, thereby reverse engineering the function of fiction back to its Pleistocene origins. The adaptive advantages probably conferred by storytelling, as Denis Dutton so eloquently showed, include “low-cost and low-risk surrogate (...) experience,” as we explore the “what if” possibilities that might affect our chances of survival; acquiring factual information through rich and striking images; and advancing .. (shrink)

The article focuses on identifying differences in the locus of control and styles of coping with stress among young students who are artistically gifted within the fields of music and visual arts. The research group includes Polish students of both music and visual art schools who develop their artistic talents in schools placing particular emphasis on professional training of their artistic abilities and competences within the field of music or visual arts respectively. We make an assumption that different types of (...) difficult situations experienced by youth educated at music and visual art schools may generate differences in dominating personal traits as well as in their sphere of emotions. The results of crosssectional research in 2013 confirm the assumption regarding differences among music and visual art school students both with regard to the source of the locus of control, understood as the personality variable, and dominating styles of coping with stress. Moreover, a positive correlation between the tendency towards internal locus of control and a task-oriented style of coping with stress in difficult situations has been observed in music school students. (shrink)

On présente ici l’édition critique des questiones de prophetia (1273-1274 env.) attribuées à Nicolas du Pressoir, tout en situant ce texte dans le contexte du débat du xiii e siècle sur la prophétie. Très proche des positions d’Albert le Grand, dont il reprend parfois les formulations à la lettre, Nicolas tient compte également d’autres auteurs (de Guillaume d’Auxerre à Thomas), ce qui lui permet de discuter, non sans originalité, quelques problèmes cruciaux liés au statut épistémologique de la prophétie et à (...) son rapport avec la vertu et la foi. Les questiones de Madrid se présentent à la fois comme un document révélateur de l’état de la question à l’époque, et comme le texte qui conclut idéalement le « siècle de la prophétologie latine ». (shrink)

Some psychological states—paradigmatically, beliefs and intentions—are rationally evaluable: they can be rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. Other states—e.g. sensations and gastrointestinal states—aren't: they're a‐rational. On a familiar but hard‐to‐make‐precise line of thought, at least part of what explains this difference is that we're somehow responsible for (having/being in) states of the former sort, in a way we're not for the others. But this responsibility can't be modeled on the responsibility we have for our (free, intentional) actions. So how should (...) it be understood? In this paper I address that question. The overall shape of my answer is in line with tradition: I take the responsibility to be grounded in certain capacities for reflection and control. Answers in this family have recently been subjected to an interesting challenge. But the version I defend meets that challenge. (shrink)

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through gendered mnemonic labour, (...) gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work. (shrink)

We shape our surroundings; form the rooms we live in, so that we feel comfortable in them. This shows parts of our personality – it can be inferred from our environment. In this study, we created stereotypical desks embodying different personality styles and let 190 students choose which desk fits – in their subjective perspective - the most to their personality. To determine their personality style, the Personality Style and Disorder Inventory (PSSI) was used. Correspondence analysis was conducted to investigate (...) the relationship between personality styles and choice of desks. Results did not show convergence of personality styles and desks. Contrary to the popular scientific idea, personality and creation of surroundings were not related; regarding our study, the relation is uninterpretable suggesting an individual’s desk choice is not statistically dependent on one's individual’s highest PSSI subscale. The study can be regarded as a pilot project for desk designs as classification tool for personality. (shrink)

Recent health legislation in Norway significantly increases access to specialist care within a legally binding time frame. The paper describes the contents of the new legislation and introduces some of the challenges with proliferations of rights to health care. The paper describes some of the challenges associated with the proliferation of legal rights to health care. It explains the benefits of assessing the new law in the light of a rights framework. It then analyses the problematic aspects of establishing additional (...) priority rules as solutions to rights conflicts. It then defends adequacy criteria for acceptable priority rules when such rules are unavoidable. It finally defends our proposed method and explores concrete applications. (shrink)

This essay deals with the problem of the status of colours, traditionally considered as the paradigmatic case of secondary qualities: do colours exist only as aspects of experience or are they real properties of objects, existing independently of human and animal perception? Recently, John Campbell has argued in favour of the simple view of colours, according to which colours are real properties of objects. I discuss the place of Campbell's position in a debated which was started by John Mackie and (...) continued by John McDowell, and defend it from a criticism due to Michael Smith. I conclude that the simple view is a philosophically credible position. Subsequently, I consider an alleged contradiction between the simple view and semantic externalism pointed out by Jim Edwards. I suggest that a supporter of the simple view may consistently maintain semantic externalism, if she also accepts epistemological externalism about the canonical warrant of perceptual judgements. (shrink)