This article serves as an introduction to the collection of papers in this monographic issue on "What the European tradition can teach about Corporate Social Responsibility" and presents the rationale and the main hypotheses of the project. We maintain that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an ethical concept, that the demands for socially responsible actions have been around since before the Industrial Revolution and that companies have responded to them, especially in Europe, and that the content of CSR has evolved (...) over time, depending on historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic drivers and particular conditions in different countries and also at different points in time. Therefore, there is not — and probably cannot be — a unique, precise definition of CSR: one global standard for CSR is unlikely. (shrink)

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Etudes de lettres, « Les échelles du texte », 3/2015, p. 163-188. Nous remercions Antonio Rodriguez de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Les principales théories contemporaines du rythme se fondent généralement sur des aspects phoniques et prosodiques du discours et délaissent la portée visuelle du texte. Cet oubli fréquent résulte d'une longue histoire et d'une antique rivalité entre la représentation, associée à la peinture, et le rythme, rattaché à la (...) - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In this short introduction, the guest editors present the main themes of the special issue.

RESUMEN El objetivo de este artículo de reflexión teórica es establecer un dialogo entre las ciencias sociales hoy en crisis y los aportes que encontramos en la cosmovisión me-soamericana para el diseño de una nueva matriz epistémica más ecológica y menos agresiva con la vida. En la primera parte se rastrea epistémicamente la genealogía de la cosificación de la naturaleza y de la vida que ha puesto en crisis el proyecto de la modernidad y las ciencias sociales, a partir de (...) la experiencia de la colonialidad, el ser como identidad y las matemáticas. En un segundo momento se cuestiona el eurocentrismo de las ciencias sociales y se defiende el diálogo con las otras epistemologías silenciadas por la razón occidental. De esta forma se exploran algunos aportes ontológicos de la epistemología mesoamericana para el diseño de nuevas relaciones sociales menos agresivas con la naturaleza y la vida. Finalmente se plantea favorecer los diálogos interpistémicos entre las distintas civilizaciones y culturas del mundo para abrir y repensar las ciencias sociales. ABSTRACT The objective of this article of theoretical reflection is to establish a dialogue between the social sciences, today in crisis, and the contributions found in the Me-soamerican worldview, to design a new epistemic matrix, more ecological, and less aggressive with life. In the first part, the genealogy of the reification of nature and life, that has put the project of modernity and social sciences in crisis, from the experience of coloniality, being as identity, and mathematics, is epistemically traced. In a second moment, the eurocentrism of the social sciences is questioned, and dialogue with other epistemologies, silenced by western reason, is defended. In this way, some ontological contributions of the Mesoamerican cosmovision are explored, to create new social relationships, less aggressive with nature and life. Finally, to favor the inter-epistemic dialogues between the different civilizations and cultures of the world is put forward, as a way to open and rethink social sciences. (shrink)

L'uomo è l'essere aperto, mancante, indefinito, in quanto tale bisognoso al suo essere.

Badiou and Derrida have dedicated much of their thought to politics and the nature of the political. Calcagno shows how their views diverge and converge, providing some very intriguing developments in Continental philosophy.

This book addresses the issue of natural simultaneity of relatives, discussed by Aristotle in Categories 7, 7b15-8a12. Natural simultaneity is a form of symmetrical ontological dependence that holds between items that are not causally linked. In this section of the Categories, Aristotle introduces this topic in his analysis of relatives and maintains that, although relatives seem to be for the most part simultaneous by nature, there seem to be some exceptions. He mentions two pairs of relatives as exceptions, namely the (...) pairs knowledge/knowable and perception/perceptible, and argues at length for the priority of the second relative over the first one in each case. Through a close reading of this text, the author analyses Aristotle's arguments for the thesis of the exceptional character of these pairs and shows that all of them are unsuccessful in supporting the thesis. In order to draw this conclusion, the author highlights and carefully considers the properties that Aristotle is committed to attributing to relatives, taking into account the metaphysical framework of the Categories as well as their specificities within the set of non-substantial categories. Then, he shows that Aristotle's mature views on relatives in the Metaphysics can be construed as committing him to the rejection of such a thesis. Although the issue of natural simultaneity is just one of several that Aristotle considers in his discussion of relatives throughout Categories 7, it is a particularly relevant issue, since it involves a number of puzzles whose analysis allows for a better understanding of the very notion of relativity in Aristotle. This is the first book to explore this issue from the perspective of illuminating the Aristotelian views on relatives. Aristotle on Natural Simultaneity of Relatives in the Categories will appeal to scholars and graduate students working on Aristotle, ancient philosophy in general, and metaphysics. (shrink)

We study the notion of logical relation in the coherence space semantics of multiplicative-additive linear logic . We show that, when the ground-type logical relation is “closed under restrictions”, the logical relation associated to any type can be seen as a map associating facts of a phase space to families of points of the web of the corresponding coherence space. We introduce a sequent calculus extension of whose formulae denote these families of points. This logic admits a truth-value semantics in (...) the previously mentioned phase space, and this truth-value semantics faithfully describes the logical relation model we started from. Then we generalize this notion of phase space, we prove a truth-value completeness result for and we derive from any phase model of a denotational model for . Using the truth-value completeness result, we obtain a weak denotational completeness result based on this new denotational semantics. (shrink)

Breve explicación de la selección de textos para este volumen conmemorativo.

