The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 51-53, September 2012.

In this paper we discuss an approach called grounded action cognition, which aims to provide a theory of the interdependencies between motor control and action-related cognitive processes, like perceiving an action or thinking about an action. The theory contrasts with traditional views in cognitive science in that it motivates an understanding of cognition as embodied, through application of Barsalou’s general idea of grounded cognition. To guide further research towards an appropriate theory of grounded action cognition we distinguish between grounding qua (...) acquisition and grounding qua constitution. On this basis, we distinguish three possible theoretical conceptions of grounded action cognition. In addition to these methodological and conceptual analyses, we draw on recent empirical evidence to motivate our inclination towards a particular theory. According to this theory certain representations are involved in action cognition and action perception that are not modality-specific as usually proposed by advocates of grounded cognition. Further, the evidence is in favor of our more specific theory stating that for some cognitive abilities, some motor abilites are constitutive. (shrink)

In this paper we explore Searle’s defense of conceptual relativism. It emerges that Searle formulates the thesis in many different ways and that contrary to his contention not all are trivial and platitudinous. Specifically he does not distinguish clearly between an ontological and a linguistic version of conceptual relativism as well as between weak difference and stronger incommensurability of conceptual schemes. This has consequences for Searle’s defense of external realism.

A paradigm shift occurred in musical culture in the early nineteenth century, whereby revered old works—newly called “classics”—began to rival contemporary ones as the guiding authority over taste. This article explores the less well-known composers found on programs in the period when classical repertories were becoming established. A kind of professional collegiality developed during this period on concert programs among pieces of diverse age and taste, reaching far beyond the iconic composers (now seen by most of us to have been (...) Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn). Many of the “other” composers came from Italy, France, or Britain and became famous for opera selections and songs, some termed “popular,” and a substantial number of their pieces were performed throughout the nineteenth century. The present-day narrative of music history has canonic blind spots for composers then widely performed—Louis Spohr, Thomas Arne, Giovanni Viotti, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, George Onslow, Louise Farrenc, and Robert Franz, for example. To understand musical life of that time, it is necessary to rethink the language of canon and canonization. The concept of canonization and the concept of the masterpiece have narrowed musical thinking harmfully. We need to look back at the fruitful collegiality that existed between canonic and contemporary music in the early nineteenth century, involving as it did a wide array of composers and tastes not yet bound by rigid assumptions about supposed “levels” of taste. (shrink)

Published posthumously in the early 1920's, Max Weber's Economy and Society has since become recognized as one of the greatest sociological treatises of the 20th century, as well as a foundational text of the modern sociological imagination. The first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders conducted in world-historical depth, this two volume set of Economy and Society—now with new introductory material contextualizing Weber’s work for 21st century audiences—looks at social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the (...) city, and the political community. Meant as a broad introduction for an educated general public, in its own way Economy and Society is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies, and the wealth of its historical content make the work an important challenge to our sociological thought: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for her sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber. (shrink)

This article examines the role of experimental generalizations and physical laws in neuroscientific explanations, using Hodgkin and Huxley’s electrophysiological model from 1952 as a test case. I show that the fact that the model was partly fitted to experimental data did not affect its explanatory status, nor did the false mechanistic assumptions made by Hodgkin and Huxley. The model satisfies two important criteria of explanatory status: it contains invariant generalizations and it is modular (both in James Woodward’s sense). Further, I (...) argue that there is a sense in which the explanatory heteronomy thesis holds true for this case. †To contact the author, please write to: SNF‐Professorship for Philosophy of Science, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 21, 4003 Basel, Switzerland; e‐mail: marcel.weber@unibas.ch. (shrink)

Managers often face situations that challenge their ability to reason morally. Avariety of factors, including the issue itself and personal and organizational influences, may affect their responses. Using Kohlberg’s moral development theory and the Adapted Moral Judgment Interviewtechnique, we examine the influences of context, age, gender, type of work, and industry membership on 308 managers’ moral reasoning. No significant differences are found when considering age or gender. Differences are discovered when assessing the context of the dilemmas, managers’ type of work (...) (managerial vs. technical), and industry membership (manufacturing vs. service). Implications from our findings are discussed. (shrink)

