This article examines the theoretical status of the three CSR models of William C. Frederick. Using the method of systematics, it disaggregates the elements of the three models and suggests one integrative means of re-sorting them. The article argues the need to develop a theoretical logic to understand behavior in this area and supplies one in the form of the beginnings of an explicit theory of normative referencing. The processes of normative referencing, including normative selection, normative commitment, normative instruction, normative (...) implementation, normative administration, normative outcomes production, normative accounting, and normative adjustment are described. (shrink)

The concept of scientific field lacks a definition in a form allowing the distinction of whether a particular academic area of study is or is not a true scientific field. Starting with the classic definition by Whitley of a field as a “reputational work organization,” this essay extracts eleven explicit and implied features of a field from Whitley’s definition and discussion, extending his analysis. The article reviews Hambrick and Chen’s model of field formation as an “admittance-seeking social movement.” Hambrick and (...) Chen argue that strategic management followed that model with success, offering the SIM Division of the Academy of Management as an unsuccessful example. The article notes errors in their assessment of SIM, argues that Hambrick and Chen are really offering a model of what I term condensation and promulgation of a field and that their model cannot be used to determine whether a field exists. The article applies the extended Whitley model of a field to examine three candidate fields within SIM: corporate social responsibility (CSR)/corporate social performance (CSP), stakeholder theory, and corporate political activity (CPA). I conclude that none is technically a field, and considering as well the comments of three senior scholars who contributed to the symposium, the article discusses the potential trajectory of fields in SIM. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing (...) OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform and new ontologies being created on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved. (shrink)

Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, and the second gives them responsibility for too little. I offer the outlines of a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. I defend a new collaborative principle that assigns recognisably (...) worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, one that favours restructuring divisions of labour in ways that enhance the prospects of recognition at every level of social organisation. This essay is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

This short paper seeks to throw light on the sense in which the prior knowledge used by AlphaFold is to be understood in ontological terms. The paper is a comment on the 2022 ICBO presentation by Jobst Landgrebe entitled “What AlphaFold teaches us about deep learning with prior knowledge”.

From his groundbreaking book Speech Acts to his most recent studies of consciousness, freedom and rationality John Searle has been a dominant and highly influential figure amongst contemporary philosophers. This systematic introduction to the full range of Searle's work begins with the theory of speech acts and proceeds with expositions of Searle's writings on intentionality, consciousness and perception, as well as a careful presentation of the so-called Chinese Room argument. The volume considers Searle's recent work on social ontology and his (...) views on the nature of law and obligation. It concludes with an appraisal of Searle's spirited defence of truth and scientific method in the face of the criticisms of Derrida and other postmodernists. This is the only comprehensive introduction to Searle's work, and as such it will be of particular value to advanced undergraduates, graduates and professionals in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, cognitive and computer science and literary theory. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

The philosophical issues raised by perception make it one of the central topics in the philosophical tradition. Debate about the nature of perceptual knowledge and the objects of perception comprises a thread that runs through the history of philosophy. In some historical periods the major issues have been predominantly epistemological and related to scepticism, but an adequate understanding of perception is important more widely, especially for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For this reason Barry Maund provides an account (...) of the major issues in the philosophy of perception that highlights the importance of a good theory of perception in a range of philosophical fields, while also seeking to be sensitive to the historical dimension of the subject. The work presents chapters on forms of natural realism; theories of perceptual experience; representationalism; the argument from illusion; phenomenological senses; types of perceptual content; the representationalist/intentionalist thesis; and adverbialist accounts of perceptual experience. The ideas of, among others, Austin, Dretske, Heidegger, Millikan, Putnam and Robinson are considered and the reader is given a philosophical framework within which to consider the issues. (shrink)

Despite their common core in statistics, insurance and epidemiology propel two different forms of solidarity. In insurance, the collective is a source of protection, thanks to the pooling of risks; in epidemics by contrast, the group remains the source of danger for the individual. The aim of this paper is to highlight the conceptions of community and solidarity at play in epidemics in contradistinction to insurance, with a focus on the shift introduced by big data and algorithms. Paradoxically, while the (...) new technologies and epidemiology share a common view on the relation between the individual and the collective, tracing apps were not widely adopted in the Covid-19 crisis. This reluctance to use current technologies for the sake of epidemic containments highlights, beyond legitimate interrogations, a confusion between two imaginaries of the social: insurance solidarity where the interdependence is a source of rights, and epidemic solidarity that imposes duties. (shrink)

Environment and Social Theory provides a concise introduction to the relationship between the environment and social theory, both historically and within contemporary social theory.

Essays discuss the social and moral meanings of Freudian thought and examine the changes Freud's ideas have undergone in various fields of psychology.

