Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Precursors to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Defining the Inter-institutional System -- The Emergence, Stability and Change of the Inter-institutional System -- Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logics -- The Dynamics of Organizational Practices and Identities -- The Emergence and Evolution of Field-Level Logics -- Implications for Future Research.

Overview -- Locke's internal sense and Kant's changing views -- Personal identity amd its problems -- Rationalist metaphysics of mind -- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition -- Strands of Argument in the Duisburg Nachlass -- A transcendental deduction for a priori concepts -- Synthesis : why and how? -- Arguing for apperception -- The power of apperception -- "I-think" as the destroyer of rational psychology -- Is Kant's theory consistent? -- The normativity objection -- Is Kant's thinker (as such) a free (...) and responsible agent? -- Kant our contemporary. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture in two large international CPA firms, auditors'' personal values and the ethical orientation that those values dictate, and judgments in ethical dilemmas typical of those that accountants face. Using an experimental task consisting of multiple judgments designed to vary in "moral intensity" (Jones, 1991), and unique as well as tried-and-true approaches to variable measurements, this study examined the judgments of more than three hundred participants in our study. ANCOVA and path analysis (...) results indicate that: (1) Ethical judgments in situations of high moral intensity are affected by personal values and by environmental variables, such as the professional code of conduct (direct and indirect effects) and previous ethics instruction (direct effect only). (2) Corporate ethical culture, and a relatively strong firm rules-orientation, affect auditors'' idealism but not relativism, and therefore indirectly affect ethical judgments. Jones'' (1991) moral intensity argument is supported: differences in the characteristics of specific judgment tasks apparently result in different decision processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare the use of the thermodynamic limit in the theory of phase transitions with the infinite-time limit in the explanation of equilibrium statistical mechanics. In the case of phase transitions, I will argue that the thermodynamic limit can be justified pragmatically since the limit behavior also arises before we get to the limit and for values of N that are physically significant. However, I will contend that the justification of the infinite-time limit is less straightforward. In (...) fact, I will point out that even in cases where one can recover the limit behavior for finite t, i.e. before we get to the limit, one cannot recover this behavior for realistic time scales. I will claim that this leads us to reconsider the role that the rate of convergence plays in the justification of infinite limits and calls for a revision of the so-called Butterfield’s principle. (shrink)

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in (...) Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. (shrink)

Sarah Moss’ thesis that we have probabilistic knowledge is from some perspectives unsurprising and from other perspectives hard to make sense of. The thesis is potentially transformative, but not yet elaborated in sufficient detail for epistemologists. This paper interprets Mossean probabilistic knowledge in a suitably-modified Kripke framework, thus filling in key details. It argues that probabilistic knowledge looks natural and plausible when so interpreted, and shows how the most pressing challenges to the thesis can be overcome. Most importantly, probabilistic knowledge (...) can satisfy factivity in the framework, though we are not forced to accept a specific account of probabilistic “facts”. The framework also reflects Moss’ claim that old-fashioned propositional knowledge is just a limiting case of probabilistic knowledge, and all knowledge is fundamentally probabilistic. Finally, Moss endorses a failure of contraposition: for example, p implies probably p, but not probably p does not imply not p. The framework makes clear the sense in which the valid inferences regarding probably p are as Moss claims. (shrink)

The study of morality is increasingly an interdisciplinary endeavor spanning the cognitive, social, and biological sciences. This article provides an overview and synthesis of recent work fields relevant to the scientific understanding of morality, with a focus on how moral judgment and behavior are rooted in the functioning, development, and evolution of the brain. It presents themes that have emerged from studies examining the cognitive processes involved in morality. It shows studies that directly investigate the neural substrates of morality using (...) modern brain imaging techniques. A number of brain regions and systems are identified that appear to be essential for normal moral behavior. The article focuses on two clinical conditions: lesions to the prefrontal cortex and psychopathy. Furthermore, it discusses neuroendocrinology and evolutionary neurobiology—that is relevant to understanding the development of morality and concerns evolutionary history and functions of two neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, in the mammalian brain and their effects on behavior. (shrink)

Birth order has been examined over a wide variety of dimensions in the context of modern populations. A consistent message has been that it is better to be born first. The analysis of birth order in this paper is different in several ways from other investigations into birth order effects. First, we examine the effect of birth order in an egalitarian, small-scale, kin-based society, which has not been done before. Second, we use a different outcome measure, fertility, rather than outcome (...) measures of social, psychological, or economic success. We find, third, that being born late in an egalitarian, technologically simple society rather than being born early has a positive outcome on fertility, and fourth, that number of older siblings and sibling set size are even stronger predictors of fertility, especially for males. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the extent to which classical phase transitions, especially continuous phase transitions, impose a challenge for reduction- ism. My main contention is that classical phase transitions are compatible with reduction, at least with the notion of limiting reduction, which re- lates the behavior of physical quantities in different theories under certain limiting conditions. I argue that this conclusion follows even after rec- ognizing the existence of two infinite limits involved in the treatment of continuous phase transitions.