We propose a method for estimating subjective beliefs, viewed as a subjective probability distribution. The key insight is to characterize beliefs as a parameter to be estimated from observed choices in a well-defined experimental task and to estimate that parameter as a random coefficient. The experimental task consists of a series of standard lottery choices in which the subject is assumed to use conventional risk attitudes to select one lottery or the other and then a series of betting choices in (...) which the subject is presented with a range of bookies offering odds on the outcome of some event that the subject has a belief over. Knowledge of the risk attitudes of subjects conditions the inferences about subjective beliefs. Maximum simulated likelihood methods are used to estimate a structural model in which subjects employ subjective beliefs to make bets. We present evidence that some subjective probabilities are indeed best characterized as probability distributions with non-zero variance. (shrink)

L’échec du sommet de Vilnius à la fin de 2013 et les récents événements ukrainiens ont mis en évidence les conséquences liées au refus de la prise en compte de l’histoire des partenaires dans la négociation que développe l’Union européenne avec ses voisins orientaux. Ils montrent que les expériences collectives alimentées à des sources historiques différentes sont autant de ressources que les acteurs mobilisent pour faire valoir d’autres dimensions temporelles. Sans une communauté de références partagées, à la base des intérêts (...) collectifs, les asymétries entre les joueurs ne peuvent que croître. L’examen du processus d’élargissement et celui de la Politique européenne de voisinage mettent en valeur les limites de la stratégie de la Commission quand elle prétend s’appuyer sur la socialisation des élites pour contrer les conflits. Les résultats se mesurent en termes de déclarations sans suite quand les idées constitutives de l’UE et le transfert des compétences ne sont d’aucun poids. L’analyse des deux séquences permet de conclure que les temporalités sont un enjeu de la négociation et que l’ « européanisation » n’est pas le modèle de toute négociation possible. (shrink)

The author, a noted literary critic, presents a selection of his thought on Balzac, Valery, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, Hoelderlin, lyric poetry, realism, the essay and the contemporary novel.

This paper begins an analysis of the real line using an inconsistency-tolerant (paraconsistent) logic. We show that basic field and compactness properties hold, by way of novel proofs that make no use of consistency-reliant inferences; some techniques from constructive analysis are used instead. While no inconsistencies are found in the algebraic operations on the real number field, prospects for other non-trivializing contradictions are left open.

Grounded upon the late 1970s phrase "institutionalizing ethics into business," I present a multi-component model and research agenda to enhance our understanding of organizations' efforts to integrate ethics into the daily decision-making process of employees. Three research foci are emphasized: (I) the need to establish consistent categorical frameworks to describe business organizations' efforts in the field, (2) the study of the interrelationships between the various components presented in the model, and (3) the exploration of the linkage between organizational efforts to (...) institutionalize ethics and ethical employee behavior. Research and organizational implications evolving from these research foci are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss three interrelated questions. First: is explanation in mathematics a topic that philosophers of mathematics can legitimately investigate? Second: are the specific aims that philosophers of mathematical explanation set themselves legitimate? Finally: are the models of explanation developed by philosophers of science useful tools for philosophers of mathematical explanation? We argue that the answer to all these questions is positive. Our views are completely opposite to the views that Mark Zelcer has put forward recently. Throughout this (...) paper, we show why Zelcer’s arguments fail. (shrink)

