We investigate the performance and risk of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) equity funds in the Australian market and find no significant difference between the returns of SRI and conventional funds. In an extension to prior literature, we examine the impact of the number of positive, negative and total screens funds impose on performance and risk. We find little evidence of positive or negative screening impacting total return, but find weak evidence that funds with more screens overall provide better risk-adjusted performance. (...) Positive screening significantly reduces funds’ risk. However, negative screening significantly increases risk and reduces funds’ abilities to form diversified portfolios. (shrink)

The core goal of this study is to empirically investigate whether there is a “world price” of corporate sustainability. This is assessed in the context of standard asset pricing models—in particular, by asking whether a risk premium attaches to a sustainability factor after controlling for the Fama–French factors. Both time-series and cross-sectional tests are formulated and applied. The results show that (1) global Fama–French factors have strong power to explain global equity returns and (2) sustainability investments have no significant impact (...) on global equity returns. The absence of a significant relationship between sustainability and returns implies that large institutional investors are free to implement sustainability mandates without fear of breaching their fiduciary duties from realising negative returns due to incorporating a sustainability investment process. (shrink)

A review of 'The aesthetics and ethics of copying'. Hick, Darren Hudson and Reinhold Schmücker, eds.

The Psychology of Screenwriting is more than an interesting book on the theory and practice of screenwriting. It is also a philosophical analysis of predetermination and freewill in the context of writing and human life in our mediated world of technology. Drawing on humanism, existentialism, Buddhism, postmodernism and transhumanism, and diverse thinkers from Meister Eckhart to Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, The Psychology of Screenwriting will be of use to screenwriters, film students, philosophers and (...) all those interested in contemporary theory. This book combines in-depth critical and cultural analysis with an elaboration on practice in an innovative fashion. It explores how people, such as those in the Dogme 95 movement, have tried to overcome traditional screenwriting, looking in detail at the psychology of writing and the practicalities of how to write well for the screen. This is the first book to include high-theory with screenwriting practice whilst incorporating the Enneagram for character development. Numerous filmmakers and writers, including David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar, Darren Aronofsky, Sally Potter and Charlie Kaufman are explored. The Psychology of Screenwriting is invaluable for those who want to delve deeper into writingfor the screen. (shrink)

The relative merits and demerits of historically prominent views such as the correspondence theory, coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism, and instrumentalism have been subject to much attention in the truth literature and have fueled the long-lived debate over which of these views is the most plausible one. While diverging in their specific philosophical commitments, adherents of these historically prominent views agree in at least one fundamental respect. They are all alethic monists. They all endorse the thesis that there is only one property (...) in virtue of which propositions can be true, and so, in this sense, take truth to be one. The truth pluralist, on the other hand, rejects this idea. There are several properties in virtue of which propositions can be true. The literature on truth pluralism has been growing steadily for the past twenty years. This volume, however, is the first of its kind—the first collection of papers focused specifically on pluralism about truth. Part I is dedicated to the development, investigation, and critical discussion of different forms of pluralism. An additional reason to look at truth pluralism with interest is the significant connections it bears to other debates in the truth literature—the debates concerning traditional theories of truth and the deflationism/inflationism divide being cases in hand. Parts II and III of the volume connect truth pluralism to these two debates. (shrink)

Here is a well-known thought about truth: Truth consists in correspondence with reality. A sentence is true just in case what it says corresponds with how the world is. Theories of truth that incorporate this thought are naturally regarded as robust or “heavyweight”. Truth is to be understood in a realist fashion. The world decides what is true and what is not. A recent incarnation of the correspondence view is found in truth-maker theories, whose adherents maintain that truths are true (...) in virtue of there being something – a truth-maker – in the world that makes them so.2. (shrink)

From divorce and property law to (more) equal pay and the recognition of reproductive rights, feminist theory and practice –– and sweat, risk, ...

