Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways (...) to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements. (shrink)

This book explores the origins of western biopolitics in ancient Greek political thought. Ojakangas's argues that the conception of politics as the regulation of the quantity and quality of population in the name of the security and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as the western political thought itself: the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal (...) with all the central topics of biopolitics from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. Yet although the Western understanding of politics was already biopolitical in classical Greece, the book does not argue that the history of biopolitics would constitute a continuum from antiquity to the twentieth century. Instead Ojakangas argues that the birth of Christianity entailed a crisis of the classical biopolitical rationality, as the majority of classical biopolitical themes concerning the government of men and populations faded away or were outright rejected. It was not until the renaissance of the classical culture and literature - including the translation of Plato's and Aristotles political works into Latin - that biopolitics became topical again in the West. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the field of social and political studies, social and political theory, moral and political philosophy, IR theory, intellectual history, classical studies. (shrink)

It is common to hear Māori discuss primordial states of Being, yet in colonisation those very central beliefs are forced into weaker utterances. In this process those utterances merely conform to a colonised agenda. ‘Mātauranga’, a tidy term that overwhelmingly refers to an epistemological knowing of the world, colludes nicely with its English equivalent, ‘knowledge’, to further colonise those core contemplations of Being. Its plausibility relies on an orderly regard of things in the world. In education, historical and current practices (...) of schooling pave the way for things in the world so that they amount to mātauranga for Māori, and even the term ‘ako’ will conspire in its own way. Both Novalis and Heidegger have the ability to identify subtly colonising philosophies, and may even propose some theoretical solutions for Māori. (shrink)

Mobility robots may soon be among us, triggering a need for safety regulation. Robot safety regulation, however, remains underexplored, with only a few articles analyzing what regulatory approaches could be feasible. This article offers an account of the available regulatory strategies and attempts to theorize the effects of simulation-based safety regulation. The article first discusses the distinctive features of mobility robots as regulatory targets and argues that emergent behavior constitutes the key regulatory concern in designing robot safety regulation regimes. In (...) contrast to many accounts, the article posits that emergent behavior dynamics do not arise from robot autonomy, learning capability, or code unexplainability. Instead, they emerge from the complexity of robot technological constitutions coupled with near-infinite environmental variability and non-linear performance dynamics of the machine learning components. Second, the article reviews rules-based and performance-based regulation and argues that both will fail adequately constrain emergent robot behaviors. The article claims that controlling mobility robots requires a simulation-based regulatory approach. Simulation-based regulation is a novelty with significant theoretical and practical implications. The article argues that the approach signifies a radical break in regulatory forms of knowledge and temporalities. Simulations enact virtual futures to create a new regulatory knowledge type. Practically, the novel safety knowledge type may destabilize the existing conceptual space of safety politics and liability allocation patterns. (shrink)

Where has all the hilarity gone – and, with it, the ethics of the dark? In this article, I engage with our metaphysical entities of darkness and nothingness. Undermining and re-declaring are more than just pleasurable exercise for my own indigenous group – Maori; they are ethical necessities that keep one’s certainties in check. Whether it is agreeable or uncomfortable, this acknowledgement of those first beings is necessary if we are to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. I then consider one (...) controversial statement about trauma and lend my perverse, indigenous sense to it, reinterpret it and recalibrate it in light of our inherent fallibility as human citizens who are always destabilised by our own metaphysical entities. This drive to undercut ourselves by making our statements contingent on other things, I shall argue, is an ethical one. (shrink)

What does it mean to teach, live, and imagine one’s futures amidst a global pandemic? How to respond to the reality of unequal and overlapping crises, COVID-19 being one of them? Can alternative understandings of time help us create a more just post-pandemic university? Drawing on environmental humanities, disaster and critical time studies, in conversation with qualitative data, this article theorizes a ‘pedagogy of scale’: a practical and conceptual centering on multiple temporalities and diverse interpretative frames. The analysis argues for (...) the need to attend to overlapping, non-linear, and changeable scales of time, reference, and meaning that students draw on in order to make sense of crises: every crisis, even as unprecedented as COVID-19, is embedded in environmental processes, long-term vulnerabilities and injustices. These overlooked and overlapping scales interweave personal, planetary, and theological notions of time—from ecological deep time to the divine time—meaning, and self. In its focus on asynchronicity, overlap and multiplicity, the analysis extends current theorizations of temporality and crisis in higher education, challenges paradigms of mastery, advocates for epistemic plurality, and embraces decolonial notions of human subjectivity, providing a much-needed critical model for the post-pandemic university. (shrink)

In this article1 I will examine a metaontological problem, which has lately been thematized for example in [19]: what is the problem of universals? I will argue for a different solution from the one that has recently been popular, a solution that represents a return to an older view.

