Institutions are a kind of social infrastructure that facilitates – or hinders – human co-ordination and allocation of resources. Thus they function as a rationality context, which simultaneously emerges from and governs human interactions. Business institutions, as they are related to human expectations, should promote the values of their stakeholders and, consequently, they are subjects of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting procedures. Ethical institutions make the good of their stakeholder groups part of the institution’s own good. They have (...) a clear vision and picture of integrity throughout the institution which is owned and embodied by top management, over time. Such a practice presumes that business institutions, e.g. corporations, are social cultures with character, which can exercise good or bad influence, depending on goals, policies structures, strategies that formalize relations among the individuals who build up corporations. For developing an ethical culture, corporations need a large scale of instruments as codes of ethics and other kinds of support structures throughout the organization to insure their adequate communication, oversight, enforcement, adjudication, and review. Between all these instruments, a special role could be played by the ethics officer and the ethics committee, ethics trainings, ethics audits but also by the implementation of responsibility and participatory decision making at lower levels in the organisation. (shrink)

The paper presents some of the challenges facing contemporary Western societies and highlights their origin in capitalism’s unsound self-interpretation—as found in the most familiar modern social imaginaries. In reaction to the uncontested familiarity of these modern social imaginaries, the paper explores an alternative view of human relations in Buber’s philosophy of dialogue with the resumption of some of his ideas in contemporary theories about the sources and meaning of economic and social cooperation. The works referred to are Tomáš Sedláček’s The (...) Economics of Good and Evil and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization. Rifkin considers empathy the ability of human beings to show solidarity—not only with each other, but also towards their fellow creatures who they share both the planet and the attribute of mortality with. In this conception, humans have gone from empathy in blood ties, to empathy in religious associational ties, to empathy based on national identification. The emergence of an empathic civilization seems to be a consequence of an existential similarity of finite beings, combined with the possibilities brought on by the third industrial revolution. But if we search for the origin of the idea, we could also find it in other sources—among them the religious spirituality of Buber’s dialogic philosophy. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume II presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues. Imre Lakatos had (...) an influence out of all proportion to the length of his philosophical career. This collection exhibits and confirms the originality, range and the essential unity of his work. It demonstrates too the force and spirit he brought to every issue with which he engaged, from his most abstract mathematical work to his passionate 'Letter to the director of the LSE'. Lakatos' ideas are now the focus of widespread and increasing interest, and these volumes should make possible for the first time their study as a whole and their proper assessment. (shrink)

Proofs and Refutations is essential reading for all those interested in the methodology, the philosophy and the history of mathematics. Much of the book takes the form of a discussion between a teacher and his students. They propose various solutions to some mathematical problems and investigate the strengths and weaknesses of these solutions. Their discussion raises some philosophical problems and some problems about the nature of mathematical discovery or creativity. Imre Lakatos is concerned throughout to combat the classical picture (...) of mathematical development as a steady accumulation of established truths. He shows that mathematics grows instead through a richer, more dramatic process of the successive improvement of creative hypotheses by attempts to 'prove' them and by criticism of these attempts: the logic of proofs and refutations. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume 2 presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues.

Imre Lakatos; II—Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Page.

The work that helped to determine Paul Feyerabend's fame and notoriety, Against Method,stemmed from Imre Lakatos's challenge: "In 1970 Imre cornered me at a party. 'Paul,' he said, 'you have such strange ideas.

The purpose of this research was to describe attitudes of nursing students (and paramedic officers) towards marginalized clients. Convenience quota sampling in a major health faculty was employed. Students participated on a voluntary basis. A 58-item Likert scale, developed by the authors, assessed the student nurses’ attitudes. In general, attitudes towards homeless clients were neutral; detailed analyses, however, revealed that student nurses would decline to care for homeless clients in various situations. Personal experience with homeless patients and positive attitudes of (...) nurses significantly contributed to increased quality of care and equality of treatment for homeless clients. Certain student nurse behaviors warrant immediate attention to prevent marginalized patients from being exposed to unfair, inaccessible and biased nursing care. Based on our results, we recommend that further research attention be paid to the role of ethics education and faculty behaviors, as faculty members serve as role models for professionalization. (shrink)

This text, excerpted from a “diary novel” by Imre Kertész, appeared in both Hungarian and German in 2014. Now suffering with an advanced stage of Parkinson's disease, the author considers it the last work that he will be able to complete.

v. 1. The methodology of scientific research programmes.--v. 2. Mathematics, science, and epistemology.

