1914 Glimpses of Truth written by one of Gurdjieff s circle in Moscow Strange events, incomprehensible from the ordinary point of view, have guided my life. ...

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do (...) transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects. (shrink)

Dans Les Métamorphoses du cercle, ouvrage incontournable de l'histoire des idées, Georges Poulet propose une analyse lumineuse et pénétrante des variations innombrables de la figure du cercle à travers les penseurs et poètes depuis la Renaissance. Le cercle apparaît alors comme une métaphore fondamentale qui de tout temps servit aux hommes à penser le inonde et la vie tout court. Sa simplicité et sa perfection en font la première de ces formes privilégiées qui se retrouvent au fond de toutes (...) les croyances et qui servent de principe de structure à tous les esprits. (shrink)

The essay aims to show how business ethics—understood as a three-level approach—can strengthen the social cohesion of a society, which is jeopardized today in many ways. In the first part, the purpose of business and the economy is explained as the creation of wealth defined as a combination of private and public wealth that includes natural, economic, human, and social capital. Special emphasis is placed on the implications of the creation of public wealth which requires institutions other than the market (...) and motivations other than self-regarding ones. In the second part, the question of what holds a society together is discussed through different approaches: enlightened self-interest, a new game-theoretical approach, and the concept of the common good advanced by Catholic Social Teaching, followed by my own proposal. The third part presents several perspectives for business ethics to strengthen social cohesion of a society by focusing on the purpose of business and the economy to create natural, economic, human, and social capital; by advancing public goods that stand the test of ethical scrutiny; and by securing human rights conceptualized as public goods. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

I reply to Stainton and Viger by pointing out that my “folieist” claim—that standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words and phonemes are illusions—would not have the calamitous consequences for linguistics that they fear. Talk of “a language” need only be understood as talk of an I‐language precisely as Chomskyans have proposed; and I reply to Adger by pointing out that, since SLEs are not generally describable as real, local physical phenomena, perception of them cannot be explained as any sort (...) of “transduction.” An intentionalist understanding of “representation of” is needed where mere transduction fails. (shrink)

This volume collects the most intimate writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre.

The author of this major study compares the significantly different approaches to business ethics on both sides of the Atlantic and considers what they have to learn from each other. He has considerable experience of business ethics in both Europe and North America, having taught and researched the subject at the University of St Gallen in his native Switzerland before his appointment as Professor of International Business Ethics in the College of Business Administration, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA. (...) Professor Enderle was also the founding Honorary Treasurer of the European Business Ethics Network and is an Associate Editor of this Review. (shrink)

Recalling several profound disagreements about business ethics as it is currently discussed in Western societies, I emphasize the need for business ethics as an academic discipline that constitutes the “backbone” for both teaching business ethics and improving business practice (section 1). Then I outline a conceptual framework of business ethics that promotes a “bottom-up” approach (section 2). This “problem-and action-oriented” conception appears to be fruitful in terms of both practical relevance and theoretical understanding. Finally, I argue for (section 3) the (...) relevance of discussing goals at all levels of human action (i.e., individuals, organizations, systems) as well as the indispensability of human rights, and propose Amartya Sen's “goal-rights-system” approach as a normative-ethical framework for business ethics that integrates these two fundamental aspects. (shrink)

_Perspektiven der Philosophie. Neues Jahrbuch_ eröffnet Forschern, denen die philosophische Begründung des Denkens wichtig ist, eine Publikationsmöglichkeit. Wir verstehen uns nicht als Schulorgan einer philosophischen Lehrmeinung, sondern sehen unsere Aufgabe darin, an der Intensivierung des wissenschaftlichen Philosophierens mitzuwirken. Besonders fördern wir den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs und laden ihn zur Mitarbeit ein.

Although numerous media literacy training sessions on internet safety for children and adolescents have been conducted, their number contrasts sharply with the few systematic studies on their effectiveness. In this study, we describe the evaluation of nationwide-implemented training sessions on internet safety in Luxembourg, which included perceptions of learning outcomes and evaluations of implementation and effectiveness. Training data from 2011 to 2018 were analyzed, including 28,060 students and 5,031 teachers. Students reported pronounced learning effects, especially for younger students and for (...) repeated training participation. Teachers greatly appreciated the implementation and effectiveness, which generally increased over the years. The perceived effectiveness of the training was significantly related to teachers’ planning to cover internet safety topics in future lessons. The present study shows that carefully planned and continuously evaluated training sessions on internet safety successfully support children’s understanding and teachers’ willingness to implement internet safety in their curriculum. (shrink)

In recent years, corporate environmental policies have become urgently needed, demanded by influential environmentalist groups and launched by an increasing number of companies. Those demands and efforts, however, often lack an ethical underpinning. This paper deals with some basic ethical issues and outlines three perspectives for further investigation: (1) How can we take into account ethical pluralism that characterizes most contemporary societies?; (2) What is the content of environmental ethics viewed from a Christian perspective, taken as an example of various (...) existent doctrines in the pluralistic world?; and (3) What relevance may this "Christian environmental stewardship" have for the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility? (shrink)

The idea of nature in medical theory and practice -- Diseases -- Health: popular concept and philosophical question -- Is a pedagogy of healing possible? -- The problem of regulation in the organism and in society.