The Kimbanguists, whose church is based on the healing and proclamation ministry of Simon Kimbangu in 1921 in the Belgian Congo, challenge colonially defined borders and identities in multiple ways. Anticolonialism is in the DNA of Kimbanguism, yet in a manner that contests the colonially inherited dichotomy between religion and politics. Kimbanguists draw from holistic Kongo traditions, where the spiritual and material/political are inherently interwoven. Kimbangu’s home village, Nkamba, is the centre of the world for them, and Kongo culture and (...) the ancient kingdom form the backdrop of the Kimbanguist view of the new eschatological order to come. The reunification of the kingdom from the two Congo states and Angola will mark the inauguration of the new era. This will not, however, mean a splintering of the Democratic Republic of Congo but rather a removal of the colonial borders. That hints towards a Pan-African vision of a united Africa and even a universally united Black race that will play a central role in the eschatological salvation historical drama. The Kimbanguist vision also contains global dimensions, and their view of borders and identities is like Nkamba-centred ripples in water. This vision wipes away colonial borders and relativises ethnic, national and racial identities whilst strongly subscribing to a salvation historical narrative that places Africa and Africans in the centre. Contribution: This article contributes to the study of nationalism as well as of African Instituted Churches. The analysis of how the Kimbanguists relate to (Kinshasa) Congolese nationalism, Kongo ethnic identity and Pan-Africanism as well as of their global missional views reveals layers and complex patterns of relationship between all these. What facilitates the simultaneous subscribing to all these layers is an openness of identities (Kimbanguist national, ethnic, etc.), as well as a tendency to see the world as consisting of interdependent areas and human communities with their holy city, Nkamba, in the centre. (shrink)

Carl Mika claims in the symposium’s lead essay that we need more myth today. In fact, an “unscientific” attitude can potentially reorient the alienation from the world. For Mika, a philosophical mātauranga Māori incorporates such a way of being in the world. Through it, an unmediated and co-existent relationship with the world can be built up. Some of Mika’s co-symposiasts invite Mika to substantiate aspects about this bold claim. Carwyn Jones nudges Mika to discuss the (...) parallels between tikanga Māori—a system that seeks to incorporate Māori law—and the common-law tradition that is adopted in New Zealand today. W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz agrees with Mika that to understand the world through an indifferent “scientific” investigation is to understand the world only partially, while the Māori scientist Ocean Ripeka Mercier illustrates how she seeks to develop a third space in her work that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the propensity to control the world through knowing. Helen Verran invites Mika to think about whether, and how, his understanding of a philosophical mātauranga Māori can help to facilitate the cultivation of a naturalism that is able to generate a cosmopolitics in New Zealand. (shrink)

Modern logicians have complained that Aristotelian logic lacks a distinction between predication and assertion, and that predication, according to the Aristotelians, implies assertion. The present paper addresses the question of whether this criticism can be levelled against Aristotle’s logic. Based on a careful study of the De interpretatione, the paper shows that even if Aristotle defines what he calls simple assertion in terms of predication, he does not confound predication and assertion. That is because, first, he does not understand compound (...) assertion in terms of predication, and secondly, he acknowledges non-assertive predicative thoughts that are truth-evaluable. Therefore, the implications of Aristotle’s ‘predication theory of assertion’ are not as devastating as the critics believe. (shrink)

Providing an indigenous opinion on anything is a difficult task. To be sure, there is a multitude of possible indigenous responses to dominant Western philosophy. My aim in this paper is to assess dominant analytic Western philosophy in light of the general insistence of most indigenous authors that indigenous metaphysics is holistic, and to make some bold claims about both dominant Western philosophy in line with an indigenous metaphysics of holism. There will, of course, be different ways of expressing holism (...) according to the indigenous group, but most of the literature states, as a most basic concern, that a general indigenous philosophy is concerned with the groundedness of an individual as an entity related to and indivisible from the rest of the world.1 The consequences of any assertion about the holistic nature of metaphysics are vast, including for the interpretation of what is often perceived of as the antithesis: Western philosophy. (shrink)