Over the last decades, various predictors have proven relevant for job performance [e.g., general mental ability, broad personality traits, such as the Big Five]. However, prediction of job performance is far from perfect, and further potentially relevant predictors need to be investigated. Narrower personality traits, such as individuals' character strengths, have emerged as meaningfully related to different aspects of job performance. However, it is still unclear whether character strengths can explain additional variance in job performance over and above already known (...) powerful predictors. Consequently, the present study aimed at examining the incremental validity of character strengths as predictors of job performance beyond GMA and/or the Big Five traits and identifying the most important predictors of job performance out of the 24 character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Job performance was operationalized with multidimensional measures of both productive and counterproductive work behavior. A sample of 169 employees from different occupations completed web-based self-assessments on character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Additionally, the employees' supervisors provided web-based ratings of their job performance. Results showed that character strengths incrementally predicted job performance beyond GMA, the Big Five, or GMA plus the Big Five; explained variance increased up to 54.8, 43.1, and 38.4%, respectively, depending on the dimension of job performance. Exploratory relative weight analyses revealed that for each of the dimensions of job performance, at least one character strength explained a numerically higher amount of variance than GMA and the Big Five, except for individual task proactivity, where GMA exhibited the numerically highest amount of explained variance. The present study shows that character strengths are relevant predictors of job performance in addition to GMA and other conceptualizations of personality. This also highlights the role of socio-emotional skills, such as character strengths, for the understanding of performance outcomes above and beyond cognitive ability. (shrink)

There are only a few ethical regulations that deal explicitly with robots, in contrast to a vast number of regulations, which may be applied. We will focus on ethical issues with regard to “responsibility and autonomous robots”, “machines as a replacement for humans”, and “tele-presence”. Furthermore we will examine examples from special fields of application (medicine and healthcare, armed forces, and entertainment). We do not claim to present a complete list of ethical issue nor of regulations in the field of (...) robotics, but we will demonstrate that there are legal challenges with regard to these issues. (shrink)

For loss averse investors, a sequence of risky investments looks less attractive if it is evaluated myopically—an effect called myopic loss aversion (MLA). The consequences of this effect have been confirmed in several experiments and its robustness is largely undisputed. The effect’s causes, however, have not been thoroughly examined with regard to one important aspect. Due to the construction of the lotteries that were used in the experiments, none of the studies is able to distinguish between MLA and an explanation (...) based on (myopic) loss probability aversion (MLPA). This distinction is important, however, in discussion of the practical relevance and the generalizability of the phenomenon. We designed an experiment that is able to disentangle lottery attractiveness and loss probabilities. Our analysis reveals that mere loss probabilities are not as important in this dynamic context as previous findings in other domains suggest. The results favor the MLA over the MLPA explanation. (shrink)

Several authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special (...) role of genetic causes consists in. In this paper, I show that the set of biomolecules that are normally considered to be information-bearers (DNA, mRNA) can be shown to be the most specific causes of protein primary structure, provided that causal specificity is measured over a relevant space of biological possibilities, disregarding physical as well as logically possible states of the causal variables. (shrink)

This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

This symposium created a circle of trust between IABS Fellows in attendance and other attendees around the issue of co-creating a vision for IABS 2050. A circle of trust is exploratory, inclusive, respectful of difference, open to new insights and perspectives, while being bound together by a shared commitment to co-learning and co-creation via the sense-making interaction of self and other. The session focused on four core questions: What are the major issues and obstacles to a flourishing future for business (...) in society as a field? What topics and issues should the field be emphasizing now and into the foreseeable future? How do we collectively build a flourishing future? What role(s) should IABS play in that future? (shrink)

We present a processing model that integrates same important psychological claims about the human sentence‐parsing mechanism: namely, that processing is influenced by limitations an working memory and by various syntactic preferences. The model uses time‐constraint information to resolve conflicting preferences in a psychologically plausible way. The starting paint far this proposal is the Sausage Machine model (Fodor & Frazier, 1980: Frazier & Fodor, 1978). From there, we attempt to overcome the original model's dependence an ad hoc aspects of its grammar, (...) and its omission of verb‐frame preferences. We also add mechanisms far lexical disambiguation and semantic processing in parallel with syntactic processing. (shrink)

