While the demise of Enron has raised a number of interesting issues, such as proper governance of large corporations, and the effectiveness and efficiency of statutory direction and regulatory mechanisms, the lack of meaningful vocal stakeholder stewardship has not been one of them. While the relative “silence” of Enron’s stakeholders (watchdogs) could simply have been a communication glitch, or a temporary lapse in social morality, an understanding of hat was not said and why, could well be a significant requisite in (...) formulating meaningful measures to preclude future Enrons. Why weren’t the watchdogs barking? Why had the stakeholder alert system shut down? Further, what are the implications for then and now of this quiescence? Since Enron’s demise many questions have been asked and answered about what went wrong. But little has been said about why the stakeholders failed to speak out by exercising their fiduciary responsibilities. This paper takes a closer look at the behavior of some key Enron stakeholders. (shrink)

Conceptually, entrepreneurship is seen as the engine that drives a robust economy, promotes a favorable quality of life, and assures the availability of the attributes needed for meaningful living. However, like many popular concepts in this world, its limitations are normally not well acknowledged. A grouping of entrepreneurial ventures which has recently come into existence deals with the personal fiscal issues associated with the end-of-life phase of the human cycle. While generally praised as humanitarian services for society, that are assuredly (...) within legal bounds, these activities have potentially significant negative implications. When examined from an ethical perspective, some questionable practices became apparent. Three such undertakings in particular have to do with the terminally ill and are examined in this paper. The first, viatical transactions, is defined as the transfer of a life insurance policy's ownership to someone who does not have an insurable interest in the life of the insured individual. The second, creative tax shelters for wealthy people involved in estate planning, involves hiring unrelated parties, particularly those who are young and in failing health, to do the dying for the principal. The third, mind games, involves curtailing the use of medical resources for the dying. The justification for this is rationing scarce medical resources. (shrink)

Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions (...) that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The privilege of having three sets of extensive and hard-hitting comments on one's work is as welcome as it is rare, and especially so on this occasion as the lectures were, for me, but thefirst (well, not entirely first) stab at a subject I hope to explore at greater length. The reflectionsthat follow will respond to some of the criticisms, but will not be a point by point reply. I will use the occasion to clarify some obscurities in the lectures, (...) and to contrast my view with some of my critics' own positions. I will proceed thematically, starting with some observations about method and about ontology, proceeding to explore several questions about the relations between social dependence and relativism, between genre, value, and normativity, and concluding with a fewwords on pluralism and liberal values. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts (...) that stratification is favored, ceteris paribus, by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. (shrink)

What is special about legal reasoning? In what way is it distinctive? How does it differ from reasoning in medicine, or engineering, physics, or everyday life? The answers range from the very ambitious to the modest. The ambitious claim that there is a special and distinctive legal logic, or legal ways of reasoning, modes of reasoning which set the law apart from all other disciplines. Opposing them are the modest, who claim that there is nothing special to legal reasoning, that (...) reason is the same in all domains. According to them, only the contents of the law differentiate it from other areas of inquiry, whereas its mode of reasoning is the one common to all domains of inquiry. (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.

Since there is no normal pagination on a web page, I assign in lieu of that paragraph numbers, included in brackets and placed flush right, just above the paragraph, for purposes of scholarly reference: they are not in the previously published version above. Apart from that the texts are substantially identical.

Essays by Rudolf Bernoulli, Martin Buber, C. M. von Cammerloher, T. W. Danzel, Friedrich Heiler, C. G. Jung, C. Kerényi, John Layard, Fritz Meier, Max Pulver, Erwin Rousselle, and Heinrich Zimmer. With an introduction by Mircea Eliade.

Essays by Julius Baum, C. G. Jung, C. Kerényi, Hans Leisegang, Paul Masson-Oursel, Fritz Meier, Jean de Menasce, Georges Nagel, Walter F. Otto, Max Pulver, Hugo Rahner, Paul Schmitt, and Walter Wili.

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)

By the 1960s many, perhaps most, philosophers had adopted 'physicalism' – the view that physical causes fully account for mental activities. However, controversy persists about what counts as 'physical causes'. 'Reductive' physicalists recognize only microphysical (elementary-particle-level) causality. Many, perhaps most, physicalists are 'non-reductive' – they hold that entities considered by other 'special' sciences have causal powers. Philosophy of chemistry can help resolve main issues in philosophy of mind in three ways: developing an extended mereology applicable to chemical combination; testing whether (...) 'singularities' prevent reduction of chemistry to microphysics; and demonstrating 'downward causation' in complex networks of chemical reactions. (shrink)

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

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

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.

The changes from the original version are relatively minor, but enough to make it necessary to treat the present version as a distinct text for purposes of exact reference. Since there is no normal pagination on a web page, I assign in lieu of that paragraph numbers, included in brackets and placed flush right, just above the paragraph, for purposes of scholarly reference.

In this culmination of a lifetime's study, Joseph Cropsey examines the crucial relationship between Plato's conception of the nature of the universe and his moral and political thought. Cropsey interprets seven of Plato's dialogues—_Theaetetus_, _Euthyphro_, _Sophist_, _Statesman_, _Apology_, _Crito_, and _Phaedo_—in light of their dramatic consecutiveness and thus as a conceptual and dramatic whole. The cosmos depicted by Plato in these dialogues, Cropsey argues, is often unreasonable, and populated by human beings unaided by gods and dealt with equivocally by (...) nature. Masterfully leading the reader through the seven scenes of the drama, Cropsey shows how they are, to an astonishing degree, concerned with the resources available to help us survive in such a world. This is a world—and a Plato—quite at odds with most other portraits. Much more than a summary of Plato's thinking, this book is an eloquent, sometimes amusing, often moving guide to the paradoxes and insights of Plato's philosophy. (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)

Cet article se propose d’étudier de quelle façon l’« Introduction à la métaphysique » de Henri Bergson fut traduite en chinois entre 1918 et 1921. En analysant trois traductions proposées successivement par Liu Shuya, Cai Yuanpei et Yang Zhengyu, l’auteur met en lumière différents enjeux de la traduction des œuvres philosophiques occidentales. En retraduisant en français ces textes chinois, il met en évidence les décalages linguistiques et culturels. Bien loin de condamner d’éventuelles maladresses des traducteurs, l’objectif est de rechercher les (...) raisons et les conséquences de ces dernières. Ainsi, on constate que ces versions chinoises, réalisées par des intellectuels non francophones et non spécialistes de Bergson, ont été à l’origine, en Chine, d’une certaine moralisation du bergsonisme, et plus particulièrement de la notion d’intuition. Les échos culturels des mots employés ont déplacé le texte de Bergson vers de nouvelles problématiques. (shrink)