Who better than Arild Lillebo, Norwegian writer and Editor of the Newsletter of the European Business Ethics Network, to chronicle the early years of EBEN and identify its aims for the future?

In this unprecedented study, Arild Sæther sheds new light both on Pufendorf's own life and work, as well as his influence on his contemporaries and on later scholars. This book explores Pufendorf's doctrines of political economy and his work on natural law, which was translated into several major European languages. Natural Law and the Origins of Political Economy considers the influence he had on the writings on political economy of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Hutcheson and Adam (...) Smith, amongst others. If Smith can be called the father of modern economics, this book claims that Pufendorf can be called the grandfather. (shrink)

Revisite la pensée et l'oeuvre de Ferdiand de Saussure, le fondateur de la linguistique moderne au tournant du XXe siècle, qui rompt avec les présupposés de la linguistique et de la philosophie du langage.

This paper concerns the question whether reflexives can have strict readings in VP-ellipsis. It is argued that the possibility for strict interpretation is determined by a syntactic factor: subordination of the elided clause relative to the antecedent clause facilitates strict interpretation, whereas coordination disfavors it. This contrast is shown to be predictable by theories of syntactic reconstruction which assume that a surface reflexive corresponds to a bound variable at the point of ellipsis reconstruction, and where the binder has scope over (...) a subordinated ellipsis but not over a coordinated ellipsis. One possibility is that the binder is the reflexive itself, moved at LF. A further factor, namely the possibility of speakers reinterpreting the ellipsis as a deep anaphor, accounts for why strict readings are in fact weakly acceptable in coordinated ellipsis. Previous accounts of ellipsis and reflexives are evaluated in light of the new data. (shrink)

For patients with mental health problems, de-institutionalization has meant a shift from institutional care to living in the community. However, several studies show that problems of stigmatization, loneliness and negative attitudes devalue the dignity and autonomy of these patients. The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how people with mental health problems experience living in an apartment of their own. The data collection method was focus group interviews. The constant comparative method revealed the main category (...) ‘preserving integrity’. The subcategories were: the need for control over information, similar relationships with both friends and neighbours (symmetrical contact), and ‘My home is my castle’. Participants who lived in a group home had little or no contact with their neighbours. The participants experienced lack of acceptance and loss of autonomy when meeting people. Integrity was a necessary condition in order for them to become equal citizens, experience autonomy and dignity, and have the opportunity to develop social contacts. (shrink)

This paper defends a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics in the Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics as a radical conventionalist one, whereby our agreement about the particular case is constitutive of our mathematical practice and ‘the logical necessity of any statement is a direct expression of a convention’ (Dummett 1959, p. 329). -/- On this view, mathematical truths are conceptual truths and our practices determine directly for each mathematical proposition individually whether it is true or false. Mathematical truths (...) are thus not consequences of a prior adoption of a convention or rules as orthodox conventionalism has it. -/- The goal of the paper is not merely exegetical, however, and argues that radical conventionalism can withstand some of the most difficult objections that have been brought forward against it, including those of Dummett himself, and thus that radical conventionalism has been prematurely excluded from consideration by philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

In Direct Belief I argue for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and go on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted “Inner Speech” Picture of Thought. The work (...) serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

Growth in CSR-washing claims in recent decades has been dramatic in numerous academic and activist contexts. The discourse, however, has been fragmented, and still lacks an integrated framework of the conditions necessary for successful CSR-washing. Theorizing successful CSR-washing as the joint occurrence of five conditions, this paper undertakes a literature review of the empirical evidence for and against each condition. The literature review finds that many of the conditions are either highly contingent, rendering CSR-washing as a complex and fragile outcome. (...) This finding runs counter to the dominant perception in the general public, among activists, and among a vocal contingent of academics that successful CSR-washing is rampant. (shrink)

There are inherent difficulties in a subject like chemistry particularly the notion of a chemical reaction. In this paper the difficulties are discussed from a teaching and learning perspective and from a history of chemistry perspective. Three teaching/learning studies of the incompleteness of the iron thiocyanate reaction in chemical equilibrium are reviewed and it is shown that a recent historical study of the iron thiocyanate reaction has the potential to challenge the interpretation of the incompleteness of the reaction. This establishes (...) a controversial context where students can be introduced to epistemic thinking, that is, how to interrogate chemistry data and form a conclusion which resonates with what we know about the nature of science. A curriculum suggestion for pre-service chemistry teachers is provided. (shrink)