La pensée du philosophe et mathématicien britannique Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) connaît un regain d'intérêt autant chez les philosophes anglo-saxons que chez les philosophes continentaux. Les contributions isolées sur les recherches logiques et mathématiques, sur les recherches épistémologiques et la philosophie de la nature, ou encore sur la métaphysique et le rôle des idées théologiques de cet auteur se multiplient. Il a semblé aux coordinateurs des « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes » — Michel Weber (Université catholique de Louvain) et Pierre Rodrigo (...) (Université de Bourgogne) — que le temps est mûr pour un développement en série de réunions internationales francophones dévolues à l'ensemble de ses positions philosophiques et à leur évolution. Le réseau « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes » a en conséquence pour objectif premier de fédérer les recherches sur les différents aspects, nuances et implications de la pensée de A. N. Whitehead. Si ses activités sont de facto ancrées dans l'horizon culturel francophone, elles n'en demeurent pas moins ouvertes, d’une part, au dialogue international (comme en témoigne la place qui est réservée aux communications en langue anglaise lors de nos réunions scientifiques) ; et d’autre part à des contributions, d’origine philosophique diverse, portant sur le concept de processus. À l'heure actuelle, deux types de réunions internationales sont programmées : des journées d'étude bilingues (Liège 2001, Louvain-la-Neuve 2003, Saint-Jodard 2005, Nantes 2005, Nice 2006, Huy 2007) et des séminaires de recherches en français qui assurent la continuité des contacts scientifiques entre chercheurs plus régulièrement que ne peuvent le faire les colloques. Ces séminaires sont le fruit d’une collaboration avec l'équipe « Philosophies de l'expérience » du Département de philosophie de l'Université de Nantes. Accueillis depuis 2002 par le Centre d'Études sur le Pragmatisme et la Philosophie Analytique (CEPPA), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne-École Doctorale, ils ont pour but premier de mettre en contact les doctorands whiteheadiens et d'offrir un lieu de dialogue entre ceux-ci et chercheurs expérimentés. La collection « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes » est, à titre principal, l’organe des différentes activités promues par le réseau : elle accueille les Actes des journées d’étude et l’Annuaire (« Chromatikon ») qui publie, entre autre, le compte-rendu des séminaires les plus marquants. À titre secondaire, elle publie les monographies et ouvrages collectifs qui se veulent être le vecteur de la pensée du processus en francophonie, et ce tout spécialement lorsqu’elles promeuvent un dialogue interdisciplinaire. (shrink)

Frontmatter -- Inhalt -- Formen und Inhalte der Bedeutungsbeschreibung: Definition, Explikation, Repräsentation, Simulation / Weber, Nico -- Zeichen, Bedeutung, Objekt aus kommunikationssemantischer Sicht / Juchem, Johann G. -- Was ist philosophische Logik der Zeit? / Stuhlmann-Laeisz, Rainer -- Zum Kompositionalitätsprinzip in der Semantik / Schröder, Bernhard -- Kognitiv orientierte Lexikographie / Figge, Udo L. -- Wortbedeutungen in Wörterbüchern, Wortbedeutungen in Texten / Seewald, Uta -- Lexikon und Universalgrammatik / Bierwisch, Manfred -- Enzyklopädische Informationen in Wörterbüchern / Bergenholtz, Henning / (...) Kaufmann, Uwe -- Ansichten von Bedeutung: fachsprachliche vs. gemeinsprachliche Semantik / Schaeder, Burkhard -- On Compound Explication in a Byzantine Greek Dictionary / Steiner-Weber, Astrid -- Lexikographische Erschließung des Wendekorpus / Hellmann, Manfred W. -- Les temps d'un dictionnaire de TAO sont-ils venus? / Zemb, Jean-Marie -- Semantische Relatoren / Engel, Ulrich -- Die Beschreibung von Sätzen ohne Subjektsphrase in der kopfgesteuerten Phrasenstrukturgrammatik / Klenk, Ursula -- Representation of Verb-alternations in an Inheritance-based Lexicon / Wolting, Suzanne -- Probleme der Extraktion semantischer Relationen aus maschinenlesbaren Wörterbüchern / Mehl, Stephan -- Können Verben semantische Relationen markieren? / Büchel, Gregor -- On the Verification of Lexical Descriptions in Text Corpora / Heid, Ulrich -- Automatische Generierung natürlichsprachlicher Paraphrasen formaler Bedeutungsbeschreibungen / Küstner, Herbert -- Verb Semantics in Multilingual Sentence Generation / Stede, Manfred -- ADRESSEN DER AUTOREN. (shrink)