La géométrie non euclidienne fut non seulement un bouleversement sans précédent dans l'histoire des mathématiques, mais également une bouffée d'air pur pour les partisans d'une "vérité sans les dogmes". Par ce "non" augmentatif, elle affirmait l'existence d'un en-dehors de l'Être, vingt-quatre siècles après le Parménide de Platon, et plaçait, more geometrico, la philosophie dans l'espace de la spiritualité occidentale, ouvrant la voie à la liberté dans le domaine des sciences rigoureuses. C'est aux implications philosophiques de cette révolution mathématique qu'est consacré (...) l'essai d'Imre Toth, qui étudie également certains aspects de la pensée de Gottlob Frege, farouche adversaire de la géométrie non euclidienne, pour en démontrer les impasses et les fourvoiements. (shrink)

This influential book discusses the nature of mathematical discovery, development, methodology and practice, forming Imre Lakatos's theory of 'proofs and refutations'.

La question au nombre irrationnel et de l'irrationnel mathématique en général, tient une part discrète dans l'oeuvre de Platon, mais elle est comme cette "pierre délaissée par les architectes" et qui est pourtant "la pierre angulaire". Elle concentre toutes les questions de l'être et du non-être, du possible et de l'impossible, du fini et de l'infini et ouvre la voie à la liberté pleine et entière de l'homme en quête de vérité. En elle, convergent pensée mathématique et spéculation philosophique, en (...) une harmonie riche de conséquences inestimables. C'est cette harmonie que révèle Imre Toth dans un essai brillant et rigoureux, le dernier qu'il ait écrit avant sa brusque disparition en mai 2010. "Les Editions de l'éclat viennent de contribuer à réparer ce qui apparaît comme une lacune de l'édition française en publiant deux textes récents d'Imre Toth" - Françoise Balibar (Critique). "Le livre de Toth est extrêmement séduisant, croisant la polémique politique la plus vive avec l'initiation limpide aux problèmes fondamentaux de la philosophie des mathématiques" - Jean-Paul Thomas (Le Monde). "Philosophes comme historiens des sciences pourront tirer profit de ce regard enflammé sur le processus mathématique, qui place la liberté au coeur de la création, mais va au-delà en cherchant à comprendre son fonctionnement, précisément en mathématique" - Jean-Michel Kantor (La Quinzaine littéraire). (shrink)

According to Russell’s famous Gray’s Elegy argument within “On Denoting”, Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung is problematic when applied to a denoting phrase like ‘the first line of Gray’s Elegy’, which denotes a linguistic expression: ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day’. The author shows that Russell’s Gray’s Elegy argument involves imprecision in the use of quotation marks as well as the unwarranted identification of an expression’s meaning with the expression itself.

"C'est un palimpseste : une succession de textes tirés des oeuvres complètes des auteurs à peu près complets. Le choix effectué par la lecture se trouve incarné dans l'ordre de l'écriture. Et cet ordre est porteur d'un message, il véhicule une thèse, il articule une idée dont le sens ne devient transparent que par le tout. Désormais les fragments extraits des texte ne représentent que le maillons d'une unique chaîne connexe de paroles, segmentss d'un entier : le texte du Palimpseste. (...) Derrière ce choix un axiome est caché, une assertion qui stimule et justifie la composition et, en dernière instance, garantit l'existence et légitime la subsistance autonome du texte. C'est ce que, par un terme emprunté à la théorie des ensembles de Georg Cantor, on pourra appeler "axiome du choix" ou encore, en une formulation quelque peu différente mais peut-être plus adéquate pour le traitement des textes, "axiome de sélection". L'axiome du choix permet donc l'assemblage d'un texte uniquement constitué de citations. Il permet aussi de citer des textes inexistants : ce sont alors des textes écrits exprès et pour l'unique raison d'être cités.... Le parler, comme l'a fait remarquer à plusieurs reprises Platon, est une praxis et l'axiome du choix confère au sujet le privilège d'exercer la fonction de choix : de sélectionner, de découper et d'assembler en un polymère verbal des fragments hétérogènes appartenant initialement à des textes préexistants. Le choix qui a présidé et guidé la navigation dans la métagalaxie des textes préexistants relève de cette liberté : sélectionner des "Propos" concernant le "Triangle", euclidien ou non, et de les assembler en un unique lieu et dans le présent indivisible d'une unique écriture étalée sur la surface du papier.". (shrink)

In the mathematical documents which have come down to us from these peoples, there are no theorems or demonstrations, and the fundamental concepts of ...