This study examines the impact of the strength of an accounting firm's ethical environment on the quality of auditor judgment, across different levels of audit expertise. Using a 2 × 2 full factorial 'between subjects' experimental design, with audit managers and audit seniors, the impact of different levels of strength of the ethical environment on auditor judgments was assessed with a realistic audit scenario, requiring participants to make judgments in respect of an inventory writedown. Based on prior research, and as (...) hypothesized, participants possessing greater auditing experience made higher quality technical judgments. While there were no significant differences between the quality of audit judgments made by participants in the stronger ethical environment, over-all results indicate that managers are more sensitive to differences in the strength of the ethical environment than seniors. This is consistent with the hypothesis, and with prior research which suggests that the impact of the code will only be significant if it has been bilaterally internalized by individuals. This has important implications for accounting firms and regulators, given that the International Standard on Quality Control 1, requires the communication and reinforcement of ethical principles as part of firms' quality control processes. It suggests that firms will need to carefully consider the means by which they communicate and reinforce ethical principles, as it is possible to differentially impact auditors of different rank. (shrink)

Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were fully amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical (...) psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

1 Cognitive Architectures 2 Multilayer Perceptrons 3 Relations between Variables 4 Structured Representations 5 Individuals 6 Where does the Machinery of Symbol Manipulation Come From? 7 Conclusions.

A psychologist offers a detailed study of the genetic underpinnings of human thought, looking at the small number of genes that contain the instructions for building the vastly complex human brain to determine how these genes work, common misconceptions about genes, and their implications for the future of genetic engineering. 30,000 first printing.

This book reviews Iris Murdoch’s thought as a whole. It surveys the breadth of her thinking, taking account of her philosophical works, her novels and her letters. It shows how she explored many aspects of experience and brought together apparently contradictory concepts such as truth and love. The volume deals with her notions of truth, love, language, morality, politics and her life. It shows how she offers a challenging provocative way of seeing things which is related to but distinct from (...) standard forms of analytical philosophy and Continental thought. Unlike so many philosophers she does offer a philosophy to live by and unlike many novelists she has reflected deeply on the kind of novels she aimed to write. The upshot is that her novels and her philosophy can be read together productively as contributions to how we can see others and the world. (shrink)

The creation of a specialized executive position that oversees sustainability activities represents a distinct shift in the structure of top management teams and their approach for addressing sustainability concerns. However, little is known about these management team members, namely the corporate sustainability officers or CSOs. We examine CSO appointments and their association with subsequent sustainability performance. Our results indicate that the creation of a CSO position may represent more of a symbolic versus substantive governance mechanism. Further tests suggest that CSO (...) expertise and the firm’s existing sustainability performance affect the association between the CSO and post-appointment sustainability performance. We find no association between CSO appointments and subsequent sustainability performance for firms that were already poor performers, while firms possessing relatively higher levels of prior sustainability performance appointing a CSO begin to experience significant improvements to performance after 3 years. We further find that CSOs with prior sustainability expertise are associated with increases in sustainability performance in firms that were already strong performers, but not in firms with poor sustainability performance. Non-expert CSOs, on the other hand, are associated with initial decreases in performance for poor performing firms, whereas better performing firms hiring non-expert CSOs are able to rely on other sustainability attributes of the firm and benefit from improvements in performance in the long term. We discuss the potential importance of these positions as it relates to symbolic versus substantive governance mechanisms through the lens of top management team literature streams. (shrink)

