Several studies have been conducted on ethical leadership and workplace ethical behavior but little is known about the role of organizational justice and each of its dimensions in this relationship. This study predicts that ethical leadership enhances organizational justice perceptions, including each of its specific dimensions, which in turn enhances employee ethical behavior. The results from two-wave survey data obtained from 270 employees in the Malaysian manufacturing industry confirm that ethical leadership has a positive impact on employee ethical behavior, and (...) that organizational justice and each of its justice dimensions mediate this relationship, both individually and together. Importantly, interpersonal and informational dimensions show the strongest mediation effects. This paper highlights the actions and strategies that can help managers to effectively elevate the moral tone in their organizations. In particular, our findings show where managers must put more emphasis to foster an ethical workplace: on providing fair treatment and honest information. (shrink)

A 68-year-old patient who suffered from gastric cancer diagnosed 8 months earlier presented with multiple peritoneal and hepatic metastasis, despite several rounds of chemo- and radiotherapy. After admission to hospital, his general condition quickly became severely compromised. He was nearly emaciated, despite being on partial parenteral feeding. Four years earlier, due to a cardiac arrhythmia that was refractory to medication, the patient had a cardiac pacemaker implanted, regulated to go off at frequencies of below 70 beats per minute. Given the (...) patient's terminal situation, the team started developing some doubts about the pacemaker's effects during his dying process. The patient had mentioned his intention to donate his pacemaker after his death, but had not asked for its deactivation. The specialists were not sure about the effect of the pacemaker in unnecessarily prolonging the patient's final hour. Nevertheless, they opposed deactivation, which they considered ethically uncertain. The family, who had been initially for the deactivation, decided against it. The patient's condition was progressively deteriorating, as he was falling into a state of sopor and, later, into a coma. (shrink)

This book explores the nature and implications of positive, creative, and loving mimesis and brings together the interdisciplinary fields of Girardian studies and creativity studies in new and original ways. Scientists, philosophers, psychologists, theologians and ancient thinkers are brought into thought provoking and insightful dialogue with Girardian conceptions of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and hominization.

El objetivo de este estudio es investigar el pensamiento estético de Descartes en el Compendium Musicae de 1618. El estudio intenta mostrar como ese pensamiento estético se asienta en un fundamento tradicional clásico, pero que a su vez fue permeable a la praxis de la composición musical de su tiempo, apuntando de este modo hacia una estética moderna de la subjetividad y el sentimiento. El estudio aporta una lectura y comentario del texto poniendo de relieve algunas de sus características más (...) relevantes. (shrink)

The modern concept of reason called one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity into question: the universal value of the salvation brought to all humanity by Jesus. From a modern point of view, it is not possible for a historic and contingent event, such as the death of Jesus, to bear universal meaning for men of all times. In this article I aim to show how René Girard’s anthropological hypothesis offers an alternative answer to the seemingly impossible universale concretum.

The Purpose in Life Test is a measure of purpose in life widely used in many cultures and countries; however, cross-cultural assessments are scarce. The present study aimed to evaluate the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the PIL in the general population of seven Latin American countries. A total of 4306 people participated, selected by non-probabilistic convenience sampling, where Uruguay has the highest mean age ; while Ecuador has the lowest mean age. Furthermore, in each country, there is a higher proportion (...) of women than men. Using Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the factorial structure does not show evidence of invariance among the included countries. However, based on the Multi-Group Factor Analysis Alignment, there is evidence that a three-dimensional structure of the PIL is the same in the participating countries. Results based on item response theory indicate that most PIL items can significantly differentiate responses according to the level of life purpose. In addition, people with low life purpose will tend to choose the lower response alternatives on the PIL; while people with higher life purpose will choose higher response alternatives. The findings indicate that the PIL has the potential to increase knowledge about how people conceive and experience their purpose in life in different countries. (shrink)

