In terms of reversal theory, both dominant and alternative explanations of the initiation of organizational wrongdoing assume that its perpetrators act in a telic state of mind. This leaves us with explanations of organizational wrongdoing that are insufficiently appreciative of the agent’s experience. The human mind can be creative and imaginative, too, and people can fully immerse in their activity. We suggest that the paratelic state of mind is relevant for the phenomenological understanding of the initiation of original, creative, daring (...) courses of action, and that the paratelic state of mind may originate courses of action that social control agents, at a later moment in time, may label as organizational wrongdoing. Our proposal is especially relevant when organizational agents are on a course of exploration, facing uncertainty, complexity, and unavailability of information. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 98-99 [Access article in PDF] Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, editors. Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Pp. xi + 342. Paper $38.00. This book contains twelve essays that work together to trace a variety of theories of emotion, intellect, and will, specifically connected to the possibility of moral decision and action, that (...) run from the late ancient period to the early modern period. Though some essays are more history than philosophy, the collection nevertheless balances out and brings to the reader an in-depth study of what the editors rightly describe as a neglected field of research. Contributors are: Calvin Normore, Simo Knuuttila, Risto Saarinen, Mikko Yrjonsuuri, John Boler, Vesa Hirvonen, Henrik Lagerlund, Lorenzo Casini, Peter King, Deborah Brown, and Lilli Alanen.It is clear from the editors' introduction that the idea behind the collection is the piecing together of a complex patchwork of theories, showing how they form a single, coherent intellectual history from Boethius to Descartes. Time will tell whether the story told holds up. Several of the essays bring to light previously ignored philosophers of the medieval and scholastic periods who are seen as important players in the history being worked out. And, several essays (Brown's and Alanen's, e.g.) forward new and interesting—though arguably controversial—takes on philosophers well known to many (in their cases, Descartes). So, there is much worth looking at here.There are a few philosophical landmines. For example, in places authors seem unconcerned about potential problems arising from the way in which a view is stated. For instance, in explaining how a human being wills, the view that the willing is done via a faculty inherent in the soul is developed. This, of course, is all well and good. But, the author goes on to say, "If whatever the will wills is attained..." (18), which makes the will the subject of willing, not the human being. The will is also said to have passions, and the rational part of the soul an appetitive faculty (ibid.). So, is it that human beings do not will and do not have passions, but the wills will and have passions? Doesn't such a 'theory' simply push back what it is that needs to be explained? For, how does the will will? Does it have a faculty that wills, and so on? The trouble is that the reader is not sure whether the landmine is inherent in the view being discussed, an artifact of the text, or something invented by an author in the exegesis itself. [End Page 98]The river is high with respect to the readings. And so, it is not recommended to those coming, for example, to the topics of rational choice, free will, or weakness of will for the first time. However, it is highly recommended to those whose research deals with such topics, or is in the field of the history of philosophy of mind. Kurt Smith Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania... (shrink)

Perceptual theories of emotion purport to avoid the problems of traditional cognitivism and noncognitivism by modelling emotion on perception, which shares the most conspicuous dimensions of emotion, intentionality and phenomenality. In this paper, I shall reconstrue and discuss four key arguments that perceptual theorists have presented in order to show that emotion is a kind of perception, or that there are close analogies between emotion and perception. These arguments are, from stronger to weaker claims: the perceptual system argument; the argument (...) from noninferential structure; the argument from epistemic role; and the argument from phenomenology. I argue that, while the arguments in favour of assimilating emotion to perception fail, the analogies between emotion and perception are not as close as perceptual theorists suggest even if some emotions resemble perception more than others, thanks to the two-levelled structure of emotional processing. (shrink)

This paper deals with the ontological foundations of the Soviet interpretation of dialectical materialism as exemplified by one of its “founding fathers,” Abram Deborin, in his works of the late 1920s. It has been claimed that the “ontologizing” tendency in Soviet philosophy is due to the influence of Friedrich Engels and his ideas pertaining to the dialectics of nature. However, a more plausible interpretation is that the ontologism of Soviet philosophy is connected with the rejection of the Kantian Copernican turn (...) in philosophy and the idea of the primacy of gnoseology it implies. In this article, I argue in favor of the latter thesis. Ontologism, i.e., the tendency to give priority in philosophy to questions concerning Being, and anti-Kantianism are but two sides of the same coin. (shrink)