Scientific research is subject to a number of regulations which impose incidental (time, place), rather than substantive (type of research), restrictions on scientific research and the knowledge created through such research. In recent years, however, the premise that scientific research and knowledge should be free from substantive regulation has increasingly been called into question. Some have suggested that the law should be used as a tool to substantively restrict research which is dual-use in nature or which raises moral objections. There (...) are, however, some problems with using law to restrict or prohibit certain types of scientific research, including (i) the inherent imprecision of law for regulating complex and rapidly evolving scientific research; (ii) the difficulties of enforcing legal restrictions on an activity that is international in scope; (iii) the limited predictability of the consequences of restricting specific branches of scientific research; (iv) inertia in the legislative process; and (v) the susceptibility of legislators and regulators to inappropriate factors and influence. Rather than using law to restrict scientific research, it may be more appropriate and effective to use a combination of non-traditional legal tools including norms, codes of conduct, restrictions on publication, and scientist-developed voluntary standards to regulate problematic scientific research. (shrink)

Spiritualist mediums are sought out from a variety of cultures for their advanced spirit communication healing techniques. Otherworldly spirits use mediums to create spirit art, which guides an individual to discover their authentic self and work through self‐limiting beliefs. To serve as a bridge for the spirit world, the medium develops an ability to enter an altered state of consciousness and use a multisensory embodied language to communicate with spirits. I describe this language as “dancing with spirits.” To investigate this (...) language, I use my own spirit art as an innovative experiential ethnographic tool that blends auto‐ethnographic perceptions of spirits with sensory and artistic ethnography, and cultural healing techniques. I provide three case studies of how my spirit art provides unique insights into the less explored experiential dimensions of spirit communication. I layer my experimental ethnographic approach with Deleuze and Guattari's “rhizome” to show that spirit communication overcomes limitations of normal linguistic models. The spirit language serves as a rupture for unconscious forces to offer individually tailored healing and insight to a recipient through heightened sensory and physiological phenomena. Art, altered states of consciousness, and anomalous sensory experiences may offer insights to address a pressing global challenge, mental ill‐health. (shrink)

Sidney Hook’s controversial career as a public intellectual grounded in pragmatic liberalism solidified him as the leading liberal critic of liberalism. Hook forthrightly advocated American democratic principles against a legion of attackers. The controversies he addressed are very much at the center of public life today.

The role and place of transcendental psychology in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been a source of some contention. This work presents a detailed argument for restoring transcendental psychology to a central place in the interpretation of Kant's Analytic, in the process providing a detailed response to more "austere" analytic readings.

Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions sparked an ongoing debate concerning the proper logical and linguistic analysis of definite descriptions. While it is now widely acknowledged that, like the indexical expressions 'I', 'here', and 'now', definite descriptions in natural language are context-sensitive, there is significant disagreement as to the ultimate challenge this context-sensitivity poses to Russell's theory.This reader is intended both to introduce students to the philosophy of language via the theory of descriptions, and to provide scholars in analytic philosophy (...) with ready access to some of the central contributions in this area. It includes classic works by Russell, Carnap, Strawson, Lambert, Donnellan, Grice, Peacocke, Kripke, Wettstein, Soames, Neale, and Schiffer. (shrink)

This is a book focused primarily on reading the *Critique of Judgment* but which takes the central topics of it to be central to understanding the Critical Philosophy generally. It distinguishes types of aesthetics and teleology and in the process suggests an ambitious reconstruction of the landscape of Kant's architectonic.

Browning and Kilmister review the nature and possibility of critical political economy in the light of recent post-modern and cultural theory. They provide an historical understanding of critical political economy, focusing on the development of the critical perspectives on capitalism of Hegel and Marx. They then review post-Marxist, post-structuralist, ecological and feminist standpoints that challenge notions of critical political economy sustained in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. This study of critical and post-critical political economy concludes by arguing for the integration or these (...) standpoints within a revitalized critical perspective. (shrink)

Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) précis represents an important effort to address key issues in concepts and categorization, but few of the simulations deliver what is promised. We argue that the models are seriously underconstrained, importantly incomplete, and psychologically implausible; more broadly, R&M dwell too heavily on the apparent successes without comparable concern for limitations already noted in the literature.

E. E. Constance Jones, a regular contributor to Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and the author of several textbooks and a monograph, worked in both philosophical l...