El objetivo de este estudio es interpretar la relación entre el modelo anatómico de Descartes y el régimen disciplinario que M. Foucault propone en su tesis sobre el poder en la Modernidad. Se muestra cómo Foucault sitúa a Descartes como el iniciador de una medicina que convertiría el cuerpo humano en una máquina y al igual que esta, pasaría a concebirse como un sistema mecánico susceptible de ser explorable, controlable y manipulable.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Success and Malaise of CapitalismA Mimetic View of the MarketPablo Díaz-Morlán (bio)INTRODUCTIONThis article seeks to contribute to the knowledge that we have on the market as the central institution of capitalism, according to Girard's perspective. Mimetic theory (MT) can explain both the success and malaise caused by the market. Success is measured by the spread of desire, and malaise by the mimetic resentment caused by this spread of (...) desire.In 1979, Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy applied René Girard's mimetic theory for the first time to economics in their book L'Enfer des Choses.1 Both authors defended the need to advance toward the construction of a mimetic economic science placing at the center of the analysis the mimetic nature of the human being. They pointed out that the liberal conception of the individual as a being who makes decisions of maximum utility and autonomously is wrong. In short, the point was that the traditionally accepted homo economicus has been replaced with the homo mimeticus.2 In his contribution [End Page 275] to the book, "L'ambivalence de la rareté," Dumouchel establishes that scarcity emerges or is born as traditional bonds of solidarity are abandoned by members of a society that, until then, had ensured that everyone was assisted in case of need. In primitive human society, reciprocal bonds of solidarity prevailed. There was no scarcity, and this internal solidarity limited violence between the members of the group and expelled it to the outside. Scarcity was invented after the creation of the vicious cycle of individualism and the commercialization of social relations: a social institution established by the modern world after the solidarity mechanisms that protected the group against violence were abandoned.3 For both authors, the market arose as the institution that replaced the sacred, containing the violence, in both senses of the word "contain": On the one hand it held the violence within, and on the other it limited the violence.From its publication, L'Enfer des Choses was adopted as the founding treaty of the mimetic economy, even by Girard himself, who referred to it on several occasions when discussing economic issues.4 Both Dumouchel and Dupuy have gone into greater depth with their findings in other subsequent studies that have taken different courses. Dumouchel has clarified his concept of scarcity and has analyzed the relationship between envy and mimetic resentment through the study of Helmut Schoeck's famous envy theory.5 Meanwhile, Dupuy defends that many developments of modern economic science are merely the evolution of homo economicus to homo mimeticus because the autonomous subject is abandoned, giving rise to one that takes into account the behavior of others (game theory, adaptive expectations theory, speculation theory, etc.). Dupuy insists on the concept of the market as an institution that effectively delays the mimetic conflict. However, he adopts a pessimist position, as capitalism, due to its very evolution, has ended up surpassing its own limits (controlling politics), and as a result, it is increasingly more difficult for capitalism to carry out its function of containing violence.6Using the work of Dumouchel and Dupuy as a base, different authors have made contributions to economics from the perspective of MT. Several studies have been conducted on money, trade, and speculation, highlighting the theory of money of Michel Aglietta and André Orléan.7 Although there are differentiating nuances among the authors, they all assume that the money and market institutions are essentially violent and sacrificial. Other examples of this school of thought are Andrew Lascaris (1987), Erich Kitzmüller (1995), Anthony W. Bartlett (2002), John Daniels (2008), and Daniel M. Bell, Jr. (2012).8 Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber have successfully applied MT to the study of financial bubbles in an economic history study, with promising results.9 And in the criticism of the market system in his book À Charge de Revanche, Mark R. Anspach [End Page 276] favors the need to overcome the perverse logic of revenge that defines both war and the market, transforming it into a positive reciprocity based on gifts.10 Except for Hobart and Huber, the cited authors overwhelmingly and explicitly reject... (shrink)

The men admired a way to swim the fish, but today they sail faster than anyone. They'd like flying like the birds, but have been a lot higher. They searched for wisdom, now they have all the knowledge accumulated in the story available in a few clicks. Human evolution is about to meet its peak through the Technological Singularity, which can be understood as the future milestone reached at the moment that a computer program can think like a human, yet (...) with quick access to all information already registered by society. It will not be like a man, but more intelligent than all mankind in history. So we have a big question: will this new entity has consciousness? Through a study of the levels of intelligent agents autonomy and in a timeless dialogue with Alan Turing, René Descartes, Ludwic Wittgenstein, John Searle and Vernor Vinge, we show the possibility of an artificial consciousness and thatthe quest for intentionality, promoted by sophisticated algorithms of learning and machine discovery, is the key to reach of Technological Singularity. (shrink)