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of ?straightforwardly shared? emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions (...) in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants? shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about ?straightforward sharing? is argued to be of secondary importance. (shrink)

Peltokorpi and Hood provide a systematic review of theory and research examining the ways communication and conversations help dyads, groups, and teams form and maintain transactive memory systems (TMS; Wegner, Erber, & Raymond, 1991) through overlapping encoding, storage, and retrieval processes. Peltokorpi and Hood organized their systematic review of 34 articles published in psychology, communication and organization research and management into four main themes: i) communication frequency and quality; ii) communication medium and group development, iii) communication styles, and iv) communication (...) networks. (shrink)

While there are growing bodies of research examining both the differences between strongly and poorly socially performing firms, and the impact of firm leaders on other strategic outcomes, little has been done in examining the effect of firm leaders on corporate social performance (CSP). This study directly addresses this issue by using upper echelon theory, and the KLD Research Analytics CSP ratings, to show that observable CEO characteristics predict differences in CSP between firms, even when firm and industry characteristics are (...) controlled for. Using a sample of 650 public US firms I find that strong or exemplary CSP, as measured by the strengths categories of KLD's ratings, is positively related to the CEO having a bachelor's degree in humanities, having a breadth of career experience and being female. I find that KLD strength ratings are negatively related to the CEO having a bachelor's degree in economics and to their level of short-term compensation. Preliminary tests of causality support the assertion that these effects reflect CEO discretion rather than being an artifact of reverse causality. Significant relationships between the CEO characteristics and poor social performance as measured by the concerns categories of KLD's ratings are not found. This suggests that CEOs have more discretion in influencing strong and exemplary social performance than in impacting poor CSP. Implications, particularly for economics education, are discussed. While there are many fruitful directions for future research, the benefits and challenges to conducting similar studies in other countries is focused upon to correspond to the global nature of this special issue. (shrink)

Philosophers widely agree that emotions may have or lack appropriateness or fittingness, which in the emotional domain is an analogue of truth. I defend de Sousa's account of emotional truth by arguing that emotions have cognitive content as digitalized evaluative perceptions of the particular object of emotion, in terms of the relevant formal property. I argue that an emotion is true if and only if there is an actual fit between the particular and the formal objects of emotion, and the (...) emotion's propositional content is semantically satisfied, or the target of the emotion exists. Emotions meet the syntactic and disciplinary requirements of minimally truth-apt states. Appropriate fit occurs when lower-level properties of particular objects of emotion provide sufficient warrant to make ascription of the relevant formal properties superassertable. (shrink)

Research on the phenomenology of agency for joint action has so far focused on the sense of agency and control in joint action, leaving aside questions on how it feels to act together. This paper tries to fill this gap in a way consistent with the existing theories of joint action and shared emotion. We first reconstruct Pacherie’s account on the phenomenology of agency for joint action, pointing out its two problems, namely the necessary trade-off between the sense of self- (...) and we-agency; and the lack of affective phenomenology of joint action in general. After elaborating on these criticisms based on our theory of shared emotion, we substantiate the second criticism by discussing different mechanisms of shared affect—feelings and emotions—that are present in typical joint actions. We show that our account improves on Pacherie’s, first by introducing our agentive model of we-agency to overcome her unnecessary dichotomy between a sense of self- and we-agency, and then by suggesting that the mechanisms of shared affect enhance not only the predictability of other agents’ actions as Pacherie highlights, but also an agentive sense of we-agency that emerges from shared emotions experienced in the course and consequence of joint action. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral problems in relation to Information Technology (IT) require new theories of ethics. In recent years, an interesting new theory to address such concerns has been proposed, namely the theory of Information Ethics (IE). Despite the promise of IE, the theory has not enjoyed public discussion. The aim of this paper is to initiate such discussion by critically evaluating the theory of IE.

