Projects may exist in many forms, depending on the purpose and organisational context. Irrespective of the type and nature, however, the effective management of any project requires a high degree of commitment by the project members to the accomplishment of project objectives. The high degree of reliance on external international funding makes project management in non-profit organisations of developing societies a challenging task. The marriage of two entirely different sets of values and philosophical orientations creates an invisible tensile force, impacting (...) the different stages of the project life cycle. The present paper, which is exploratory in nature, broadly aims to study the impact of sponsors’ values on the different project-management activities, including both the planning and the implementation stages of the project. The research involves conceptualisation of the different significant issues in effective project management. The analysis of the identified issues is first made on the basis of the experience of the selected stakeholders in Tanzanian non-profit organisations. The analysis is further linked to the selected context-specific contemporary philosophical thoughts affecting the socio-cultural values in the region. The analysis shows that the variation in the values of project owners and stakeholders is one of the major challenges in the effective implementation of a project in the given context. The study is novel in its approach and raises some fundamental issues arising due to the different philosophical orientations and value-sets of the different partner-project organisations. It is expected that the study will stimulate further academic debate on the broader theme of ‘values, philosophy and project management’. The study is also likely to contribute to knowledge development in the subject area of management in general and practical management philosophy in particular. (shrink)

In most liberal democracies for example, the central bank is as independent as the supreme court, yet deals with a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. How do these public servants make these policy decisions? What normative principles inform their judgments? In The Machinery of Government, Joseph Heath attempts to answer these questions. He looks to the actual practice of public administration to see how normative questions are addressed. More broadly, he attempts to provide the outlines of (...) a "philosophy of the executive" by taking seriously the claim to political authority of the most neglected of the three branches of the state. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on John Locke as a representative figure of English Enlightenment theorizing about the legitimacy of cognitive authority and examine the way in which a greater attention to the cultural milieu in which Locke worked can lead to a profound reexamination of his writings on cognitive authority. In particular, I suggest that an inattention to the rise of a culture of reading and the growing availability of books in Early Modern England has led historians of philosophy (...) largely to misrepresent Locke's theory of testimonial justification. At the core of my paper are two interrelated claims. First, with respect to the history of ideas, I argue that the Locke's interest in testimony as a source of justification was in fact greater than that of his Scholastic forebears, and that this fact has a simple, if as yet unacknowledged, cultural cause -- viz., the rise of the book as a mass commodity in the late 17th century. Second, with respect to the history of philosophy more particularly, I argue that this failure to acknowledge the cultural movements that led to a consideration of testimony as a topic of interest to epistemologists in the Modern era has led to a misreading of Locke's work on the subject. Indeed, Locke, though usually read as having attempted to denigrate testimony as a legitimate source of justification, in fact sought to devise an epistemology that would do justice to the centrality of testimony in the intellectual lives of growing numbers of his contemporaries in 17th and 18th century England and Scotland. (shrink)

Provides a set of normative measure sto assess the value of nature and proposes the new discipline of foundational ecology as a response to environmental crisis.

Aware of the decline and imminent demise of many integrated steel mills in the United States and fascinated by their monumental architecture, machinery, and the culture of work and community that was inextricably connected to them, Joseph Elliott photographed the mills in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from 1989 until final shutdown in 1997. This book appeals to the growing fascination with industrial archaeology and will be an inspiration for the preservation and re-use of these relic structures.

A thesis familiar by being as often disputed as defended has it that intentional action is action for a reason. The present paper contributes to the defence of a weaker version of it, namely: Acting with an intention or a purpose is acting (as things appear to one) for a reason.

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 473-479, May 2022.

The Specter of Capital provides a searching historical analysis and critique of the role of classical and neoclassical economic theory in creating the economic conditions which produced the global financial crisis.