I will use three simple arguments to refute the thesis that I appear to directly perceive a mind-independent material object. The theses I will use are similar to the time-gap argument and the argument from the relativity of perception. The visual object of imagination and the object of experience are in the same place. They also share common qualities such as the content, subjectivity, change in virtue of conditions of observers, and the like. This leads to the conclusion that both (...) a tree-image and a tree-experience are distinct from a material tree. Perception of an object is caused by human nature, the senses and consciousness, and mind may prevent the direct perception of the external world. The strongest objection against that consequence is that there is no extra entity called sense-datum or appearance between a subject-in-itself and a real external thing-in-itself. That is, we see books, not book-images. The possible reply would be that a person sees no mental pictures except that which they see via pictures. (shrink)

In order to study whether there exist a period of activity in the human early visual cortex that contributes exclusively to visual awareness, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation over the early visual cortex and measured subjective visual awareness during visual forced-choice symbol or orientation discrimination tasks. TMS produced one dip in awareness 60–120 ms after stimulus onset, while forced-choice orientation discrimination was suppressed between 60 and 90 ms and symbol discrimination between 60 and 120 ms. Thus, a time window specific (...) to visual awareness was found only in the orientation condition at 120 ms. The results imply that both conscious and unconscious perception depend on activity in early visual areas. On the basis of previous estimates of neural processing speed, we suggest that the late part of the activity period most likely involve local extrastriate–striate interactions which provide the contents for visual awareness but are not themselves sufficient for awareness to arise. (shrink)

Visual feature binding has been suggested to depend on reentrant processing. We addressed the relationship between binding, reentry, and visual awareness by asking the participants to discriminate the color and orientation of a colored bar and to report their phenomenal awareness of the target features. The success of reentry was manipulated with object substitution masking and backward masking. The results showed that late reentrant processes are necessary for successful binding but not for phenomenal awareness of the bound features. Binding errors (...) were accompanied by phenomenal awareness of the misbound feature conjunctions, demonstrating that they were experienced as real properties of the stimuli . Our results suggest that early preattentive binding and local recurrent processing enable features to reach phenomenal awareness, while later attention-related reentrant iterations modulate the way in which the features are bound and experienced in awareness. (shrink)

We re-examine the long-held postulate that there are two modes of thought, and develop a more fine-grained analysis of how different modes of thought affect conceptual change. We suggest that cognitive development entails the fine-tuning of three dimensions of thought: abstractness, divergence, and context-specificity. Using a quantum cognition modeling approach, we show how these three variables differ, and explain why they would have a distinctively different impacts on thought processes and mental contents. We suggest that, through simultaneous manipulation of all (...) three variables, one spontaneously, and on an ongoing basis, tailors one's mode of thought to the demands of the current situation. The paper concludes with an analysis based on results from an earlier study of children's mental models of the shape of the Earth. The example illustrates how, through reiterated transition between mental states using these three variables, thought processes unfold, and conceptual change ensues. While this example concerns children, the approach applies more broadly to adults as well as children. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to deepen our understanding of the inherent purpose of sports competitions. In ‘On Winning and Athletic Superiority’, Nicholas Dixon states that the central comparative purpose of an athletic contest is to determine which team or player is superior, or, synonymously, to provide an accurate measure of athletic superiority. Dixon identifies athletic skill as the standard of athletic superiority in competitive sport. However, I argue there are three separate standards of athletic superiority: the demonstration of (...) athletic skill, the achievement of prelusory goal using lusory means, and achievement of superior formal result. This stance responds to Dixon’s argument that failed athletic contests are contests that have not fulfilled the central purpose of competitive sport, because they have been undermined by refereeing errors, cheating, gamesmanship or bad luck. I argue that a failed athletic contest occurs when any of the three standards of athletic superiority conflict. (shrink)

We start this article from Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between propositional knowledge, ‘knowing-that’, and procedural knowledge, ‘knowing-how’, and investigate how participants in interaction display orientation to the latter in various settings. As the knowledge of how things are done, know-how can be analyzed in terms of its relevance and consequentiality for parties in interaction. Similarly, as participants adjust their actions and understandings according to their sense of what they know and assume others to know, their know-how and its distribution may form (...) the basis for adjusting and reshaping their actions, forms of participation and identities. In this sense, we aim at opening an investigation of know-how, and its conventionalized form, expertise, in interaction. In as much as it forms a distinct domain, a new research object – expertise in interaction – is formulated. Methodological issues of how to study expertise in interaction are discussed. The data are in English and Finnish. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse sport records and consider why there are two kinds of them: performance records and statistical records. Usain Bolt?s world record of 9.58?s in a 100?m race is a prominent example of a performance record, while an example of a statistical record is Michael Phelps? 18 Olympic gold medals. This categorisation of two types of sport record is a development of Sigmund Loland?s view. Loland focuses on performance records and largely ignores statistical records; (...) I develop Loland?s explanation of performance records and present an original description of statistical records. I also address an argument that Loland employs to challenge performance records?the record dilemma. My analysis of the relationship between performance records and statistical records reveals that a performance record is a special example of a statistical record. I also argue that the function of sport records is to direct sports towards universality, which reflects a common tendency of sports. The existence of two kinds of sport records allows this to be fully realised. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the concept of advantage in sport. Advantage is often referred to in discussions of the philosophy of sport, but only a few analyses of the term exist. Sigmund Loland has discussed advantage most comprehensibly. Nevertheless, his view does not address all of the relevant kinds of advantage. I begin with a summary of Loland's view and then show its limitations. I continue by developing his ideas further to present what I call performance (...) advantage, a comparative relationship between numbers attributed to performances. For instance, the performance of a football team that beat its opponent 3?2 is given a numerical value. However, another kind of advantage exists, one that I label property advantage. This term refers to advantage as a comparative relationship between different properties that affect performances. For example, a runner may have more haemoglobin than his or her competitor. I then outline the relationship between the two meanings of advantage. Finally, I summarise by stating that advantage in sport is a relationship of superiority that can be divided into performance advantage and property advantage. (shrink)

Our lives take place within specific time-space contexts, and in everyday life these contexts are taken as self-evident. Simultaneously, we have accepted the classical idea of fixed, permanent and acontextual truths. This paper argues that people use and are aware of various time-space contexts, and have implicitly created knowledge and approaches that work within them. The paper further argues that explicit consideration of time-space contexts should influence the tools, techniques and methods we use when making sense of each situation, and (...) determining the management interventions we make. (shrink)

In Maori thought, the possibility exists for a sort of lateral thinking that does not necessarily directly respond to another’s utterance or opinion but that considers some of the creative and arbitrary themes that arise. In this article, I employ this counter-colonial speculation, keeping in mind a Maori worldview whilst thinking in the wake of Elizabeth Rata’s “Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What’s Wrong with Kaupapa Maori?” The speculative powers that Maori have at our disposal here have undoubtedly been (...) employed in a number of ways throughout Maori history; here, I use them in a way that does not directly respond to a prompt. Although Rata’s true aim is to critique kaupapa Maori, she inadvertently brings my attention to a particular characteristic of her writing—the suffix -ism. The fact that it saturates her writing in this article leads me to consider the broader issues associated with instrumentalist language, and the impact of the -ism on a Maori relationship with things in the world. It emerges that, although Rata may be controversial for Maori in her views, her writing is useful for some unintended reasons, as it prompts some thinking around the appropriateness of the -ism for Maori. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe use of nanotechnologies is important to reduce environmental health problems in Iran, so the present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of nanotechnologies in environmental health. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study for 11-year periods (2008–2018) on all articles published in three specialized journals of environmental health with emphasis on the use of nanotechnologies in various fields of environmental health (water, air, sewage, waste, food, radiation, etc).ResultsIn this study, 774 articles related to 114 issues of 3 specialized environmental (...) health journals were reviewed. A review of 774 articles showed that 80 articles (10.3%) were published in the field of nanotechnologies. Out of 80 articles published in the field of nanotechnology, 66 articles (82.5%) were published on the subject of water, 9 articles (11.3%) on wastewater and 5 articles (6.2%) on air pollution. Subject review of articles showed that articles using carbon nanotubes to remove natural organic pollutants, surfactants, hydroxybenzenes, phenol, dimethyl phthalates, use of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, iron-magnesium nanoparticles for wastewater treatment, Silver nanoparticles were used to remove air pollution. The results showed that published articles on nanotechnology in the field of environmental health were few. (shrink)