The first book to focus on the intersection of Western philosophy and the Asian martial arts, _Striking Beauty_ comparatively studies the historical and philosophical traditions of martial arts practice and their ethical value in the modern world. Expanding Western philosophy's global outlook, the book forces a theoretical reckoning with the concerns of Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic and technical dimensions of martial arts practice. _Striking Beauty_ explains the relationship between Asian martial arts and the Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, (...) and Daoism, in addition to Sunzi's _Art of War_. It connects martial arts practice to the Western concepts of mind-body dualism and materialism, sports aesthetics, and the ethics of violence. The work ameliorates Western philosophy's hostility toward the body, emphasizing the pleasure of watching and engaging in martial arts, along with their beauty and the ethical problem of their violence. (shrink)

Different conceptions of the nature of subjects of experience have very different implications for the sort of relationship which exists between subjects and their experiences. On my preferred view, since subjects consist of nothing but capacities for experience, the ‘having’ of an experience amounts to a subject’s producing it. This relationship may look to be problematic, but I argue that here at least appearances are deceptive. I then move on to consider some of the ways in which experiences can seem (...) to have subjects or owners, and argue that those who take a ‘sense of self’ to be an essential feature of all forms of consciousness may well be mistaken. (shrink)

We can illustrate the phenomenon of model-induced escape by examining the phenomenon of spam filters. Spam filter A is, we can assume, very effective at blocking spam. Indeed it is so effective that it motivates the authors of spam to invent new types of spam that will beat the filters of spam filter A. -/- An example of this phenomenon in the realm of philosophy is illustrated in the work of Nyíri on Wittgenstein's political beliefs. Nyíri writes a paper demonstrating (...) convincingly that there are strong signals of a conservative strain of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein. This has initially a tiny effect; but then a more significant effect sets in as the authors of Wittgenstein secondary literature, consciously or unconsciously, draw attention to features of Wittgenstein which cast the conservatism thesis in a negative light. This is an example of what I call model-induced escape: the Nyíri model of Wittgenstein initiates a process which undermines the Nyíri model of Wittgenstein. -/- Wittgenstein, as obiectum philosophiae, is reduced to a constantly mutating set of interpretations of a certain body of work. -/- Perhaps this is what makes philosophy so problematic when viewed from the perspective of results, or in other words of signs of progress commonly accepted across the discipline. There are just too many ways of inducing escape from any given putative discovery; too many dimensions along which an interpretative or definitional arms race can be triggered. (shrink)

Material things have material (spatial) parts. Acts, events, occurrences, have phases, which we can view as their temporal parts. Spatial surfaces and volumes, stretches of time, they all have parts again; they can all be considered "extended". Entities, on the other hand, such as directions, numbers, temperatures, colors, tones, fictional characters, prices, numbers, values, ideologies, goals, are all unextended; they are partless. Let us call such non-extended objects “nodes”, in order to express the fact that we have a tendency to (...) grasp them as pure correlates of our thinking, often at the same time viewing them effectively as placeholders within systems of coordinates in various intellectual and social domains. My aim, here, is to clarify this rough idea of “node” for the purpose of providing a corresponding clarification of Ingarden's idea of a purely intentional object. I first consider purely intentional objects in general, and then focus in particular on fictional examples. (shrink)

In addition to gestalt psychology and phenomenology, merleau-ponty's first book was influenced decisively by hegel. more precisely, it is argued that his critical remarks concerning reflexology as well as idealism and empiricism were inspired in large measure by the interpretation of hegel that merleau-ponty learned from alexandre kojeve.

The model developed in the target article is not as comprehensive as might be desired on two counts: (1) in that how the transition from proximal stimulation at the skin gives rise to the perception of external objects is taken for granted; and (2) in that another population of participants, the blind, constitute an important group from which we can understand somatosensory processing and neural plasticity.

Several lines of evidence have underscored the remarkable neuroplasticity of the primate sensorimotor cortex, characterizing these cortical areas as dynamic constructs that are modelled in a use-dependent manner by behaviourally significant experiences. Their plasticity likely provides a neural substrate that may contribute to the dynamic systems paradigm argued by Shanker & King (S&K) as crucial for development of communication skills.

Andrews explores spiritual practices that were the vital source from which everything else about Transcendentalism-texts, ideas, and social action-flowed. These practices are eminently available to spiritual seekers today, both those who are connected to conventional forms of religiosity and those who are allergic to 'religion.

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology used in hundreds of active projects in scientific and other domains. BFO has been selected to serve as top-level ontology in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), an initiative to create a suite of ontologies to support digital manufacturing on the part of representatives from a number of branches of the advanced manufacturing industries. We here present a first draft set of axioms and definitions of an IOF upper ontology descending from BFO. The (...) axiomatization is designed to capture the meanings of terms commonly used in manufacturing and is designed to serve as starting point for the construction of the IOF ontology suite. (shrink)

Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledge—superficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem (...) is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal—alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit. (shrink)