Uterus transplantation (UTx) is an experimental surgery likely to face the issue of organ shortage. In my article, I explore how this issue might be addressed by changing the prevailing practices around live uterus donor recruitment. Currently, women with children – often the mothers of recipients – tend to be overrepresented as donors. Yet, other potentially eligible groups who may have an interest in providing their uterus – such as transgender men, or cisgender women who do not wish to gestate (...) or to have children – tend to be excluded as potential donors. Moving forward, I recommend that donor inclusion criteria for UTx be broadened to be more inclusive of these latter groups. (shrink)

Church's thesis, that all reasonable definitions of “computability” are equivalent, is not usually thought of in terms of computability by acontinuouscomputer, of which the general-purpose analog computer (GPAC) is a prototype. Here we prove, under a hypothesis of determinism, that the analytic outputs of aC∞GPAC are computable by a digital computer.In [POE, Theorems 5, 6, 7, and 8], Pour-El obtained some related results. (The proof there of Theorem 7 depends on her Theorem 2, for which the proof in [POE] is (...) incorrect, but for which a correct proof is given in [LIR]. Also, the proof in [POE] of Theorem 8 depends on the unproved assertion that a solution of an algebraic differential equation must be analytic on an open subset of its domain. However, this assertion was later proved in [BRR].) As in [POE], we reduce the problem to a problem about solutions of certain systems of algebraic differential equations (ADE's). If such a system is nonsingular (i.e. if the “separant” does not vanish along the given solution), then the argument is very easy (see [VSD] for an even simpler situation), so that the essential difficulties arise fromsingularsystems. Our main tools in handling these difficulties are drawn from the excellent (and difficult) paper [DEL] by Denef and Lipshitz. The author especially wants to thank Leonard Lipshitz for his kind help in the preparation of the present paper.We emphasize here that our proof of the simulation result applies only to the GPAC as described below. The GPAC's form a natural subclass of the class of all analog computers, and are based on certain idealized components (“black boxes”), mostly associated with the technology of past decades. One can easily envisage other kinds of black boxes of an input-output character that would lead to different kinds of analog computers. (For example, one could incorporate delays, or spatial integrators in addition to the present temporal integrators, etc.) Whether digital simulation is possible for these “extended” analog computers poses a rich and challenging set of research questions. (shrink)

This reconsideration of the descriptive and normative components of my earlier comparisons of Mencius and Aquinas suggests that the strengths of Aquinas’s account were highlighted while some of his shortcomings and the corresponding strengths in Mencius were missing. This is made clear by considering the treatment of their respective ideas about optimal human fulfillment and even clearer by considering their understanding of the relationship between theoretical and literary accounts of that fulfillment. The third subject, their different treatments of people’s failure (...) to attain fulfillment, is more complicated, however, and involves a set of truly vexing issues. (shrink)

As biological and moral creatures, humans contain physical and psychological needs that correspond to various development stages. According to Lee, a hierarchy of biological and individual needs provides an objective basis for ethics. The anthropocentric hierarchy of needs provides a model for examining the needs of the environment as well. A sound world order must be based on an ethical theory that integrates the needs of humans and the environment of which they are a part. Political and economic systems must (...) universally address all needs at all levels. (shrink)

This article focuses on Homers idea of reflexive rhetoric. The majority of Homeric deliberation scenes contain no deliberative calculi. One approach to this problem would be to generalize from the scenes where Odysseus uses deliberative calculi to those where he does not. One might argue, though, that data have to be transmitted to and outputted from a computer via interfaces, one where data are transformed into electrical impulses, and one where the output is printed as information. The deliberative calculus cannot (...) be the essential link between deliberation and persuasion, though it undoubtedly figures into the process of self-persuasion to the extent that it either explicitly or implicitly brings about a particular decision. In this perspective, the fact that Homer is frequently silent about deliberative calculi is irrelevant to the question of whether Odysseus persuades himself. The idea of Homeric rhetoric is alleged to pose the problem of anachronism. Moving toward an account of reflexive rhetoric allows to see in even greater detail the centrality of rhetoric to human condition. Accession Number: 18705553; Mifsud, Mari Lee 1; Affiliations: 1: Department of Rhetoric and Public Address, Whitman College.; Issue Info: 1998, Vol. 31 Issue 1, p41; Thesaurus Term: RHETORIC; Thesaurus Term: AUTHORSHIP; Thesaurus Term: LITERATURE; Subject Term: HOMER; Subject Term: ODYSSEUS (Greek mythology); Subject Term: ERRORS & blunders, Literary; Subject Term: PHILOSOPHY; Number of Pages: 14p; Document Type: Article. (shrink)

According to a standard picture of Leibniz’s mature views on creaturely causation, Leibniz held what some interpreters have described as his ‘thesis of spontaneity’: “every non-initial, nonmiraculous state of every created substance has as a real cause some preceding state of that very substance.”2 Evidence for this thesis is abundantly available throughout Leibniz’s mature work and here are some prominent instances.

