The literature on corporate responsibility contains a wide range of arguments for business sector involvement in matters of social and political community. Some writers argue for extensive involvement, while others draw relatively narrow boundaries around the appropriate sphere of a company's nonbusiness activity. One way to classify and clarify these various views is to examine each in light of the notion of business-society relationship which underlies it. Four ways of understanding the business-society relationship are articulated here, together with the arguments (...) for corporate responsibility that emerge from them. (shrink)

Published in 1950: The Penseés is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and - above all - theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but who can be transformed through faith in God's grace.

The foundations of a theory of nonminimal coupling of matter and the gravitational field in the framework of Riemannian (or Riemann-Cartan) geometry are presented. In the absence of matter, the Einstein vacuum field equations hold. In order to allow for a Newtonian limit, the theory contains a new parameter l0 of dimension length. For systems with finite total mass, l0 is set equal to the Schwarzschild radius.

Purpose: Understanding the place of Ernst von Glasersfeld's Radical Constructivism (RC), and some of its implications, in the development of epistemology. Design: Characterization of two main options for the content of "knowledge" (without and with belief in mind-independent structures), sketch of their history in occidental thought; comparison of their properties concerning subjectivity, objectivity, second-order cybernetics, reliability of mental tools, and the needs and mechanisms for certainty and overall structures. Findings: Awareness that we structure mental working tools can, as RC suggests, (...) replace belief in mind-independent reality, and this change dissolves the conceptual problem of metaphysics-ontology, but also eliminates the certainty expected from it, which raises the possibility of relativism. Working-concepts cannot be deconstructed because they imply no ontological claims. Subject(s) are necessarily included in all knowledge (which does not mean solipsism): because subjective experience encompasses all mental tools, including those of objectivity and mathematics, while in contrast the subject itself cannot become an objective system. Practical reliability of mental tools differs from subjective certainty, which requires an ontological leap of faith to positive beliefs: for specific tools including automata, and for positive holistic structures. However, in agreement with the constructivist view, holistic views can instead have an unstructured center, with reliability = viability, which prevents relativism. In sum, belief in mid-independent reality is needed for certainty if desired; for all other purposes constructivism is more helpful. Implications: The change in view suggested by von Glasersfeld's work is of relevance for a number of fields of study with conceptual problems (such as the mind-brain relation). However, due to their generality, the implications will need evaluation in specific instances. The question of certainty needs attention for practical reasons. (shrink)

A new challenge for Bible translators A few decades ago the development of the dynamic-equivalent method of translation (which later became known as functional equivalence) broke radically away from the formal and traditional method of translation. Since then the functional-equivalent approach has undergone refinement, but the development can no longer be called revolutionary. However, research in the art of translation has now shifted from the method of translation to the format of the printed text (also called the paralinguistic features of (...) the text). In this article practical examples are given of how the employment of paralinguistic features can underscore the meaning of the text of the Bible, especially the Afrikaans Bible since it has become imperative to start working on a new translation. (shrink)

A trait is robust to a genetic or environmental variable if its variation is weakly correlated with variation in that variable. The source of robustness lies in the fact that the developmental processes that give rise to complex traits are nonlinear. A consequence of this nonlinearity is that not all genes are equally correlated with the trait whose ontogeny they control. Here we explore how developmental mechanisms determine and alter the correlation structure between genes and the traits that they control. (...) A formula is developed by which the correlation of a gene or environmental variable with a trait can be calculated if the mechanism that gives rise to the trait is known. The nature of robustness and the ways in which robustness can evolve are discussed in the context of the problems that arise in the analysis of inherently nonlinear systems. BioEssays 24:553–563, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Guidelines for a model bride in Islam based on Islamic teachings; includes stories of six exemplary Muslim wives during Prophet Muhammad's time.

The present work is intended once again to draw the attention of readers to the resources opened up by Spinoza for the elucidation of the classical problems of philosophy. Today these problems are too often taken to be merely verbal, so that answers to them so far as these are metaphysical are confidently claimed to be "nonsense. " My labours will, therefore, seem to minds thus committed to have been untimely and funda mentally futile. Untimely they may have been, but (...) unless also fu tile their untimeliness may render them the more exigent; and to judge them as futile is to claim a certainty not avaIlable to the honest sceptic. Vigorous attempts to discredit metaphysical investigation are no new thing, though the latest is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing, and cer tainly the most self-confident. Yet it may well be argued that effective criticism of metaphysics is either itself a sort of metaphysics, or has for its foundation presuppositions that could only be metaphysically es tablished. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. " Metaphysics survives, and can only survive as a true philosophia perennis, as the catalyst of scepsis and schism - neither as inexorabie dogma "once for all de livered," nor as "a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed. (shrink)

The present work is intended once again to draw the attention of readers to the resources opened up by Spinoza for the elucidation of the classical problems of philosophy. Today these problems are too often taken to be merely verbal, so that answers to them so far as these are metaphysical are confidently claimed to be "nonsense. " My labours will, therefore, seem to minds thus committed to have been untimely and funda mentally futile. Untimely they may have been, but (...) unless also fu tile their untimeliness may render them the more exigent; and to judge them as futile is to claim a certainty not avaIlable to the honest sceptic. Vigorous attempts to discredit metaphysical investigation are no new thing, though the latest is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing, and cer tainly the most self-confident. Yet it may well be argued that effective criticism of metaphysics is either itself a sort of metaphysics, or has for its foundation presuppositions that could only be metaphysically es tablished. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. " Metaphysics survives, and can only survive as a true philosophia perennis, as the catalyst of scepsis and schism - neither as inexorabie dogma "once for all de livered," nor as "a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed. (shrink)

In this book, William H. F. Altman turns to Demosthenes-universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity-and Plato's other Athenian students in order to add external and historical evidence for Plato's original curriculum.