Inconsistent information between an organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments and perceived CSR (in-)action is a big challenge for organizations because this is typically associated with perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and related negative stakeholder reactions. However, in contrast to the prevailing corporate hypocrisy literature we argue that inconsistent CSR information does not always correspond to perceptions of corporate hypocrisy; rather, responses depend on individual predispositions in processing CSR-related information. In this study, we investigate how an individual’s moral identity shapes reactions (...) to inconsistent CSR information. The results of our three studies show that individuals who symbolize—i.e., display—their moral identity to the public more than they internalize moral values react less negatively to inconsistent CSR information. We also show that this weakens their anger and willingness to change company behavior. Furthermore, we find that this effect is amplified for extraverted but weakened for neurotic individuals. Our findings underline the importance of individual predispositions in processing CSR information. (shrink)

The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.

Art and Its Reflections. Moments and Portrets in the Mirror. This article is supposed to discuss the fact that art is a form of communication, that through it we are interconnected, that it is something mesmerizing that can be either very easy or very hard to understand. It all comes down to our perceptions, our perspectives that can change the way we see reality. It only takes a moment for the unthinkable to become reality. We all live a strange life (...) in a strange world, but did our little experience and existence across the world and the universe teach us something? Or was it just in vain? (shrink)

Starting March 2020, Romania has been faced with a health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis reflected in media communication. In such situations, media play a crucial role in making relevant information timely and accessible, to help people learn about and understand what this pandemic is and how it is assessed, how to protect themselves, and what measures are taken by the authorities. This study aims to analyse how Romanian students keep informed during this national and global crisis, (...) which also generates adjacent media phenomena such as an increase in misinformation, lack of transparency in communicating with the public or over-abundance of information. To this end, we applied a questionnaire which was answered by 426 students from a public university in Romania. The results show that students use many sources to get the information they consider important, believe that the types of messages that help them feel properly informed about the pandemic and its implications: data, figures, accurate facts, and the information received from authorities or experts and that they prefer multimedia digital content. Young people tend to be cautious concerning the transparency of official communication and continue to consume information transmitted by the mainstream media, perceived as being more credible than other news sites. (shrink)

Taking into consideration the concepts of „knowledge” and „power”, whose correlation authored the very idea of modernity, this study on Foucault traces their evolution through two cultural patterns: the archive and the diagram. A world picture can be constructed only by making appeal to the archives of knowledge. In every historical moment the structure and the quality of the archive actuate the initiatives of power, that is, the play of forces between actors, institutions, centres of decision in society, and between (...) agents and patients. The play of these forces, ever reshaping, allows the temporary drawing of the power diagram. It is in the precarious balance realized by a diagram that the social play happens, which, by reverting to its archive sources, transforms the cycle of knowledge. As a central idea, it can be asserted that it is between knowledge and power, between archive and diagram and that it is according to the actual schemes of their correlation that the evolutionary curve of a human world is decided. (shrink)

An evaluation was made of theassociations between self-reported healthconscious consumerism, body-mass index (BMI),and consumer beliefs, attitudes, intentions,and behaviors regarding sustainably producedfoods. Self-administered surveys were completedby adult consumers (n = 550) in threemetropolitan Minnesota grocery stores. Selecteddemographic and psychographic differencesbetween health conscious consumers andnon-health conscious consumers were evaluated.Compared to non-health conscious consumers,health conscious consumers were more likely tobe female, older, more educated, higher incomeearners, more active, healthier, and possess ahealthier body mass index. They also held moresupportive beliefs, attitudes, and intentionswith regard (...) to sustainably produced foods. Inconclusion, some consumers are interested insupporting sustainable production practices andtheir support may be linked to improvedpersonal, environmental, and communityhealth. (shrink)