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in scholarly work on the Presocratics: new texts have appeared, new interpretations have been advanced, and a new appreciation for the scientific and philosophical claims of the early Greek thinkers is evident.1 There has been a general broadening of the questions that have been examined: scholars have been exploring the supposed boundaries of Presocratic thought, and new work on reception history and on the transmission of texts has enriched our understanding of (...) the earliest Greek philosophers. Here, I survey some of the trends and results of the new Presocratic scholarship.2Because no complete Presocratic text survives, those who work with the early Greek .. (shrink)

Desde una hermenéutica ontológica política se hacen visibles y audibles prácticas singulares a partir del punto de vista de los estudios latinoamericanos, los cuales apelan por una perspectiva de afirmación como propone Arturo Escobar respecto a una mirada sobre la diversidad y singularidad de accio..

Il s’agira ici de préciser les enjeux, les résultats et les lignes de tension de l’analyse ontologique des œuvres d’art telle qu’elle est développée par Roman Ingarden. Si en effet le programme ontologique d’Ingarden se déploie de manière large et complexe entre ontologie formelle, matérielle et existentiale, il tend aussi à absorber la phénoménologie de la conscience pure en tant que celle-ci constitue une région ontologique spécifique. À partir de ce renversement des rapports entre ontologie et phénoménologie, Ingarden élabore une (...) conception de la constitution réservée aux seuls objets intentionnels et expressément distincte de la phénoménologie génétique transcendantale. Ce faisant Ingarden rencontre sur le terrain esthétique une double difficulté et comme une double contrainte : rendre compte, d’une part, de la constitution des objets esthétiques qui ne sont pas donnés d’avance mais résultent variablement des opérations de concrétisation des divers récepteurs, et déterminer, d’autre part, les conditions de leurs valeurs, lesquelles relèvent à leur tour d’une opération de constitution soumise à variation. Nous essaierons alors d’envisager jusqu’à quel point Ingarden peut maintenir l’approche ontologique en position exclusive. (shrink)

In Quod animi mores, Galen says both that there is an identity between the capacities of the soul and the mixtures of the body, and that the soul’s capacities ‘follow upon’ the bodily mixtures. The seeming tension in this text can be resolved by noting that the soul’s capacities are constituted by, and hence are nothing over and above, bodily mixtures, but bodily mixtures explain the soul’s capacities and not the other way around. Galen’s proposal represents a distinctive position in (...) the Ancient debate on the relationship between soul and body. (shrink)

States of the brain represent states of the world. A puzzle arises when one learns that at least some of the mind/brain’s internal representations, such as a sensation of heat or a sensation of red, do not genuinely resemble the external realities they allegedly represent: the mean kinetic energy of the molecules of the substance felt (temperature) and the mean electromagnetic reflectance profile of the seen object (color). The historical response has been to declare a distinction between objectively real properties, (...) such as shape motion and mass, and merely subjective properties, such as heat, color and smell. This hypothesis leads to trouble. A challenge for cognitive neurobiology is to characterize, in suitably general terms, the nature of the relationship between brain models and the world modeled. We favor the hypothesis that brains develop high-dimensional maps whose internal relations correspond in varying degrees of fidelity to the enduring causal structure of the world. From this perspective, the basic epistemological relation is not “single-percept to single- external-feature” but rather “background-brain-maps to causal-domain-portrayed. (shrink)

"No philosophical dictum is better known than Descartes's assertion about the intimate relation between thinking and existing. What remains unknown is how we are to understand the 'I' who thinks and exists. This book is about the ways that the concept of an 'I' or a 'self' has been developed and deployed at different times in the history of Western Philosophy. It also offers a striking contrast case, the 'interconnected' self, who appears in some expressions of African Philosophy. Appealing to (...) philosophy to illuminate the concept of a 'self' may seem unnecessary. Anyone who can read this book is a self, so why can we not just tailor a concept to fit what we already know about ourselves? This objection has considerable force and provides a constraint on efforts to fashion a self-concept. Although there is a sense of 'self-knowledge' in which it is said to require a lifetime of serious effort to achieve, what is at issue here is simply knowing that one is a self"--. (shrink)

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca. 500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in Athens. He propounded a physical theory of “everything-in-everything,” and claimed that nous (intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the cosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including the claims that the sun (...) is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all its ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients are thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is evident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or homogeneous. (shrink)

The exportation of Western biomedicine throughout the world has not resulted in a systematic homogenization of scientific ideology but rather in the proliferation of many forms and practices of biomedicine. Similarly, in the last decade, bioethics has become increasingly an international enterprise. Although there may be consensus regarding the inherent value of ethical discourse as it relates to health and medical care, there are disagreements about the nature and parameters of medical morality. This lack of consensus exists because our beliefs (...) about morality are culturally constituted, embedded in social, religious, and political ideologies that influence particular individuals and communities at specific historical moments. (shrink)