This title opens the debate about what an ethics for the 21st century would look like and the role of corporations and how to work to ensure they produce results which benefit society as a whole.

Utilizing a series of essays examining the broad philosophical concepts embedded in Rod Serling's series, _The Twilight Zone_, __Philosophy in The Twilight Zone__ provides a platform for further philosophical discussion. Features essays by eminent contemporary philosophers concerning the over-arching themes in _The Twilight Zone,_ as well as in-depth discussions of particular episodes Fuses popular cult entertainment with classical philosophical perspectives Acts as a guide to unearthing larger questions - from human nature to the nature of reality and beyond - posed (...) in the series Includes substantial critical and biographical information on series creator Rob Serling. (shrink)

In 2001, France became one of the few countries to require corporate social responsibility reporting through its Nouvelles Régulations Économiques #2001-420. However, initial compliance with the statute was low, a factor implying the law lacked normativity. In this exploratory study, we attempt to determine whether there is movement toward normativity by examining the change in CSR disclosure from 2004 in comparison to 2010 for a sample of 81 publicly traded French firms. We measure both the space and the quality of (...) CSR disclosures, including in the latter a measure based on informational quality attributes as discussed by the International Accounting Standards Board, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the Global Reporting Initiative. We find significant increases in the space allocated to CSR disclosure, as well as some evidence of increased quality; although the informational quality of the disclosures remains quite low and fewer firms are including negative performance information in their reports. Finally, we document that differences in disclosure space and quality in 2004 appeared to be associated with legitimacy-based variables and that those relations remain largely unchanged in 2010. As such, it appears that the NRE’s goals of increased transparency remain unmet. (shrink)

After yeast cells commit to the cell cycle in a process called START, genes required for DNA synthesis are expressed in late G1. Periodicity is mediated by a hexameric sequence, known as a MCB element, present in all DNA synthesis gene promoters. A complex that specifically binds MCBs has been identified. One polypeptide in the MCB complex is Swi6, a transcription factor that together with Swi4 also binds G1 cyclin promoters and participates in a positive feedback loop at START. The (...) finding that Swi6 is directly involved in both START and DNA synthesis gene control suggest a model in which Swi6, activated through its participation in START, serves as the central transcription factor in coordinating late G1 gene expression. The mechanism may be conserved in all eukaryotic cells. (shrink)

Prescriptive rules guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law, morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself covers a case. (...) Others, in the spirit of Lon Fuller, believe that there is no way to understand a rule without invoking its purpose — the benevolent ends which it is meant to advance. In this paper we ask whether people associate rules with their textual formulation or their underlying purpose. We find that both text and purpose guide people’s reasoning about the scope of a rule. Overall, a rule’s text more strongly contributed to rule infraction decisions than did its purpose. The balance of these considerations, however, varied across experimental conditions: In conditions favoring a spontaneous judgment, rule interpretation was affected by moral purposes, whereas analytic conditions resulted in a greater adherence to textual interpretations. In sum, our findings suggest that the philosophical debate between textualism and purposivism partly reflects two broader approaches to normative reasoning that vary within and across individuals. Keywords: , the concept of law, rules, legal psychology, Hart, Fuller. (shrink)

Peter Kivy and Noël Carroll advocate a narrow view of aesthetic experience according to which it consists mainly in attention to formal properties. Excluded are cognitive and moral properties. I defend the broader view that includes the latter properties. I argue first that cognition and moral assessment can be inseparable in experience from grasp of form and expressiveness. Second, Kivy and Carroll must extend the notion of form itself beyond ordinary usage to accommodate acknowledged aesthetic experience. Third, the broad view (...) has a more impressive historical lineage than the narrow view. Fourth, aesthetic experience is appreciation of aesthetic value, and the latter is more plausibly analyzed in a broad way. (shrink)

Classical fractal dimensions have recently been effectivized by characterizing them in terms of real-valued functions called gales, and imposing computability and complexity constraints on these gales. This paper surveys these developments and their applications in algorithmic information theory and computational complexity theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, KnowledgeWilson H. ShearinPhilip Hardie. Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 306 pp. 4 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $90.Students of Latin literature need no introduction to the work of Philip Hardie. Although he has written on topics across the classical canon, he is perhaps best known as an influential critic of Virgil. His 1986 book, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos (...) and Imperium, which traces the Aeneid’s articulation of Roman imperial ideology in cosmological idiom, remains, whatever one’s position on its arguments, a central monument within recent Virgilian criticism. One achievement of that work is its demonstration of how Virgil’s epic is informed by the writing of his Epicurean precursor, Lucretius. As the volume under review shows, the last quarter-century has only deepened and expanded Hardie’s fascination with Lucretius’ relationship to later authors, above all, Virgil. Lucretian Receptions now joins Hardie’s earlier writing (and Monica Gale’s Virgil on the Nature of Things [Cambridge, 2000]) as a significant English-language resource for mapping Lucretius’ presence in the Latin literature of the late Republic and early Empire. While the work manifests some blindspots—in particular, certain theoretical questions about the shape of Hardie’s critical practice and the nature of his broader project remain unanswered for this reviewer—the strength and insight of its detailed interpretations should make it standard reading for both Lucretians and those interested in the history of Latin literature more generally.With a reach that extends from Homer to Milton, the volume is neither exclusively a treatment of didactic nor of Latin literature; taken as a whole, it tends towards the articulation of a broader strain of Lucretian tropes and themes within ancient poetry, a strain whose tradition is bounded neither by language nor genre and whose chief voices include Homer, Empedocles, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid (as this list makes clear, many “Lucretian” tropes and themes antedate Lucretius himself; Hardie occasionally places Lucretius within a tradition of “Empedoclean” rather than “Lucretian” epos). Not unlike Hardie’s earlier book, which locates the influence of Lucretius’ didactic, natural-scientific poem upon a narrative epic, this work finds textual traces of the Epicurean poet in places where they may be less expected and where, at least historically, some critics have denied them. Thus we find within the volume treatment of the connections between De rerum natura and Virgil’s bucolic poetry or Horace’s lyric alongside the more expected (and well-explored) indications of Lucretius’ impact on the Georgics. Further, as the work’s subtitle hints, it is organized as a collection of topical, thematic essays rather than as a sustained, sequential argument. This arrangement (which betrays the diverse origin of the chapters) allows Hardie to pursue Lucretius and his place in the ancient poetic landscape unconstrained by, if also well aware of, the traditional features—genre, natural-scientific theme, philosophical bent—that, at least occasionally, have encouraged critics to locate Lucretius outside the main currents of classical and post-classical Latin poetry.The volume consists of eight chapters, six published in some form previously, [End Page 532] which collectively treat the broad subjects “Time, history, culture,” “Sublime visions,” and “Certainties and Uncertainties.” Argument generally proceeds by close reading, or through tracking close verbal reminiscence (often visually articulated by boldface highlighting). Yet this attention to detail does not prevent Hardie from making important larger connections: his first chapter, for example, “Cultural and historical narratives in Virgil’s Eclogues and Lucretius,” begins by tracking gen- words (genetrix, genitalia, gignant, etc.) in De rerum natura (13–15), but it quickly turns these detailed observations into a reading (based on Ovid Ars Amatoria 3.337) of Aeneas as the atomic, “original substance” of Rome. Similarly, his final chapter concludes with a pointed verbal reminiscence of Lucretius in Andrew Marvell’s “On Paradise Lost”: for Hardie, Marvell’s mention of “delight and horror” (l. 35), which conjures up Lucretius’ divina voluptas... atque horror DRN, 3.28–29), captures perfectly the similarity between Lucretius’ and Milton’s sense of the strong connection between verbal composition and the composition, or creation, of reality (278–79... (shrink)

The critical examination of current hypotheses is one of the key ways in which scientific fields develop and grow. Therefore, any critique, including Haidle and Schlaudt’s article, “Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective,” represents a welcome addition to the literature. However, critiques must also be evaluated. In their article, Haidle and Schlaudt review some approaches to culture and cumulative culture in both human and nonhuman primates. H&S discuss the “zone of latent solutions” hypothesis as (...) applied to nonhuman primates and stone-toolmaking premodern hominins. Here, we will evaluate whether H&S’s critique addresses its target. (shrink)

This book offers a powerful interpretation of the philosophy of William James. It focuses on the multiple directions in which James's philosophy moves and the inevitable contradictions that arise as a result. The first part of the book explores a range of James's doctrines in which he refuses to privilege any particular perspective: ethics, belief, free will, truth and meaning. The second part of the book turns to those doctrines where James privileges the perspective of mystical experience. Richard Gale (...) then shows how the relativistic tendencies can be reconciled with James's account of mystical experience. An appendix considers the distorted picture of James's philosophy that has been refracted down to us through the interpretations of his work by John Dewey. (shrink)

There seem to be at least two leading conceptions of art appreciation. The first, and by far the most popular, it seems to me, regards “appreciation” as a synonym for “approbation,” which itself can be a synonym for affection or even love. “To appreciate,” in this sense, is “to cherish.” This is the notion of appreciation that most plain speakers have in mind when they say things such as “I appreciate what you’ve done with your garden.” They mean “I like (...) what you’ve done with your garden.” Call this “appreciation-as-liking.” Although I’ve claimed that this is the popular construal of appreciation, it also possesses some estimable philosophical credentials. David Hume, for example, seems to hold a... (shrink)

Exponents and critics of semantic presupposition have almost invariably based their discussion on the ('Standard') definition of presupposition implied by Frege and Strawson. In this study Noel Burton-Roberts argues convincingly against this definition, that leads it to a three-valued semantics. He presents a very simple semantic definition which is weaker, more general and leads to a semantics more easily interpreted as two-valued with gaps. The author shows that a wide range of intuitive facts that eluded the Standard definition follow (...) directly from this ('Revised') definition itself: facts about the presuppositions of compound sentences and modal sentences, about presuppositional conflict and about differences in the logical status of simple sentences suffering from presupposition failure. The book includes a detailed argument that an ambiguity of natural language negation, generally assumed to be necessary to the defence of semantic presupposition, is neither possible nor necessary in a presuppositional semantics. Noel Burton-Roberts has made an authoritative contribution to a debate which has involved philosophers and linguists for many years. His command of the issues, his clarity of exposition and his theoretical insight may well serve to change the boundaries of that debate. (shrink)

This article defends the content approach to aesthetic experience. It begins by sketching this approach to aesthetic experience. It then rehearses certain recent criticisms of the view by Alan Goldman and attempts to rebut them. One of those criticisms raises a long-standing concern about the author's account that has recently been called the “qua” problem. The article concludes by putting this issue to rest.

What is art? The philosophers and historians contributing to this volume address the assertion that the term "art" no longer holds meaning.

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18 th -20 th (...) centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject. (shrink)

We listen to a cacophony of voices instructing us how to think and feel about nature, including our own bodies. The news media, wildlife documentaries, science magazines, and environmental NGOs are among those clamouring for our attention. But are we empowered by all this knowledge or is our dependence on various epistemic communities allowing our thoughts, sentiments and activities to be unduly governed by others? Drawing on over 30 years on research into the 'social constitution of nature', Making Sense of (...) Nature shows that what we call 'nature' is made sense of for us in ways that make it central to social order, social change and social dissent. By utilising insights and extended examples from anthropology, cultural studies, human geography, philosophy, politics, sociology, science studies, this interdisciplinary text asks whether we can better make sense of nature for ourselves, and thus participate more meaningfully in momentous decisions about the future of life - human and non-human - on the planet. This book shows how 'nature' can be made sense of without presuming its naturalness. The challenge is not so much to rid ourselves of the idea of nature and its 'collateral concepts' (such as genes) but instead, we need to be more alert to how, why and with what effects ideas about 'nature' get fashioned and deployed in specific situations. (shrink)

In “Movies, Narrative and Emotion” there is an attempt to suggest the ways in which a certain form of narrative organization, to which we can call “erotetic narration,” This can be co-ordinated with the emotional address of the motion picture in terms of what can be called “criterial prefocusing.” On this view, the primary way in which the emotions are engaged is character-directed, the protagonist’s goals providing grounds which generate the narrative questions that the movie goes on to answer.

This book critically interrogates the work of David Harvey, one of the world’s most influential geographers, and one of its best known Marxists. Considers the entire range of Harvey’s oeuvre, from the nature of urbanism to environmental issues. Written by contributors from across the human sciences, operating with a range of critical theories. Focuses on key themes in Harvey’s work. Contains a consolidated bibliography of Harvey’s writings.

Theory appears to have played the ideological-institutional role of enfranchiser, even if the role was ulti-mately an epiphenomenal one. Furthermore, the expectation of gold in "them thar hills" also encouraged too many university presses to invest in film publications, especially when the arcane peregrinations of Theory facilitated their rationalization of their relaxation of their traditional role as academic gatekeepers. Hence film studies has been flooded with repetitive decoctions of the Theory in search of the same market in much the same (...) way that con-sumers are confronted with so many marginally differentiated shampoos. (shrink)

This paper offers an historical introduction to Pere Alberch's evolutionary thought and his contributions to Evo-Devo, based on his unique approach to experimental teratology. We will take as our point of reference the teratogenic experiments developed by Alberch and Emily A. Gale during the 1980s, aimed at producing monstrous variants of frogs and salamanders. We will analyze his interpretation of the results of these experiments within the framework of the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology (or “Evo-Devo”). The aim is (...) understand how Alberch interpreted teratological anomalies as highly revealing objects of study for understanding the development of organic form, not only in an ontogenetic sense—throughout embryonic development—but also phylogenetically—throughout the evolution of species. Alberch's interpretation of monsters reflects the influence of a long tradition of non-Darwinian evolutionary thought, which began in the nineteenth century and was continued in the twentieth century by people such as Richard Goldschmidt, Conrad H. Waddington, and Stephen Jay Gould. They all proposed various non-gradualist models of evolution, in which embryonic development played a central role. Following this tradition, Alberch argued that, in order to attain a correct understanding of the role of embryological development in evolution, it was necessary to renounce the gradualist paradigm associated with the Darwinian interpretation of evolution, which understood nature as a continuum. According to Alberch, the study of monstrous abnormalities was of great value in understanding how certain epigenetic restrictions in development could give rise to discontinuities and directionality in morphological transformations throughout evolution. (shrink)