The organizational justice literature and the family business literature have developed independently, which limits our understanding of fairness and justice in the family business workplace. So far, the concepts of justice and fairness have been used interchangeably in the family business literature, as if objective measures that aim to increase justice in the workplace will automatically translate into fairness perceptions among family business employees. By integrating the organizational justice literature and the family business literature, we first differentiate between the two (...) concepts of justice and fairness and argue that a utilitarian conceptualization of justice may come into direct conflict with fairness perceptions in the family business workplace. Second, we shed light on the importance of incorporating socioemotional goals, particularly those that reveal a bright side of socioemotional wealth, into rules and regulations designed to increase justice in the workplace, which, we argue, contributes to increasing fairness perceptions among employees and to building and maintaining an ethical family business workplace. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern PracticeDavid DepewPrudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth."This volume," writes the editor, "is one contribution to the contemporary revival of interest in the concept of prudence" (ix). What interest? Notably, that of latter-day "virtue ethicists," whose discontents with the algorithmic decision-making procedures of modernism have given wings to a hope (...) that we (considered as members of some sort of imagined polis) will return to the context-sensitive "practical wisdom" of the ancients. (Prudentia is Cicero's Latin translation of the Greek phronesis, practical wisdom.)In theory, this line of reasoning was supposed to break the mold of contemporary politics. In practice, it has been captured by the political right. Virtue ethicists and civic republicans like Benjamin Barber have been outflanked by "virtuecrats" such as Bill Bennett (he of the gambling habit), the pompous columnist George Will, and Amitai Etzioni, the neo-corporatist founder of the Communitarian Party. It should be said right away, then, that few, if any, of the contributors to this collection are sympathetic to this sort of thinking. Admittedly, they share with virtuecrats a critique of rule-governed forms of decision-making, whether deontological or utilitarian, especially when these procedures masquerade as ways of "operationalizing" morality. Such calculi are indeed creatures of the institutional cultures of business firms and bureaucracies, which have increasingly affected law and politics. In addition, the authors of this volume are no less inclined than right-leaning virtuecrats to rake through intellectual history in order to come up with something relevant to the present and future. "There is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present" (20). But they do so with a view to seeing what will come up when management of the topic of prudence is taken away from philosophers and reconnected (as it was from antiquity [End Page 167] until the nineteenth century) with the art of rhetoric, considered as an array of teachable discursive practices that are helpful in identifying and commending appropriate responses to contingent circumstances. The most salient features of the volume follow: a shift of the center of gravity from Aristotle to Cicero (ix), and a consideration of how, through rhetorical performances that involve the construction of a visible, embodied self, that strangest of creatures, a post-modern prudence, might be brought forth.I am pleased to report that changes of meaning in the collection's key term are discernible as we move from Cicero's prudentia to Machiavelli's prudenzia, and from the prudence that Edmund Burke invoked to justify American independence against his government's blind, imprudent rule-following to the quite different, and indeed incompatible, prudence that the Americans actually ended up with by the Jacksonian period, which is explored here by James Jasinski and Christine Oravec. Still, greater attention to the first great fracture in the concept, as phronesis moved across the Adriatic and became prudentia, would have made it clearer that, if there is to be a post-modern prudence, whether on terms set forth here by Maurice Charland or Hariman, or elsewhere by others, it cannot conceivably be seen as emerging out of a continuous root stock that managed to cross two seas intact, but as invented by doing repeated violence to a term, in part by providing it with a handsome pedigree that must be fitted up for the occasion.At this point let me register my only complaint. In spite of some useful remarks about Aristotle's notion of phronesis by Hariman and Charland, the volume lacks a systematic treatment of the Greek notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) even as a foil. This makes it difficult to see that the notion of phronesis was diversely interpreted by fourth-century Greeks; that Cicero's assimilation of phronesis to a Latin term already loaded with local associations—the subject of an informative essay by Robert Cape—might not preserve the Greek notion intact; that to the extent that Cicero does preserve aspects of Greek phronesis, his version is probably closer to Isocrates' rhetoric-friendly... (shrink)

INTRODUCTION This book is a systematic study of the problem of perception and knowledge. I intend to analyze the problem, to expound and criticize the most ...