Es altamente probable que este siglo que está recién comenzando supere al siglo XX descrito por Hobsbawm como el más sanguinario del que la Historia tenga registro; juicio éste compartido por personajes tan dispares como René Dumont, William Golding e Isaiah Berlin.Vivimos en tiempos violentos. Hemos hasta llegado a perder la capacidad de asombro frente a las diversas manifestaciones de violencia que nos hacen conocer los programas cotidianos de noticias: de una parte aquellas provenientes de..

In this article, we aim to offer a new overall interpretation of Heraclitus’ philosophy, through an analysis of his own implicit conception of ‘philosophy’, as it is insinuated in the few but important fragments where the word philia occurs. In these fragments, a clear distinction between reality and appearance is drawn for the first time in the history of philosophy; and, accordingly, philosophy itself is hinted at as a direct ‘attachment’ to reality, beyond the appearances that conceal it. Using this (...) result as a hermeneutic principle, a thorough survey of the most significant fragments is then proposed. The outcome of such a survey is, hopefully, the presentation of Heraclitus’ main doctrines as a coherent whole. (shrink)

Any analysis of the Hippocratic anthropology must begin by taking a stand on two quite different issues. On the one hand, it must ascertain a precise and definite meaning of the word ‘Hippocratic’ in such a context, considering the historical problems surrounding the 'real' Hippocrates and the doctrinal heterogeneity of the Hippocratic collection. On the other hand, it must justify the very possibility of an anthropology within the Hippocratic tradition, by accommodating it with the obvious animadversion that its most representative (...) works show towards any philosophical or speculative inquiry. The first problem can be solved by purely historical means, viz. by restricting the object of analysis to the texts that admittedly represent the views of the Hippocratic school. Not so with the second one, which constitutes the truesignificant problem from a philosophical point of view and with which the present article is therefore concerned. After discussing the texts where the question on the nature of man is posed, a general survey of the Hippocratic conception of the theoretical and scientific foundations of clinical practice is given, in order to understand the Statement according to which it is to medicine, and not to philosophy, that an answer to such a question truly belongs. From such a survey a thesis arises: that, according to the Hippocratic perspective, the appropriate answer to the question on the nature of man is not the one that seeks to determine what man is, even by means of the empirical methods of medicine, but the one that reshapes the question itself, thereby replacing the philosophical focus on the knowing of man, for the sake of knowledge, by the clinical focus on the caring of man, for the sake of man himself. (shrink)

Predication is a complex entity in Aristotelian thought. The aim of the present essay is to account for this complexity, making explicit the diverse forms it assumes. To this end, we tum to a crucial chapter of the Posterior Analytics, where, in the most complete and developed manner within the corpus, Aristotle proceeds to systematize this topic. From the analysis, it will become apparent that predication can assume, generically, five forms: 1) the predication of essence, that is of the genus (...) and the specific difference; 2) essential predication, that is either of the genus or of the differences ; 3) the predication of accidents per se 4) and of simple accidents ; and 5) accidental predication. However, only types 2-4 are forms of strict predication. In effect, the “predication” of essence is not a genuine predication, but a formula for identity, constituting, technically, the statement of the essence of the subject. On the other hand, accidental “predication” can only be conceived of as such equivocally, since it results from a linguistic accident through which the ontological subject of the attribution suffers a displacement to the syntactic position of the predicate, which is not, by nature, its own. In neither case does the phrase bring about any legitimate predication. The study concludes with a discussion of Aristotle’s thesis according to which no substance can be a predicate, which is implied by its notion of accidental predication, a thesis which has been - and in our opinion wrongly so - challenged in modem times. (shrink)

Neste artigo pretende-se discutir a dimensão política presente na origem da teoria do reconhecimento de Axel Honneth, partindo da constatação de que durante a reelaboração de sua tese de habilitação, publicada em 1992 com o título de Luta por reconhecimento, o autor se posiciona pela primeira vez diante do debate entre liberais e comunitaristas e elabora seu conceito formal de eticidade como uma resposta às limitações de cada uma dessas correntes da teoria política contemporânea.

Este artículo presenta una alternativa a la dicotomía entre razones motivacionales y razones normativas. En Practical Reality, Dancy mantiene que ambas razones se identifican con estados externos al agente--"tesis de la identidad" --. Hay dos argumentos en PR a favor de la TI: El primero se basa en una interpretación externista del significado de "tener una razón". El segundo presenta una vía indirecta, defendiendo que las adscripciones de razones según estados psicológicos internos no son casos centrales en las explicaciones normativas. (...) Estas dos críticas ignorarían una fuerte intuición normativa: el "acceso epistémico". Si ésta es persuasiva, los estados internos no pueden ser eliminables. /// This paper presents an alternative account to the dichotomy between normative and motivating reasons. In Practical Reality, Dancy argues that both types of reasons should be identified with external states of the agent--"identity thesis". There are two arguments in PR for the IT: one is based on an externalist interpretation of expressions like "A has a reason to x". The other is an indirect argument that claims that the ascription of reasons grounded on internal states cannot be central instances in normative explanations. Both arguments ignore a strong intuition: the "epistemic access". If this is a persuasive intuition, internal psychological states cannot be eliminated. (shrink)

The paper considers the "GR-desideratum", that is, the way general relativity implements general covariance, diffeomorphism invariance, and background independence. Two cases are discussed where 5-dimensional generalizations of general relativity run into interpretational troubles when the GR-desideratum is forced upon them. It is shown how the conceptual problems dissolve when such a desideratum is relaxed. In the end, it is suggested that a similar strategy might mitigate some major issues such as the problem of time or the embedding of quantum non-locality (...) into relativistic spacetimes. (shrink)

In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy.