In 1999, Neale Donald Walsch wrote three little books, each focusing on different areas of life: Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships, Neale Donald Walsch on Holistic Living, and Neale Donald Walsch on Abundance and Right Livelihood. In 2010, these three books were published in a single volume as Neale Donald Walsch's Little Book of Life. Walsch describes this book as a thousand pages of dialogue (...) in the Conversations with God series reduced down to a few salient points and a few very direct observations about how to render them functional. Readers can think of this book as either Conversations with God in a Nutshell or the Essential Conversations with God. Here are the basic principles for: Satisfying personal relationships; Living a joyful, harmonious life; Discovering authentic prosperity. Walsch's words provide hope and help for readers living in particularly challenging times. This is indeed Walsch's essential life guide for twenty-first century readers."--Back cover. (shrink)

A unique concept: 40 extraordinary people give answers to 10 searching questions about their beliefs. In our current age of uncertainty and turmoil, this is a book to give insight for life's journey and to encourage readers to confront the same questions themselves. "My suggestion or advice is very simple; that is, to have a sincere heart." - The Dalai Lama What Has Life Taught You? features the answers given by 40 outstanding people to 10 profound questions about life, the (...) mind and the spirit. Author Zoë Sallis has a passion for stirring up debate on philosophical and ethical questions and journeyed all over the globe to ask well-known figures of widely varying beliefs the same 10 questions. Interviewees include: Nelson Mandela His Holiness the Dalai Lama Neale Donald Walsch Anjelica Huston Jack Nicholson Sophia Loren Teale Swan Richard Dawkins David Lynch Gore Vidal And more... The questions range from "What is your concept of God?" and "Do you think this life is all there is, or do you believe in an afterlife?" to "What has life taught you so far?" and "How do you find peace within yourself?" Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living, and perhaps that is why he roamed the streets of Athens accosting people and asking them their thoughts and beliefs. By sharing the wisdom of these truly inspiring people, the book hopes to provoke debate and encourage readers to examine what they have learned on their life journey so far and share their own insights with others. (shrink)

With the dramatic collapse of bureaucratic dictatorial socialism, Business Ethicists need an antithesis to capitalism to enrich our reformist writings. Reliance on self-regulation and requesting that business executives behave in a socially responsible manner are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for creating a "good society." The purpose of this article is to introduce readers to the works of two new age theologians – Neale Donald Walsch and Reverend Sun Myung Moon – who offer an alternative vision and (...) paradigm for understanding business and society relationships. They provide unique insights about economics, organizational structures and policies, and individual attitudes and behaviors necessary for creating an ethical society. Pertinent economic and organizational concepts emanating from their writings include mission statements and codes of ethics; meaningful and joyful work; autonomy and self-management; workplace diversity; parentism and participatory management; stakeholder governance boards; democratic social capitalismwith upper and lower income limits; and the principle ofvisibility. Work should support family units and individualgrowth and development, not supersede or destroy them. (shrink)

Looks at the work of Gottlob Frege on truth and composition. It investigates Frege's idea that a sentence refers to a truth‐value, his Principle of Composition, and his abandonment of what Donald Davidson calls ‘semantic innocence’. Neale explains what kinds of slingshotian considerations prevented Frege from accepting facts as denotations of sentences and made him see sentences rather as names of truth‐values. The three sections of the chapter are: Reference and Composition; Innocence Abandoned; and The Reference of a (...) Sentence. (shrink)

Revolves around the matter of whether the stronger results that W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson were attempting to derive from slingshot arguments over facts might be forthcoming if other theories of descriptions were assumed. This also provides an opportunity to evaluate various theories as potential competitors to Bertrand Russell's theory. The four sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; Hilbert and Bernays ; Fregean Theories ; and Strawsonian Theories.

Chs. 9 convert the two basic forms of slingshot argument—one used by Alonzo Church, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, the other by Kurt Gödel—into knock‐down deductive proofs that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The proofs are agnostic on key semantic issues; in particular, they assume no particular account of reference and do not even assume that sentences (...) have references. Using the same procedure as in Chs. 8 and 9 shows that a slingshot argument engendered by Gödel's suggestions can be converted into a proof that delivers an exacting constraint on non‐extensional discourse—the Descriptive Constraint—and that is more general than anything Gödel appears to have had in mind. The proof of this constraint is constructed without appeal to logical equivalences, without assuming that a semantic theory must treat sentences as having references, without presupposing anything contentious about the semantics of singular terms, and without commitment to any particular semantics for definite descriptions. A constraint on facts, situations, states of affairs, and propositions—indeed on anything that is expressed or represented sententially—drops out as a trivial consequence of a constraint on non‐extensional discourse. The three sections of the chapter are: Principles of Conversion for Descriptions; Gödel's Proof in Quinean Format; and A Stronger Slingshot? (shrink)

Chs. 7 set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The previous chapter clarified what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and this one separates various inference principles common in extensional logic. The six sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; (...) A Principle of Substitutivity for Material Equivalents; A Principle of Substitutivity for Singular Terms; A Principle of Substitutivity for Logical Equivalents; An Inference Principle Involving ‘Exportation’; and A Principle of Substitutivity for Definite Descriptions. (shrink)

Chs. 8 and 9 convert the two basic forms of slingshot argument—one used by Alonzo Church, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, the other by Kurt Gödel—into knock‐down deductive proofs that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The proofs are agnostic on key semantic issues; in particular, they assume no particular account of reference and do not even assume (...) that sentences have references. Using this procedure, Ch. 8 shows that cleaned‐up versions of the slingshot arguments used by Davidson, Church, and Quine demonstrate theses weaker than those their authors were seeking—the impossibility of facts and non‐truth‐functional connectives. This is primarily because the arguments depend upon logical equivalences and theories of definite descriptions that must satisfy certain semantic conditions if the aforementioned logical equivalences are to obtain. The four sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; The Quinean Strategy; An Incomplete Connective Proof; and A Complete Connective Proof. (shrink)

Introduces the criticisms put forward by philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty to the idea that one thing might represent another: that thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are said to have content by virtue of their power to represent reality; and that those that do the job accurately are true, they correspond to the facts, or mirror reality—they are representations of reality. The author then outlines the deductive proof that he will present in the book to show that (...) Davidson's and Rorty's criticisms are unfounded. The content of the proof is based on the work of Kurt Gödel and W. V. Quine, and demonstrates conclusively that any supposedly non‐truth‐functional operation must satisfy an exacting logical condition in order to avoid collapsing into a truth‐function, and any theory of facts, states of affairs, situations, or propositions must satisfy a corresponding condition if such entities are not to collapse into a unity. The three main sections of the chapter: examine the case against representations made by Davidson and Rorty, including Davidson's notorious argument against facts; discuss Rorty's critique of representational philosophy ; and consider collapsing arguments that discredit the existence of facts, as put forward by Gottlob Frege, and developed by Alonzo Church, Quine, Davidson, and Gödel. The last section of the chapter outlines the structure of the book. (shrink)

Discusses the philosophy of Donald Davidson, who appears to have brought the slingshot argument to the current prominence within philosophical discussions. It examines Davidson's semantic programme, the relation between semantics and ontology that he champions, his arguments against facts and the scheme–content distinction, and the ways in which he and Richard Rorty assail the notion of representation. The chapter is arranged in nine parts: Introductory Remarks; Meaning and Truth; Reference and Ontology; Content and Other Complications; Facts and Correspondence; The (...) Great Fact; Scheme and Content; Realism and Objectivity; and Representation. (shrink)

Chs. 6 and 7 set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. Clarifies what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and the next separates various inference principles. The four sections of the chapter are: Extensions and Sentence Connectives; Scope; Extensional and (...) Non‐Extensional Connectives; and Intensional Connectives. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. _Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge_ addresses * Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind * the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul (...) Horwich * Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo * Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides. (shrink)

It is now often taken for granted that facts are entia non grata, for there exists a powerful argument (dubbed the slingshot), which is backed by such great names as Frege or Gödel or Davidson (and so could hardly be wrong), that discredits their existence. There indeed is such an argument, and it indeed is not wrong on the straightforward sense of wrong. However, in how far it knocks down any conception of facts is another story, a story which is (...) anything but simple and perspicuous. In his book, Stephen Neale takes pains to excavate the origins of the argument and the presuppositions which it needs to be usable for the purpose of exorcising facts. In the introduction of the book, Neale expresses his conviction that his analysis of the slingshot will not only compromise its usability for the purpose of discrediting facts, but also save representationalist conceptions of language and mind from the attacks of the antirepresentationalist philosophers like Davidson and Rorty. „Representational philosophy,“ he claims, „survives the Davidson-Rorty onslaught because non-truth-functional logics and ontologies of facts, states of affairs, situations and propositions survive not only the actual arguments deployed against them, but also the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments that can be constructed.“ However, what he does take his analyses to show is that „the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments demonstrate conclusively that the logical and ontological theories originally targeted must satisfy non-trivial conditions if they are to avoid logical or ontological collapse.“ (P. 12) The book starts with the discussion of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, who appears to have brought the slingshot argument to the current prominence within philosophical discussions. Here we encounter the first variant of the slingshot: Consider two sentences φ and ψ and a proper name d. Consider the definite descriptions ‘the object x such that (x = d and φ)’ and ‘the object x such that (x = d and ψ)’.. (shrink)

Sales professionals have been frequent targets of ethical criticism. This paper reports on a survey on ethics of sales professionals in South Africa. The results revealed salespeoples views on controversial sales practices that involve direct monetary consequences; on practices that adversely affect customers, employers and competitors; and on sales peoples sensitization of ethical issues. Stealing from a competitor at a trade show was viewed as the most unethical of the scenarios, while phone sabotage and lying to a customer were held (...) to be the next most unethical scenarios. Analysis of the results lead to a discussion of the implications for sales management. Ethical perceptions were affected by financial considerations. Marketing and Sales Managers will have to review their approach to training in sales ethics as well as how sales professionals implement the market driven approach. (shrink)

The topic of moral repair in the aftermath of breaches of trust and harmdoing has grown in importance within the past few years. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that offers insight into a series of key issues related to offender efforts to repair interpersonal harm in the workplace: What factors motivate offenders to make amends with those they have harmed? In what ways do offenders attempt to make amends? What outcomes emerge from attempts to (...) make amends? Drawing from the findings, we build an inductive model intended to guide future business ethics and management inquiry and research in this area. (shrink)

There is almost no theoretical discussion of non‐human animal well‐being in the philosophical literature on well‐being. To begin to rectify this, I develop a desire satisfaction theory of well‐being for animals. I contrast this theory with my desire theory of well‐being for humans, according to which a human benefits from satisfying desires for which she can offer reasons. I consider objections. The most important are (1) Eden Lin's claim that the correct theory of well‐being cannot vary across different welfare subjects (...) and (2) his objection against theories of human well‐being that require exercising a sophisticated capacity such as reason giving. (shrink)

“Moral hazard” is a term familiar in economics and business ethics that illuminates why rational parties sometimes choose decisions with bad moral outcomes without necessarily intending to behave selfishly or immorally. The term is not generally used in medical ethics. Decision makers such as parents and physicians generally do not use the concept or the word in evaluating ethical dilemmas. They may not even be aware of the precise nature of the moral hazard problem they are experiencing, beyond a general (...) concern for the patient's seemingly excessive burden. This article brings the language and logic of moral hazard to pediatrics. The concept reminds us that decision makers in this context are often not the primary party affected by their decisions. It appraises the full scope of risk at issue when decision makers decide on behalf of others and leads us to separate, respect, and prioritize the interests of affected parties. (shrink)

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume’s treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume’s project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. The belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think (...) of their perceptions. The author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet. (shrink)

Semmelweis’s investigations of puerperal fever are some of the most interesting in the history of medicine. This paper considers Hempel’s analysis of the Semmelweis case. It argues that this analysis is inadequate and needs to be supplemented by some Kuhnian ideas. Kuhn’s notion of paradigm needs to be modified to apply to medicine in order to take account of the classification schemes involved in medical theorising. However with a suitable modification it provides an explanation of Semmelweis’s failure which is argued (...) to be superior to some of the external reasons often given. Despite this success in applying Kuhn’s ideas to medicine, it is argued that these ideas must be further modified to take account of the fact that medicine is not a natural science but primarily a practice designed to prevent and cure diseases. (shrink)

A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research Donald Evans and Martyn Evans Centre for Philosophy and Health Care University of Wales Swansea, UK The investigation and development of modern medicines and medical technology can create numerous ethical dilemmas both for clinical researchers and research ethics committees. A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research seeks to facilitate and encourage good clinical research by exploring the concerns, responsibilities, general issues and particular pitfalls associated with ethical aspects of research. It (...) provides practical guidelines for researchers on how to improve the quality of research design, while for those appointed to scrutinise research proposals it offers advice on how to apply consistent, careful and critical reasoning to the process of assessing ethical standards. As such, it will provide invaluable assistance to clinical researchers and ethics committees alike in understanding the moral challenges posed by modern health care. (shrink)

We distinguish three aspects of medical diagnosis: generating new diagnostic hypotheses, selecting hypotheses for further pursuit, and evaluating their probability in light of the available evidence. Drawing on Peirce’s account of abduction, we argue that hypothesis generation is amenable to normative analysis: physicians need to make good decisions about when and how to generate new diagnostic hypothesis as well as when to stop. The intertwining relationship between the generation and selection of diagnostic hypotheses is illustrated through the analysis of a (...) detailed clinical case study. This interaction is not adequately captured by the existing probabilistic, decision-theoretic models of the threshold approach to clinical decision-making. Instead, we propose to conceptualize medical diagnosis in terms of strategic reasoning. (shrink)

(1999). Salvation as a state of mind: The place of acquiescentia in spinoza's ethics. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 447-473. doi: 10.1080/09608789908571039.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a global private governance system overseeing the sustainability and biodiversity of the world forestry system through certification of forests and forestry processes and products, and is perceived as the strongest of the various certification schemes available (Domask, Globalization and NGOs: Transforming Business, Government, and Society , 2003 ; Gulbrandsen, Global Environmental Politics , 2004 ). It has seen more success in developed than developing countries in terms of amount of forest certified and number of (...) chain-of-custody certificates issued, raising questions as to its ability to promote biodiversity Gulbrandsen, Global Environmental Politics , 2004 ). A number of challenges have risen to the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of the FSC as a global governance system: alternative certification schemes, output and market access, cost of certification, plantations, and illegal logging. I examine each of these challenges as they pertain to the dimensions of pragmatic and moral legitimacy of the FSC. I conclude with a discussion of theoretical implications for global governance systems using ecolabel schemes, as well as a discussion of practical implications for the FSC in particular. (shrink)

Whitehead's magnum opus is as important as it is difficult. It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole.

It is argued that the slingshot argument does not soundly challenge the truth-maker correspondence theory of truth, by which at least some distinct true propositions are expected to have distinct truth- makers. Objections are presented to possible exact interpretations of the essential slingshot assumption, in which no fully acceptable reconstruction is discovered. A streamlined version of the slingshot is evaluated, in which explicit contradiction results, on the assumption that identity and nonidentity contexts are purely extensional relations, effectively establishing the intensionality (...) of identity. (shrink)