This article investigates the effects of perceived supervisor support on ethical and unethical employee behavior using a multi-method approach. Specifically, we test the mediating mechanism and a boundary condition that moderate the relationship between support and ethical employee behaviors. We find that supervisor-based self-esteem fully mediates the relationship between supervisor support and ethical employee behavior and that employee task satisfaction intensifies the relationship between supervisor support and supervisor-based self-esteem.

In this paper, I present an analysis of the depictive properties of deepfakes. These are videos and pictures produced by deep learning algorithms that automatically modify existing videos and photographs or generate new ones. I argue that deepfakes have an intentional standard of correctness. That is, a deepfake depicts its subject only insofar as its creator intends it to. This is due to the way in which these images are produced, which involves a degree of intentional control similar to that (...) involved in the production of other intentional pictures such as drawings and paintings. This aspect distinguishes deepfakes from real videos and photographs, which instead have a non-intentional standard: their correct interpretation corresponds to the scenes that were recorded by the mechanisms that produced them, and not to what their producers intended them to represent. I show that these depictive properties make deepfakes fit for communicating information in the same way as language and other intentional pictures. That is, they do not provide direct access to the communicated information like non-intentional pictures (e.g., videos and photographs) do. Rather, they convey information indirectly, relying only on the viewer's assumptions about the communicative intentions of the creator of the deepfake. Indirect communication is indeed a prominent function of such media in our society, but it is often overlooked in the philosophical literature. This analysis also explains what is epistemically worrying about deepfakes. With the introduction of this technology, viewers interpreting photorealistic videos and pictures can no longer be sure of which standard to select (i.e., intentional or non-intentional), which makes misinterpretation likely (i.e., they can take an image to have a standard of correctness that it does not have). (shrink)

In this article I investigate what the Stoic doctrine of the two principles, God and matter, owes to Plato. I discuss recent scholarly views to the effect that the Stoics were influenced by Old Academic interpretations of the Timaeus and argue that, although the Timaeus probably did play a role in the genesis of the Stoic doctrine, some role was also played by a dualist theory of flux set forth in the etymologies of the Cratylus. I also discuss Theophrastus’ account (...) of Plato’s achievements in physics (fr. 230 FHS&G) and the report of Old Academic physics contained in Cicero’s Academica, 1. 24–9, and commonly taken to go back to Antiochus of Ascalon, and I show that those reports too are likely to have been influenced by the Cratylus. (shrink)

This paper argues that Umberto Eco had a sophisticated theory of abductive reasoning and that this theory is fundamentally akin to Peirce’s both in the analysis and in the justification of this kind of reasoning. The first section expounds the essentials of Peirce’s theory of abduction, and explains how Peirce moved from seeing abduction as a kind of reasoning to seeing it as a stage of the larger process of inquiry. The second section deals with one of Eco’s paradigmatic examples (...) of abduction, i.e., William of Baskerville’s abduction concerning the horse Brunellus in the overture of The Name of the Rose, and shows that, just like in Peirce’s three-stages model of inquiry, William’s abductions are verified by means of deduction and induction. The third section examines the problem of the justification of abductive reasoning, and argues that both Peirce and Eco solved this problem through the idea that the justification of abduction is itself abductive (meta-abduction in Eco, ur-abduction in Peirce). (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Bykvist’s recent challenges to the fitting-attitude account of value (FA) can be successfully met. The challenge from solitary goods claims that FA cannot account for the value of states of affairs which necessarily rule out the presence of favouring subjects. I point out the modal reasons why FA can account for solitary goods by appealing to contemplative attitudes. Bykvist’s second challenge, the ‘distance problem’, questions the ability of FA to match facts about the intensity (...) of fitting attitudes and facts about value, particularly in the case of solitary goods. I argue that this challenge can be met by including the notion of a veil of ignorance in the formulation of FA, and understanding its role as bracketing the relevance of certain facts when determining the fittingness of attitudes to states of affairs. (shrink)

According to a well-established interpretive line, the Benthamic judge would be allowed no room for autonomous calculations of utility and his or her task would only be that of mechanically applying substantive law, which expresses the legislator's will. For Gerald Postema, in contrast, Bentham's judge would be granted ample power to decide cases by directly applying the principle of utility. This article criticizes both views, by showing that a adjudication was for Bentham utterly impossible, although this does not mean that (...) judges should be free to decide according to direct utility calculations. Judges must be the tutors of the citizens’ expectations, which, under a system of statute law, will focus on the code. However, they can avoid suboptimality in cases where applying a general rule would not maximize utility, without preponderant damage for law-induced expectations: Bentham's suggestion is that they do so by proposing amendments of the code to the legislature. (shrink)

By addressing social issues, rather than maximizing profits, social enterprises are said to contribute to the well-being of societies. In this paper, we test whether social enterprises fulfil this expectation. The paper applies regression analysis to a unique dataset obtained by merging survey data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor with official statistics on social enterprises in Luxembourg. Results suggest that social enterprises contribute to subjective well-being, which is an encompassing measure of people’s satisfaction with their own life. We find that (...) when the share of social enterprises in a city increases, the ill-being of poor and unemployed people declines. Therefore, policy makers who seek to increase the well-being of economically disadvantaged people could adopt policies to promote the creation of social enterprises. (shrink)