On one day in 2009, in 38 countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation - an attempt to enable normal people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process.This book, written by the international practitioners and scholars who facilitated the project, analyses the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event. Despite the apparent success of the individual deliberations, the recommendations had (...) little impact within the media or the policy process at Copenhagen. The authors examine these successes and failures, and the challenges and opportunities of such deliberative events. Through this they explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global: the role of deliberation within global governance; methodology and practice; participant selection; policy impacts; engaging the media; how policy culture affects deliberation uptake; capacity building and knowledge transfer; process evaluation; content and argumentation analysis; and gender, race and class aspects.The global aims of the WWViews project, along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale. (shrink)

Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was an outstanding philosopher, whose ideas not only influenced profoundly the Soviet philosophy, but even left their mark on the discussions concerning the role of the dialectical method, the theoretical foundations of psychology and the philosophy of Marxism in general. This volume is based on the selected materials presented twenty years after the death of Ilyenkov at an international congress in Helsinki. The contributions focus on several areas of Ilyenkov's influence: on psychology, on semiotics, on the logic (...) of Marx's Capital. The volume also includes a previously unpublished foreword by Ilyenkov to the Russian edition of Hegel's Science of Logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse Hobbes’s understanding of democracy. The first part of the article analyses the role of democracy in the social contract. It aims to show how there exists a democratic element at the beginning of the process of social contract, in which the multitude is transformed into a people. However, after the first social contract is made, Hobbes aims to reduce the power of the people by leading the process of social contract on to (...) another level, on which the power of the people is assigned to a representative of the sovereign power, for example a monarch. The second part of the article aims to explain the practical reasons, provided by Hobbes in different parts of his political theory, for his aversion to a democratic form of government. Main reason for this, it is argued, is that democratic government is closest to the unwanted multitude. Thus, in his political theory Hobbes uses democracy to build sovereign power, but does not trust it as a form of government. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence continues to have a fundamental impact in our world and lives, a crucial need arises for integrating ethical and constructivist principles in the design of AI ….

The book reinterprets the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, the leading light of the Frankfurt School and one of the most influential leftist intellectuals of the twentieth century, by arguing that his worries over the frailty of reason and democracy were inspired by radical conservative thinkers of Weimar Germany.

English summary: Confidence and doubt : change of emphasis from harmony to tragedy in Miguel de Unamuno's understanding of faith.

A Kantian Utopia in Russia: Erikh Solov'ëv. The article deals with Erikh Solov'ëv, a historian of philosophy who is one of the best Soviet and post-Soviet exponents of Kant. In several of his works and articles, published in the 1990s, Solov'ëv has attempted to apply the ideas of Kant's social philosophy to post-Soviet realities. Kant is important above all as a theoretician of a free subjectivity, human rights, and a critic of paternalism in social life. Several Kantian motives came to (...) the fore during the perestrojka when the Marxist "class approach" was abandoned and "all-human" values entered into the discussion. Later, Solov'ëv attempted to develop Kantian guidelines for a post-Soviet society, including moral norms for businessmen in the new Russia, but these attempts bore the distinct hallmark of social utopianism. (shrink)

The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the calculations. However, we usually have only testimonies for the common events. While this difference does not have a significant effect on the inductive part of the inference, it has a large influence on how one should view the reliability of testimonies. In (...) this work, a full Bayesian solution is given for the more realistic case, where one has a large number of testimonies for a common event and one testimony for an uncommon event. A free-running parameter is given for the unreliability of testimony, to be determined from data. It is seen that, in order for there to be a large amount of testimonies for a common event, the testimonies will probably be quite reliable. For this reason, because the testimonies are quite reliable based on the testimonies for the common events, the probability for the uncommon event, given a testimony for it, is also higher. Perhaps surprisingly, in the simple case, the increase in plausibility from testimony for the uncommon events is of the same magnitude as the decrease in plausibility from induction. In summary, one should be more open-minded when considering the plausibility of uncommon events. (shrink)

Spiritual violence is a modern concept expressing the abusive aspects of religion. This article observes the potential for spiritual violence within the rhetoric of the Gospel of Matthew, a principal text of the dominant world religion. Utilizing the supernatural punishment hypothesis of religion as a theoretical background, this cross-disciplinary analysis opens perspectives on the use of religious power in the past and the present.