Presents a thoughtful open-minded approach, beyond that of conventional cognitivism, using alternative perspectives such as socio-cultural contexts and social interaction, to explain behavior. For social and exptl. psychologists, and clinicians.

This thesis is the first step in a research project which aims to develop an accurate and robust theory of global justice. The thesis concerns the content of our duties of global justice, under strict compliance theory. It begins by discussing the basic framework of my theory of global justice, which consists in two aspects: duties of minimal wellbeing, which are universal, and duties of fairness and equality, which are associative and not universal. With that in place, it briefly discusses (...) the nature of duties of fairness and equality. I shall argue that they are associative, because they are derived from the form of cooperation at hand; and that there are three kinds of them in our contemporary world: states, local cooperation and trans-state cooperation. It is from their forms of cooperation that these duties are derived. After that, the thesis focuses exclusively on duties of minimal wellbeing. Against the usual account of these duties - the human-flourishing account - I argue for my human-life account. This account argues that the function of these duties is to secure a human life for individuals; and it begins with a Razian conception of wellbeing, which states that the wellbeing of an individual is fundamentally constituted by: (a) the satisfaction of his biological needs, and (b) his success in whole-heartedly pursuing socially defined and determined goals and activities which are in fact valuable. An account of what constitutes a human life is then derived from this conception of wellbeing – it is a life that consists in having a level of wellbeing that is higher than the satisfaction of biological needs, where this is constituted by the pursuit of goals and activities with a sense of what is worth doing; and this in turn consists in: (a) being able to forms ideas of what is worth doing, (b) being able to revise them in light of further reasons, and (c) being able to coordinate one's actions according to them. I then determine the specific objects of duties of minimal wellbeing (means for the satisfaction of biological needs, education, physical security, freedom of belief, association and expression, freedom of non-harmful conduct, and minimal resources), by determining what is involved in securing such a human life for individuals. (shrink)

The current moral education is focused on character building of Lickona. Several papers and books pointed out that his thesis has some drawbacks. As a teacher in charge of moral education in class, I have also found out them without effort. For these reasons, I simply pointed out disadvantages of Lickona’s thesis on this paper, then studied how to apply philosophical community of inquiry (PCOI) as the new model of moral education for Korean middle school classes (Now I teach students (...) moral subject at Wondong middle school in Gyeong-nam, Republic of Korea). This study is thought to be well-grounded as an alternative idea because it has been very successful when I have tried to apply PCOI model to Korean classroom for about 4 years. With this PCOI model, I won the first rank in Gyeong-nam secondary teaching contest in 2007. I have tried to apply PCOI model to Korean history, economy, the world history and geography class as well as moral class. And I have been studying how to apply to these subjects more effectively. (shrink)

This volume sets out to reverse the neglect.

Early research examining the relationship between corporate social practices and candidate attraction generally concludes that prospective employees prefer to be affiliated with socially responsible organizations (Dolan, 1997; Greening & Turban, 2000; Turban & Greening, 1996). A basic assumption embedded in these studies is that there is a generalized consensus among job candidates regarding the factors that constitute a desirable social record. Our project challenges this assumption and seeks to uncover variation among prospective job candidates’ attraction to specific organizations’ social practices. (...) We draw on the model of stakeholder orientation outlined by Mitroff (1983) to build a theoretical framework to explain variations in candidate attraction to specific practices and to guide the development of propositions that outline how candidates might be attracted to certain practices. Analysis of pilot data provides an illustration of how various corporate social practices cluster in a manner that is consistent with the theoretical propositions. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.