In this study, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on corporate political activity by providing insights into how the content of corporate political strategy evolves over time within a single firm. A basic premise of the study is that the evolution of corporate political strategy is embedded within a broader social context that influences its pace and direction. Empirical evidence is based on a historical single case study of a large scale Finnish industrial conglomerate, Tampella Ltd., covering the (...) time period of 1944–1991. The results of the study show how the contextual forces shape the patterns of corporate political strategy. Moreover, an evolutionary model of intra-firm political strategies is introduced. (shrink)

No return to sweetness. The philosophical poem book Heavy Poems is drawn from splatter films and catalogs of violence and sex, but the language of poetry is the poet’s own. -/- The world of these poems is authentic, true, and sincere. Life and death measure each other. How is human value calculated? Which of us is valuable and who is worthless?

_ Source: _Volume 63, Issue 3, pp 257 - 292 It is commonly assumed that Aristotle defines a sense by reference to its ability to perceive the items that are proper to that sense, and that he explains perceptions of unities of these items, and discriminations between them, by reference to what is called the ‘common sense’. This paper argues in contrast that Aristotle defines a sense by reference, not only to its ability to perceive the proper items, but also (...) to its ability to discriminate between them, and thus aims to show that Aristotle’s theory of sense perception is basically a theory of perceptual discrimination. (shrink)

_Theological and Philosophical Responses to Syncretism: Beyond the Mirage of Pure Religion_ by Patrik Fridlund and Mika Vähäkangas elaborates the consequences of admitting the unavoidable syncretic nature of religions in theology and philosophy of religion.

This article addresses the question how to restore the biggest possible amount of fairness after a discovery of doping infringement. I will analyse eight actions that could be taken: disqualification and re-ranking, change in official result, medal stripping and medal re-awarding, ban, rematch, legal action, apology and forgiveness. I conclude that the best way to restore the biggest possible amount of fairness seems to be a selected combination of actions. I also propose that re-ranking and medal re-awarding should be accompanied (...) by a ceremony in which the new winners are celebrated because they typically did not have the possibility of enjoying their success in front of the original audience. (shrink)

In Western thought, it has been persistently assumed that in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience rather than on external authorities, laws, and regulations. This volume investigates this concept, examining the development of the Western politics of conscience, from Socrates to the present, and the formation of the Western ethico-political subject. The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense (...) against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics. This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization. (shrink)

This paper argues that the sport of ski jumping possesses the untapped potential to empower women. It also recommends ways in which this potential should be realised. The untapped potential of ski jumping lies in the notion that, under two independent conditions, women are able to jump as far as men. The first condition is that women start from a higher gate than men. The second is that women and men start from the same gate, but compete on a ski (...) flying hill. In order to realise the untapped potential, it is recommendable to take two steps to transform the practice of ski jumping. The first step is to introduce a mixed-pair competition for the 2014–2015 season. The second step is to introduce a sex-integrated individual competition for the 2016–2017 season. The sex-integrated competition can be either compensated or non-compensated. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political (...) notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. (shrink)

Through an argumentation analysis can one show how it is feasible to view a narrative religious text such as the Gospel of Matthew as a literary argument. The Gospel is not just good news but an elaborate argument for the standpoint that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah. It is shown why an argumentation analysis needs to be supplemented with a pragmatic literary analysis in order to describe how the evangelist presents his story so as to reach his (...) argumentative objective. The analysis also shows why in the case of historical religious literary texts, certain demands are put on the analyst that are not normally present. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a novel view of fairness: I explain fair sport competition through the notion of successful competition. I begin by analysing successful competition. I propose that competitions can be successful, both internally and externally. Internally successful competition is connected to the internal purpose of competition and has two senses: narrow and wide. Competition was internally successful in the narrow sense if three criteria of ‘betterness’ – official result, ideally adjudicated result, and display of athletic skills – (...) were congruous in that competition. Competition was internally successful in the wide sense if the three aforementioned criteria of betterness were congruous and the competition also embodied ‘sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome’. Externally successful competition is connected to the external purposes of competition. Financial gain is an example of an external purpose. I argue that competition was fair if it was internally successful in the narrow sense, that is, if the three criteria of betterness were congruous in the competition. (shrink)