What should our theorizing about social justice aim at? Many political philosophers think that a crucial goal is to identify a perfectly just society. Amartya Sen disagrees. In The Idea of Justice, he argues that the proper goal of an inquiry about justice is to undertake comparative assessments of feasible social scenarios in order to identify reforms that involve justice-enhancement, or injustice-reduction, even if the results fall short of perfect justice. Sen calls this the “comparative approach” to the theory of (...) justice. He urges its adoption on the basis of a sustained critique of the former approach, which he calls “transcendental.” In this paper I pursue two tasks, one critical and the other constructive. First, I argue that Sen’s account of the contrast between the transcendental and the comparative approaches is not convincing, and second, I suggest what I take to be a broader and more plausible account of comparative assessments of justice. The core claim is that political philosophers should not shy away from the pursuit of ambitious theories of justice (including, for example, ideal theories of perfect justice), although they should engage in careful consideration of issues of political feasibility bearing on their practical implementation. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene el propósito de reflexionar sobre las luchas que las mujeres mexicanas emprendieron desde los años sesenta y hasta la actualidad para alcanzar su liberación y el reconocimiento de sus derechos y, por tanto, de su ciudadanía largamente negada, clausurada. En una primera parte del artículo se revisan brevemente los postulados teóricos desarrollados por Betty Friedan, una autora norteamericana que influyó de manera determinante en los movimientos feministas de los años sesenta. En un segundo momento, el artículo (...) aborda las distintas luchas que el movimiento feminista y de mujeres desarrolló en México de 1968 hasta los años dos mil. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate about the nature of persistence, stage theory is the view that ordinary objects (artefacts, animals, persons, etc.) are instantaneous and persist by being suitably related to other instantaneous objects. In this paper I focus on the issue of what stage theorists should say about the semantics of ordinary proper names, like ‘Socrates’ or ‘London’. I consider the remarks that stage theorists actually make about this issue, present some problems they face, and finally offer what I take (...) to be the best alternative available for them. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Synthetic biology, an emerging field of science and technology, intends to make of the natural world a substrate for engineering practice. Drawing inspiration from conventional engineering disciplines, practitioners of synthetic biology hope to make biological systems standardized, calculable, modular, and predictably functional. This essay develops a Heideggerian reading of synthetic biology as a useful perspective with which to identify and explore key facets of this field, its knowledge, its practices, and its products. After overviews of synthetic biology and Heidegger’s account (...) of technology, I discuss calculability, utility, function, setting-upon, and ordering, with the aim of discussing the manner in which synthetic biology works to render the biological world intelligible as something to be used, rather than something that is in and of itself. Having developed this Heideggerian reading, I proffer a number of corrections to his account that enable a more accurate, nuanced understanding of synthetic biology. Specifically, I discuss the notion of Ge-stell and submit that multiple systems of “enframing” may help to make Heidegger’s argument more robust. I suggest that synthetic biology may work to reveal the natural world as a standing-reserve of function. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the debate on epistemic foundationalism. Section I expounds and criticises Hans Albert's critical rationalist antifoundationalism position. Section I1 discusses Karl‐Otto Apel's ‘transcendental pragmatic’ argument for ultimate epistemic foundations. Section III suggests how the latter argument can be restated so as to avoid ambiguity and yield a plausible case for epistemic foundationalism.