It is customary in current philosophy of time to distinguish between an A- (or tensed) and a B- (or tenseless) theory of time. It is also customary to distinguish between an old B-theory of time, and a new B-theory of time. We may say that the former holds both semantic atensionalism and ontological atensionalism, whereas the latter gives up semantic atensionalism and retains ontological atensionalism. It is typically assumed that the B-theorists have been induced by advances in the philosophy of (...) language and related A-theorists’ criticisms to acknowledge that semantic atensionalism can hardly stand, but have also maintained that what is essential for the B-theory is ontological atensionalism, which can be independently defended. Here it is argued that the B-theorists have been too quick in abandoning semantic atensionalism: they can still cling to it. (shrink)

In De int. 9 Aristotle argues that some declarative sentences are neither true nor false. This raises the problem of how we should understand the words of ch. 4, which introduces the declarative sentence as ‘that in which being true or being false holds’. In this paper I remove the contradiction by arguing that in ch. 4 Aristotle does not intend to claim that *all* declarative sentences are either true or false, but rather that *only* they are either true or (...) false, unlike other kinds of sentence; I defend the soundness of this interpretation on the linguistic and textual level; and I show how we can make good philosophical sense of it. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is gaining momentum in the business world, but several issues continue to challenge managers in charge of sustainability. Supply chain management is one area in which CSR-related activities could potentially drive the process of sustainability within firms. This case presents the way that illycaffè, an Italian coffee producer, has approached CSR. Since 1991, the company has focused on developing a new relationship with Brazilian coffee producers based on networking translated into knowledge transfer—Brazilian producers became responsible for (...) their operations all along the supply line—and innovation translated into quality—one supplier talks about how illycaffè persuaded him he was capable of producing a Ferrari among coffees instead of a Fiat. These two factors not only drive the supplier relationship, but also serve as the drivers of illycaffè’s sustainability strategy. Lessons for managers relate to benefits for the business, for society and for stakeholders, and questions arise about how to replicate illycaffè’s success and create value through values. (shrink)

Paul Elbourne claims that Russellians cannot accommodate the behavior of certain embedded definite descriptions. Since Fregeans can handle such descriptions, Elbourne urges theorists to reject Russell's theory in favor of Frege's. Here, I show that such descriptions pose no threat to Russellianism. These descriptions, I argue, are neutral between the two camps.

The essay confronts the classical forms of the government of social fears, elaborated in the course of modern and contemporary history, (in particular, national state and welfare systems)with the ongoing processes of economic and political globalization. The authors also discusses the question of the transformation of the subjective gaze, either individual and collective, regarding the historical time and in reference to the possible shift to a postmodern epoch.

In the cases of deep-seated changes in the capitalistic economies, starting from the first Industrial Revolution, we can choose a pessimistic hypothesis such as that of Polanyi (The great transformation. Rinehart, NY, 1944). In other words, a systematic dismantling of the previous structures and the economic and social customs, with the serious social and human crisis, or the slightly more “optimistic” one of Perez (Technological revolutions and financial capital: the dynamic of bubbles and golden ages. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2002), for (...) which, in the recurring 50-year cycles of innovation, a 4-phase sequence is realised (irruption, frenzy, synergy and maturity) of which frenzy, i.e. “when financial capital takes over” and there is “a time of speculation, corruption and unashamed (even widely celebrated) love of wealth”, leads, through a turning point, to a new one: “The unsustainable structural tension that builds up in the economy and society” can lead to “a regulation (...) to put order in financial markets and to move towards full market expansion and greater social cohesion”; it should be noted that Perez emphasises that this is a possibility and not a certainty. What is evident for social science is that in periods of deep and revolutionary changes, as to the economic dimension, of capitalistic societies, since the first Industrial Revolution, the economic process of change is more and more unfettered of any social, political, administrative and cultural effective regulation; all the dimensions of everyone’s life, both private and public, are driven by the demands coming from the economic and financial realm; a divorce between economic institutions and society at large that is a lack of legitimatisation and democratic control on their lives by people becomes the rule. It happened in the 1880s, 1920s and 1990s and this is the actual situation of our societies; that is why many researchers and also financial and popular magazines are stricken by an historical comparison such as this one: “It has been a great time to be a capitalist. All around the world, profits have been rising as a percentage of gross domestic product. According to Goldman Sachs, the profit share of US GDP in the first quarter of this year was an all-time high. HSBC says 2005 was the best year for UK profits since records began”. (Financial Times, July 29, July 30, 2006). The journalist is aware of the consequences of the situation and he adds: “High profits and the extreme wealth they usually imply can be extremely unpopular (...). It is easy to assume that the liberalising processes of the past 20 years are irreversible. But such reforms have little bedrock support; they have been effectively imposed on many countries by economic elites.” This is the starting point of this article: the role of economic elites and the crisis of legitimacy of democratic regimes. (shrink)

Vol I. A -- Vol II. B -- Vol. III. C -- Vol. IV. D -- Vol. V. E-F -- Vol VI. G -- Vol VII. H-L -- Vol. VIII. M -- Vol. IX. N-Q -- Vol X. R-S -- Vol XI. T-V -- Vol XII. X-Z.

Analogy has received attention as a form of inductive reasoning in the empirical sciences. Its role in mathematics has, instead, received less consideration. This paper provides a novel account of how an analogy with a more familiar mathematical domain can contribute to the confirmation of a mathematical conjecture. By reference to case-studies, we propose a distinction between an _incremental_ and a _non-incremental_ form of confirmation by mathematical analogy. We offer an account of the former within the popular framework of Bayesian (...) confirmation theory. As for the non-incremental notion, we defend its role in rationally informing the prior credences of mathematicians in those circumstances in which no new mathematical evidence is introduced. The resulting framework captures many important aspects of the use of analogical inference in the domain of pure mathematics. (shrink)