Descartes boldly claimed: "I think, therefore I am." But one might well ask: Why do we think? How? When and why did our human ancestors develop language and culture? In other words, what makes the human mind human? _Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture_ offers a comprehensive and scientific investigation of these perennial questions. Fourteen essays bring together the work of archaeologists, cultural and physical anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, geneticists, a neuroscientist, and an environmental scientist to explore the evolution of the (...) human mind, the brain, and the human capacity for culture. The volume represents and critically engages major theoretical approaches, including Donald's stage theory, Mithen's cathedral model, Tomasello's joint intentionality, and Boyd and Richerson's modeling of the evolution of culture in relation to climate change. The volume contains chapters by: Peter Carruthers; Thierry Chaminade; Philip Chase; Merlin Donald; Peter Gardenfors; Gary Hatfield; Jody Hey; Steven Mithen; April Nowell; Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd; Theodore Schurr; Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney; Kim Sterelny; and Felix Warneken. ISBN 978-1-934536-49-0. (shrink)

A survey of diverse aspects of the reception, attitudes toward, and activities of foreigners in the major cuneiform cultures of the third through first millennia B.C.E. While outsiders could play important roles in their new environments, they were generally soon assimilated into their host societies without effecting significant changes in them. Only toward the close of this period did the arrival of large groups of invaders convinced of the superiority of their own cultures, such as Persians and Greco-Macedonians, radically alter (...) the age-old civilizations of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia. (shrink)

« Puissance + Praxis » aborde le principe d’organisation de l’exposition du projet Interlaced, qui rend hommage à la vie et à l’œuvre de Dominique Malaquais : l’accent est mis sur les artistes dont la pratique aborde le pouvoir de diverses manières. L’article positionne le motif derrière une telle pratique, qui peut être transgressive ou encourager la résistance, comme étant finalement une préoccupation pour la condition humaine. L’essai considère également le contexte – le temps et l’espace – qui encadre la (...) pratique curatoriale, en particulier en ce qui concerne l’Afrique. (shrink)

This volume explores questions that emerge from considering the relationship between nature and ethics through philosophical, theological, ethical, and environmental lenses.

Should evolution replace rational choice as the guiding paradigm for game theory? Evolutionary game theory provides an intriguing perspective from which to critique the hyper-rational assumptions of classical economic game theory. In contrast to economic game theory, evolutionary game theory is better suited to descriptive rather than normative domains. It is argued that a pluralism of paradigms holds the best promise for theoretical innovation in game theory.

This chapter examines an apparent tension created by recent research on neurological development and genetics on the one hand and cognitive development on the other. It considers what it might mean for intrinsic signals to guide the initial establishment of functional architecture. It argues that an understanding of the mechanisms by which the body develops can inform our understanding of the mechanisms by which the brain develops. It cites the view of developmental neurobiologists Fukuchi-Shimogori and Grove, that the patterning of (...) the part of the brain responsible for our higher functions is coordinated by the same basic mechanisms and signaling protein families used to generate patterning in other embryonic organs. Thus, what's good enough for the body, is good enough for the brain. (shrink)

The ambition in what follows is to begin a consideration of the lessons that might be learnt from a reassessment of twentieth-century avant-gardist practice within the domain of musical composition. The goal here will not be an evaluation of the compositional outputs of this period but, rather, some reflections on the place and role of teaching within and among the musicians themselves, remembering that many of them gained a considerable reputation as teachers: Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John (...) Cage being the pre-eminent examples.And, as an aside, before too quickly assuming that the radical newness and futurism associated with much avant-gardism is somehow at odds with our... (shrink)