The ‘paradoxes of coincidence’ are generally taken as an important factor for deciding between rival views on persistence through time. In particular, the ability to deal with apparent cases of temporary coincidence is usually regarded as a good reason for favouring perdurantism (or ‘four-dimensionalism’) over endurantism (or ‘three-dimensionalism’). However, the recent work of Gilmore ( 2007 ) and McGrath ( 2007 ) challenges this standard view. For different reasons, both Gilmore and McGrath conclude that perdurantism does not really obtain support (...) from the puzzles of temporary coincidence. In this paper, I will evaluate their arguments and defend the opposite view: that the paradoxes of coincidence do give some support to perdurantism. However, the way in which they do so is rather unexpected. As we will see, there are different ways in which coincidence scenarios may be thought to support perdurantism, some of which have not yet been sufficiently explored. Thus, my immediate goal is to explore one of those directions, bringing into focus a new argument from coincidence to perdurantism. And although I motivate my discussion by examining the arguments in the work of Gilmore and McGrath, the merits of this argument can be independently assessed. More generally, my overall purpose is to contribute to our general understanding of how the topics of coincidence and persistence bear on each other. (shrink)

La« théorie cellulaire», élaborée au XIXe siècle sous l'impulsion, entre autres chercheurs, de Lorenz Oken, Matthias Schleiden, Theodor Schwann et Rudolf Virchow, a profondément modifié la vision que l'Homme se faisait jusque-là de la vie, puisqu'elle affirmait que la cellule est l'unité organique constitutive de tous les êtres vivants et que tout être vivant est issu d'une cellule. L'observation d'un unicellulaire comme la paramécie montre, en effet, qu'une cellule doit être considérée comme une forme vivante intégrale puisqu'en se nourrissant, en (...) se développant, en se défendant et en se reproduisant elle manifeste le destin commun à tous les êtres vivants. Son espace vital, engendré par ses déplacements, est coextensif à ses besoins et donc à ses comportements. (shrink)

Beyond the empressionistic similarities Chinese and Jews sometimes detect in each other, a study of the scriptural texts of the two traditions reveals surprising parallels. Eleven such parallels in ideas and values are examined and it is suggested that the comparative study of cultural traditions developed independently of each other is a worthwhile undertaking. This serves to apprehend that which is genuinely universal beyond the diversity of expression.

1. cahier. Connaissance et existence--2. cahier. L'existentialisme athée devant la philosophie--3. cahier. L'existentialisme religieux devant la philosophie. Phénoménologie et arabisme--4. cahier. Marxisme et méditerranée.

Genau 150 Jahre nach dem Erscheinen der letzten vollständig zu nennenden Ausgabe der Odysseescholien von W. Dindorf (Oxford 1855) legt Filippomaria Pontani (im folgenden: P.) ein Buch vor, das berechtigten Anlaß zur Hoffnung gibt, daß das dringende Desiderat einer vollständigen Neuausgabe dieses Scholiencorpus endlich erfüllt werden wird. Als der kürzlich verstorbene Doyen der Homerscholienforschung, Hartmut Erbse, 1966 einen Neudruck von Ludwichs Specimina mit den Scholien zu Od. 1.1–309 besorgen ließ, äußerte er im Vorwort fast beschwörend den Wunsch, daß “Ludwichs gutgemeinter, (...) aber eben doch unfertiger Text einen jungen Gelehrten dazu anregen sollte, das ganze Werk von Grund auf zu erneuern und zu vervollständigen”. P. ist sichtlich gewillt (S. 5) und, nach dem zu besprechenden Buch zu schließen, auch fähig, diese schwierige, aber zweifellos lohnende Aufgabe zu übernehmen. Das Buch stellt gewissermaßen die Prolegomena zu einer Neuedition der Odysseescholien dar, weshalb das Augenmerk insbesondere auf der paläographischen, papyrologischen, kodikologischen, überlieferungsgeschichtlichen und textkritischen Untersuchung des Materials liegt, das die Grundlage einer (Neu-)Edition bildet. Aber das Buch leistet mehr, was maßgeblich an P.s Grundüberzeugung liegt, “che ogni manoscritto rappresenti il frutto di un'intenzione precisa, comprensibile solo in una determinata cornice storica e geografica” (S. 6). Diesem historischen und geographischen Kontext spürt P. denn auch durchweg und mit viel Akribie nach. Dadurch erfährt der Leser viel, was deutlich über das hinausgeht, was üblicherweise in einem Prolegomena-Band zu einer kritischen Ausgabe zu lesen ist. Zu einem gewissen Grad wird auch die Anordnung des Materials davon tangiert. (shrink)