An internationally famous physicist and electrical engineer, the author of this text was a pioneer in the investigation of gravitational waves. Joseph Weber's General Relativity and Gravitational Waves offers a classic treatment of the subject. Appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, this text remains ever relevant. Brief but thorough in its introduction to the foundations of general relativity, it also examines the elements of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus applicable to this field. Approximately a quarter of the contents (...) explores theoretical and experimental aspects of gravitational radiation. The final chapter focuses on selected topics related to general relativity, including the equations of motion, unified field theories, Friedman's solution of the cosmological problem, and the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity. Exercises. Index. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling through (...) the air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.3 (2001) 15-29 [Access article in PDF] Globality, Organization, Class Samuel Weber 1 Although one could hardly imagine a topic more far-ranging than "Theory, Globalization, and the Remains of the University," it can be argued that it does not range far enough. Or perhaps ranges too far. For the questions suggested by this concatenation of terms cannot be limited to the fate or future of "theory" in (...) whatever will remain of the "university" in a globalized world. And yet it is no doubt significant that "theory" leads the parade—significant but also perhaps part of the problem. For not just etymology links "theory" to notions such as detached contemplation, spectatorship, and appropriation through vision. The history and practice that have been associated with this term continue, even today, to be indebted to the dualist paradigm of an underlying subject—today reformulated as "agent" or "position"—confronting and comprehending an ob-ject. And yet, if we are still discussing "theory," here and today, it is by virtue of a series of texts that have persistently and powerfully questioned the subject-object paradigm that has dominated theoretical discourse at least since Descartes, and sought to elaborate alternatives to it. Those alternatives have almost always involved a reflection upon language as the medium of a practice that is no longer "theoretical" in the traditional sense, because it no longer works within the parameters of the subject-object model of cognition and truth. From Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, the subject-object model of cognition has been reinterpreted as an effect of the medium of language, a medium that articulates itself through the reading, writing, and repetition of texts, understood as concatenations of significance that both respond to and address an irreducible alterity.The "university" has always occupied an equivocal position with respect to this "linguistic" problematization of the subject-object model of cognition and truth: not only because "the university" as such has never existed—not at least as the singular universal implied by the definite article—but even more, because of the traditional claim of universities to serve as places where universally valid cognition is both transmitted and produced. In this sense, notions such as "the globalization of the university" simply continue the universalizing claims built into universities and promoted by them in order to justify their social existence and dependency.The very notion, or rather figure, implied in the notion of "globalization" tends to strengthen such universalism. Coming after the struggle between Communist and Capitalist camps in the Cold War, "Globalization" stresses that there is no place left on the "globe" where the capitalist system, its values, its power, and way of life can be contested. The "globe" is all there is, and despite its diversity, it is to have a single future, prolongation of the prevailing relation of forces. Globalization is thus the successor to the notion of "One World," itself a recent offshoot of the "universal history" that was the Enlightenment heir of the Christian eschatological narrative. [End Page 15]But the university has also been one of the few places in modern society where such universalizing and homogenizing tendencies have also been reflected, reworked, and criticized, if not resisted. Thus, if the names mentioned above have any credence at all in the English-speaking world, it is in large part by virtue of its universities, which have extended a certain hospitality to their writings. Like all hospitality, however, that of the universities has rarely been a neutral one. There, as elsewhere, writings are admitted as legitimate "objects" of study only under the double condition, first, of being linked to "proper names," and second, of being received and validated by existing disciplines. In short, writings are received for study in universities on the condition that they be certified as proper "theoretical objects" for "theoretical subjects" defined and validated through their appurtenance to the existing academic division of labor. This division of labor founds its disciplines in the subject-object model of cognition and of truth.This is why the hermeneutic and poststructuralist turn (back) to language as a signifying medium rather than... (shrink)

In Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy, Eric Weber argues for an experimentalist approach to moral theory in addressing practical problems in public policy. The experimentalist approach begins moral inquiry by examining public problems and then makes use of the tools of philosophy and intelligent inquiry to alleviate them. -/- Part I surveys the uses of practical philosophy and answers criticisms - including religious challenges - of the approach, presenting a number of areas in which philosophers' intellectual efforts can prove (...) valuable for resolving public conflicts. -/- Part II presents a new approach to experimentalism in moral theory, based on the insights of John Dewey's pragmatism. Focusing on the elements of good public inquiry and the experimentalist attitude, Weber discusses ways of thinking about the effective construction and reconstruction of particular problems, including practical problems of public policy prioritization. -/- Finally, in Part III the book examines real-world examples in which the experimentalist approach to ethics proves useful, including instances of "bandwidth theft" and the controversies surrounding activist judges in the US Supreme Court. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConfucianism tends to play only a marginal role in current theorizing about justice, which is a global pursuit dominated by Western theory and its strong tendency to assume that justice refers to some substantive conception of distributive, socioeconomic justice. This article examines and compares reconstructions of Confucian justice by Joseph Chan, May Sim, and Fan Ruiping. Each reconstruction makes reference to both classical and modern Western justice theory and thus each involves a comparative approach; indeed, each reconstruction seeks ultimately, in (...) its own distinctive fashion, to present a version of Confucian justice that is comparable with modern Western justice theory. In this article we assess, critically and comparatively, the tertium comparationis and the arguments in each reconstruction. While our analysis does not wholly endorse any of the reconstructions, it shows that there is a richness and vitality to Confucian justice theory that merits proper consideration in justice theory co... (shrink)

Theories of emotion propose that responses to emotional pictures can occur independently of whether or not people are aware of the picture content. Because evidence from dissociation paradigms is inconclusive, we manipulated picture awareness gradually and studied whether emotional responses varied with degree of awareness. Spider fearful and non-fearful participants viewed pictures of spiders and flowers at four levels of backward masking while electrodermal activity and heart rate were measured continuously. Recognition ratings confirmed that participants’ picture awareness decreased with masking. (...) Critically, effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate also decreased with masking. These findings suggest that effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate are closely related to picture awareness. (shrink)

A new instrument, The Moral Reasoning Inventory, designed to measure moral reasoning responses to moral dilemmas within a business setting is the subject of this paper. The instrument consists of two moral dilemma scenarios with eight moral reasoning statements. Two measurement scales were used for rating responses on the strength of belief in the reasons and the importance of the reasons for resolving the dilemma. Data analysis clearly supported theeffectiveness of the instrument to differentiate patterns of consistency in moral reasoning (...) within decision groups. (shrink)

Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.

_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 4, pp 616 - 624 The claim that it is always good to be reasonable can be understood to mean either that being reasonable is always better than being unreasonable all things considered or that being reasonable is better than being unreasonable in at least one respect. This paper tries to evaluate both claims and argues for the second, weaker thesis while dismissing the first. To do this, two distinct ideas contained in our every-day understanding (...) of reasonability are distinguished and formulated more precisely. It is then argued that, regardless of which idea we take to be fundamental, being reasonable is always good in at least one respect, though not always good all things considered. (shrink)

Based on Davenport’s (1998) social audit, we examined six firms’ corporate social responsibility activities within the beer industry in an effort to identify and compare these firms’ industry social standing. The results have implications in our understanding and assessment of corporate citizenship practices both within and across business industry groups.

Das Buchbeinhaltet Max Webers vollständige Schriften zu wissenschaftlichen und politischen Berufen: „Wissenschaft als Beruf”, die Artikel zu Hochschulen, und „Politik als Beruf”. Die Einleitung des Herausgebers verbindet beide Berufe konzeptionell und in der Person Max Webers. Die Verwendung von C. G. Jungs psychologischer Typentheorie, die durch den Myers-Briggs Typindikator (MBTI) weiterentwickelt wurde, wird ein Verständnis seines Persönlichkeitstypus ermöglicht. Das Buch ist die überarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage der englischen Ausgabe „Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations”. In der (...) zweiten Auflage des Bandes wurde die Einleitung um einige Analysen von Webers Schriften erweitert. Außerdem wurden zwei weitere Artikel aufgenommen und die Bibliographie um einige bedeutsame Werke ergänzt. Einleitung und englische Kommentare wurden einheitlich neu übersetzt. (shrink)

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.