The article analyzes Lev Vygotsky’s attempts to utilize Spinoza’s philosophical ideas in solving the methodological crisis of psychology in the 1920s and 1930s. Vygotsky had a manuscript, Uchenie ob emocijakh, where he scrutinized the doctrines of the effects on Descartes and Spinoza. Whilst Descartes’ doctrine built on a dualistic soul versus body premise, Spinoza’s starting point was monistic. Despite his clear sympathies for Spinoza’s solution, which according to him was more compatible with Marxism, too, Vygotsky did not manage to finish (...) his study. One may, indeed, doubt whether Spinoza was able to deliver the decisive key for the solution of the dualism problem, since his philosophy built on metaphysical postulates that were unacceptable to Vygotsky. (shrink)

The Fable of the bees and the Treatise of human nature were written to define and dissect the essential components of a 'civil society'. How have early readings of the Fable skewed our understanding of the work and its author? To what extent did Mandeville's celebrated work influence that of Hume? In this pioneering book, Mikko Tolonen extends current research at the intersection of philosophy and book history by analysing the two parts of the Fable in relation to the (...) development of the Treatise. Focussing on the key themes of selfishness, pride, justice and politeness, Tolonen traces the evolution of Mandeville's thinking on human nature and the origins of political society to explore the relationship between his Fable and Hume's Treatise. Through a close examination of the publishing history of the Fable and F. B. Kaye's seminal edition, Tolonen uncovers hitherto overlooked differences between Parts I and II to open up new approaches in Mandeville scholarship. As the question of social responsibility dominates the political agenda, the legacy of these key Enlightenment philosophers is as pertinent today as it was to our predecessors. (shrink)

The philosophy of mechanisms has developed rapidly during the last 30 years. As mechanisms-based explanations (MBEs) are often seen as an alternative to nomological, law-based explanations, MBEs could be relevant in IS. We begin by offering a short history of mechanistic philosophy and set out to clarify the contemporary landscape. We then suggest that mechanistic models provide an alternative to variance and process models in IS. Finally, we highlight how MBEs typically contain deliberate misrepresentations. Although MBEs have recently been advocated (...) as critical realist (CR) accounts in IS, idealizations (deliberate misrepresentations) seem to violate some fundamental tenets of CR and research method principles for CR. Idealizations in MBEs, therefore, may risk being regarded as flawed in IS. If it turns out that CR cannot account for idealizations, naturalism can, and it does so without extra-philosophical baggage. (shrink)

It is this demand to address questions emerging from these experiential and normative perspectives to which this book on emotions, ethics, and authenticity ...

This chapter considers the extent to which David Hume is properly regarded as a Scottish philosopher at all. It begins by looking at A Treatise of Human Nature and argues that there is little, if any, discernible connection between it and either the education Hume received at Edinburgh or what was going on in Scottish letters in the 1720s and 1730s. It also explores ways in which Hume, like William Robertson, engaged with and subverted the usual tropes of Scottish history (...) writing. His writings on religious topics Scotland were never far from Hume’s mind. Hume repeatedly found himself involved in the struggle between ‘Moderate’ and ‘Orthodox’ wings of the Church of Scotland, and this had a significant impact on how he presented his philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Urban places are of central significance for cities both as built structures and as centers of everyday life. Due to the emergence of various design-led place-making policies and practices, “urban place” has largely become a marketed and branded product. Aesthetics plays a major role in this project of place-making, and the related interpretation of “commodified aesthetics of place” emphasizes certain experiential and qualitative place-attributes—such as authenticity—despite apparent conceptual confusions and controversies. A thorough reconsideration of central place-concepts is required to shed (...) light on this problematic sphere. This article provides an alternative reading of urban places and the related aesthetic dimensions, based primarily on a Heideggerian account of human existence as placed being in the world. Such an approach emphasizes the decisive difference between an object-based and a contextual interpretation of place, providing also a framework for understanding the aesthetics of place and its fundamental lifeworld-constituting role anew. (shrink)