Arthur Fine has recently argued that standard realist and anti-realist interpretations of science should be replaced by "natural ontological attitude" (NOA). I ask whether Fine's own justification for NOA can meet the standards of argument that underlie his criticisms of realism and anti-realism. Fine vacillates between two different ways of advocating NOA. The more minimalist defense ("why not try NOA?") begs the question against both realists and antirealists. A stronger program, based on Fine's arguments for a "no-theory" of truth, has (...) promise, but the arguments must be developed in a stronger, more general form if they are to justify NOA. (shrink)

Countering the common assumption in affect theory that deconstruction is incompatible with studies of affect, this essay theorises a deconstructive approach to reading for affect in texts and examines the role affect has always played in deconstructive reading. It reads Derrida alongside Deleuze who has been influential in affect theory in order to explicate what deconstruction adds to existing poststructural theories of affect: namely, how affect functions at the scene of reading, shaping the reading itself and coming into view through (...) textual forms. In its second half, the essay turns to Cixous' ‘Savoir,’ demonstrating through a reading of that text what a deconstructive reading of affect looks like in practice and exploring the ethics of such an approach. (shrink)

The ArgumentBy the beginning of the fourteenth century, medicine had acquired a cultural role in addition to its traditional functions as a therapeutic art. Medical subject matter infiltrated the religious discourse via the new thirteenth-century encyclopedic literature. Preachers came to employ in their moral analogies a wider range of medical topics, using sophisticated medical examples and citations attributed to recognized medical authorities. These developments coincided with the growing prestige of medicine as an academic discipline.

On September 17, 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92.He was described as the official opposition of the “ Vienna Circle”, the philosophical club which in the inter-war period was glamorous and which espoused the then popular doctrine of logical positivism, so-called. His relations with that club were friendly-hostile, to use the term with which he liked to characterize the relations between scientific researchers. He is the last of that generation (unless it is Carl G. Hempel, who, however, (...) sees himself as too young to belong there). The public aspect of Popper’s friendly-hostile relations with his Viennese peers was unfortunately more hostile than friendly. Somehow, philosophers have managed to keep the accounts open for too long. The end of the era is the time to close accounts so as to be able to go on with the job at hand, since the intermingling of personal affairs with objective knowledge is unhealthy. Yet most of the leading heirs of the “ Vienna Circle” still coast around the issues raised by Popper, and so they can neither overlook him nor quote him correctly. If past evidence is reliable here, then this will alter just about now. Is it? (shrink)

A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on learning, (...) that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation’s effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). (shrink)

The full-text of the entire issue is available on the Web; readers seeing this should ensure that there is permission to download. It would be quite difficult to separate just my piece from the others.

This book presents and evaluates the understanding of political form in the work of Pierre Manent. The study of political form is Manent's central philosophical task. Manent places himself in the classical political tradition, with its foundations in human nature and in a politics that accords with nature; he also situates himself within a triangle of faith, philosophy, and politics. The book first examines the major influences on Manent; the overarching questions that guide his work on political form, the "theologico-political (...) question" and the question of the "modern difference" with the ancient view of man and politics; and his two intertwined paths of inquiry into political events and political thought. It includes a bibliography and an index. (shrink)

Bruno de Finetti is one of the founding fathers of the subjectivist school of probability, where probabilities are interpreted as rational degrees of belief. His work on the relation between the theorems of probability and rationality is among the corner stones of modern subjective probability theory. De Finetti maintained that rationality requires that degrees of belief be coherent, and he argued that the whole of probability theory could be derived from these coherence conditions. De Finetti’s interpretation of probability has been (...) highly influential in science. This paper focuses on the application of this interpretation to quantum mechanics. We argue that de Finetti held that the coherence conditions of degrees of belief in events depend on their verifiability. Accordingly, the standard coherence conditions of degrees of belief that are familiar from the literature on subjective probability only apply to degrees of belief in events which could be jointly verified; and the coherence conditions of degrees of belief in events that cannot be jointly verified are weaker. While the most obvious explanation of de Finetti’s verificationism is the influence of positivism, we argue that it could be motivated by the radical subjectivist and instrumental nature of probability in his interpretation; for as it turns out, in this interpretation it is difficult to make sense of the idea of coherent degrees of belief in, and accordingly probabilities of unverifiable events. We then consider the application of this interpretation to quantum mechanics, concentrating on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment and Bell’s theorem. (shrink)

To explain the connection, this book presents a new paradigm of nature and couples it with a convincing explanation of how our right brain hemispheres have a ...