Hegel develops a critical political economy, which is critical because he takes no aspect of the world to be discrete or impervious to revisionary re-reading in the light of its relationship with other spheres. Hence, for Hegel, the modern political economy is not accepted at face value; it is to be criticised in the light of a deeper philosophical reading of social and political developments. Hegel’s philosophy is critical and holistic. Within its perspective, the economy is not detachable from a (...) wider set of social relationships. Hegel accepts that a modern political economy operates for the most part via self-interested utility-maximising behaviour, but he qualifies this acceptance by emphasising the need for wider social and political values and commitments to limit the autonomy of the market and the impact of economic individualism. Hegel highlights the wider web of social relationships within which the economic is situated. In achieving the prime objective of an overall rational organisation of the social world, the economic goals of producing and distributing goods and services are subordinated to the goals of securing an overall harmony between social practices and of establishing ethical relationships between members of a community. Again, for Hegel, political economy does not transcend time, for the modern market economy is part and parcel of the distinctively modern world. (shrink)

Oakeshott sets out philosophical and historical views of the state. They are distinct, and their distinctiveness harmonizes with his notion of the exclusivity of philosophical and historical perspectives. The modal distinctness of philosophy, history, and practice is established in Experience and Its Modes and is then rehearsed in subsequent publications, notably in essays in Rationalism and Politics. History is a way of seeing the past that is at odds with practical thought and philosophy. It is the sign of ideology, and (...) its misperceptions of the relations between philosophy and practice that ideologists such as Lenin and Thatcher invoke abstractions of communism and the market to frame practical political decision-making. However, in considering art in the essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Oakeshott imagines art to be independent of other activities and yet to maintain a conversational relationship between the modes of experience. What is meant by a conversation? For Oakeshott, a conversation does not preclude the independence of modes of experience from one another. The closeness between philosophy, practice, and history is also assumed and yet underplayed by the argument of On Human Conduct, which imagines theory to be separate from history and practice. In this paper, it is argued that the connections between practical, historical, and philosophical modes of understanding the state in Oakeshott’s work are closer than is suggested by the metaphor of conversation and at odds with the separation that is maintained in Experience and its Modes. (shrink)

Language users ordinarily suppose that they know what thoughts their own utterances express. We can call this supposed knowledge minimal self-knowledge. But what does it come to? And do we actually have it? Anti-individualism implies that the thoughts which a person's utterances express are partly determined by facts about their social and physical environments. If anti-individualism is true, then there are some apparently coherent sceptical hypotheses that conflict with our supposition that we have minimal self-knowledge. In this book, Anthony Brueckner (...) and Gary Ebbs debate how to characterize this problem and develop opposing views of what it shows. Their discussion is the only sustained, in-depth debate about anti-individualism, scepticism and knowledge of one's own thoughts, and will interest both scholars and graduate students in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology. (shrink)

Dewey's enduring insights into democratic politics are still relevant today. Dewey grounded his political ideals historically within the American democratic experience and sought to adapt Jeffersonian idealism to the corporate-industrial age. Like Jefferson, Dewey maintained that the roots of the American political tradition are moral, not merely a means to material gain. Dewey's theory of democracy was designed to reconcile freedom with authority, social stability with the need for reform, and universal standards with specific circumstances.

Four variations on Two Envelope Paradox are stated and compared. The variations are employed to provide a diagnosis and an explanation of what has gone awry in the paradoxical modeling of the decision problem that the paradox poses. The canonical formulation of the paradox underdescribes the ways in which one envelope can have twice the amount that is in the other. Some ways one envelope can have twice the amount that is in the other make it rational to prefer the (...) envelope that was originally rejected. Some do not, and it is a mistake to treat them alike. The nature of the mistake is diagnosed by the different roles that rigid designators and definite descriptions play in unproblematic and in untoward formulations of decision tables that are employed in setting out the decision problem that gives rise to the paradox. The decision maker’s knowledge or ignorance of how one envelope came to have twice the amount that is in the other determines which of the different ways of modeling his decision problem is correct. Under this diagnosis, the paradoxical modeling of the Two Envelope problem is incoherent. (shrink)