Det er muligens ikke lenger et spørsmål om, men når mennesker med Downs syndrom ikke lenger finnes blant oss. Moderne medisinsk teknologi brukt i masseundersøkelser av gravide, tilsier at det nesten ikke behøver å bli født mennesker med Downs syndrom i fremtiden. I den politiske debatten i flere av de nordiske landene er dette kontroversielt. Det handler om et samfunn der det er plass til alle, hevdes det. På samme tid tas moderne genteknologi i bruk for bl.a. å forhindre at (...) mennesker disponert for Huntingtons sykdom eller arvelig brystkreft blir født. Om noen generasjoner kan slike sykdommer være utryddet. Dette påkaller imidlertid ikke henvisninger til «sortering» og «seleksjon». I denne artikkelen undersøkes de viktigste forutsetningene for hvorfor fosterdiagnostikk på noen indikasjoner vekker etisk debatt, mens det ikke skjer i andre tilfeller. Det argumenteres for at den medisinske forståelsen av alvorlighetsgrad ved en sykdom/funksjonshemming ikke gir oss nøkkelen til å forstå den etiske bekymringen rundt seleksjon. Identitets- og anerkjennelsesproblematikk, hevdes det, er kjernen i kontroversene rundt fosterdiagnostikk i Norden. Derfor står det noe vesentlig på spill i fosterdiagnostikkdebatten. Men bare for noen grupper. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 31-33.

Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we (...) can’t find in other theories of well-being; while there are smaller-scale ways we can incorporate narrativist insights into our views of well-being, narrativism should not be a universal organizing principle for our lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Norwegian government implemented a comprehensive welfare reform in 2012 to better manage an increasingly care-demanding patient demography while meeting budgetary constraints. This article discusses interdiscursive relationships between policy strategies and language use among rehabilitation professionals. It is based on a synthesis of textual analyses of policy documents and of transcribed interviews to produce complex insights into current rehabilitation discourse. The synthetic product is expressed in the form of two nodal discourses which subsume and articulate in particular ways the constituent (...) discourses of the policies and interviews. One nodal discourse approaches rehabilitation as a clinical practice; the other concerns rehabilitation as a management practice. These discourses serve different purposes. One is based in traditional medical science as a means for political action and relates to the body as an object of government policies and practices. The other relies on the individual... (shrink)

In this interview with Jan Hendrik van den Berg, the Dutch phenomenologist and psychiatrist addresses the origins of his work, his most significant influences, and the purpose of metabletic phenomenology in the modern age. In the course of the interview. Dr. Van den Berg provides a basic overview of his work, and highlights the central finding of his metabletic analyses: a loss of wonder before nature, which results from the more fundamental loss of genuine spirituality in the modern (...) world. (shrink)

Deliberative processes provide an important alternative input to environmental politics as they may, in contrast to often used market simulations, provide an arena for 1) discussion of lay participants’ values, 2) articulating arguments grounded in other values than consequentialistic, and 3) capturing weakly comparable values. A case study of a Citizens’ Jury (CJ) on genetically modified plants was used to investigate how the framing of the process affected the attitude formation among the citizens. The formal set up of this specific (...) CJ made value discussions less relevant. While it opened for value plurality, it failed to facilitate the articulation of weakly comparable values. (shrink)

At the outset of _Marx for Cats_, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have (...) long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration. (shrink)

Telling the story of three overlooked revolutionary thinkers, Liberty in Their Names explores the lives and works of Olympe de Gouges, Sophie de Grouchy and Manon Roland. All three were thinking and writing about political philosophy, especially equality and social justice, before the French Revolution. As they became engaged in its efforts, their political writing became more urgent. At a time when women could neither vote nor speak at the Assembly, they became influential through their writings. Yet instead of Gouges, (...) Grouchy and Roland, we speak of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. -/- Sandrine Bergès examines the lives and writings of these trailblazing women philosophers, and their impact on philosophical thought during the French Revolution. Featuring pictures, a timeline and a bibliography of their works, this book offers exciting new insights into the history of political philosophy and of the French Revolution. (shrink)