There are certain character strengths that can more than make up for various obstacles to learning and success in life. Grit is one of these character strengths. Manifesting itself as persistence, undaunted courage, determination, steadfastness, and a refusal to back down in the face of adversity, grit is a character strength that can lead to success no matter how high the obstacles. Readers learn how to acquire and demonstrate grit in their daily lives. Real-life role models--both everyday teens and celebrities--help (...) illustrate the journey to and the rich rewards of approaching life with an unshakable spirit of grit. This text lends itself well to certain of the reading and analysis standards of the Common Core Curriculum for informational texts, affording readers the opportunity to summarize text, determine central ideas and identify supporting details, trace and evaluate an argument and its details, analyze how ideas and claims are developed, and determine an author's point of view and purpose. (shrink)

This paper is not merely an attempt to come to terms with Edward Schillebeeckx’s theology and his philosophical mindset. Such attempts have already been made years back, when his ties with phenomenology, and also with postmodern hermeneutics and culture were pivotal for us in order to better understand his influence on mid-20th century Continental philosophy. This present study partially remains on those premises, but also brings Schillebeeckx’s thought closer to the 21st century, since nowadays concepts like salvation and resurrection tend (...) to embed particular meanings, such as well-being and ancestrality, which until recently were considered halfway synonyms of the previous images, and thus were looked upon with less persuasion. This study follows their interchangeable use in Schillebeeckx’s doctrine of creation, where the purpose of the Christian creedal formula is to appease in a tribal sense, rather than to fun­ction as a confession of faith. On the other hand, Schillebeeckx’s take on the resurrection as a means to reconnect humanity to its ancestral faith will further be inspected as the starting point of his rehabilitated anthropology or the humanum. The initial discussion on the relationship between God and Jesus in the history of salvation finalized with Jesus’ death receives a new turn in Schillebeeckx’s thought when in this same context he talks about the resurrection. Jesus’ status after the resurrection is analyzed here considering the tribal flavors it receives in Schillebeeckx’s work with an accent on its outcome for the new humanity and its well-being. (shrink)

This paper is an inquiry into Edward Schillebeeckx’ concept of resurrection, though it is fairly different from a thorough analysis of the meaning of resurrection per se. The difference comes from the fact that we will not simply view his take on the concept as a peculiar experiment, but the question of the importance of resurrection today receives special attention. This does not mean that certain attempts at defining and elaborating on the significance of Schillebeeckx’s concept of resurrection have been (...) overlooked. Still, the main purpose of this study is to literally put this concept to the test and see the tradition associated with it over the years. A final purpose is to determine Schillebeeckx’s place at the end of this experiment, as he is associated with the two poignant interpretations of resurrection today, namely the radical and liberal positions. The aim of this experiment is to decide whether we still need to talk about resurrection today and how critical it is to ask serious questions about it in this human history facing its end. This paper explores the concept of resurrection based on its impact on the humanum or the potential of human history always with an eye to its future, where in Schillebeeckx’s thought the perfect human state will be attained. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 59 Heft: 3 Seiten: 410-426.

The theological formulation of the “eternal manifestation of the Spirit through the Son”, developed by the patriarch of Constantinople Gregory of Cyprus in the 13th century, has been the subject of numerous studies in the 20th century and played an important role in the renewal of Trinitarian Orthodox theology. The interpretations are however diverging. Most theologians see in this formulation the manifestation of the uncreated energy, which would have been formalized later by Gregory Palamas. Others understand it as a hypostatic (...) reality concerning the third Person of the Trinity. This paper contributes to the discussion by re-analyzing the main texts of Gregory of Cyprus and of Gregory Palamas on this matter. In a first step, we defend the thesis that in the thought of the Byzantine patriarch, this expression truly concerns the hypostasis of the Spirit. In a second step, we question the existence of the theme of an “eternal manifestation” of the uncreated energy in the work of Gregory Palamas. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly (...) the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution. (shrink)

Objective: Theory and research suggest that the pursuit of personal goals that do not fit a person's affect-based implicit motives results in impaired emotional well-being, including increased symptoms of depression. The aim of this study was to evaluate an intervention designed to enhance motive-goal congruence and study its impact on well-being. Method: Seventy-four German students (mean age = 22.91, SD = 3.68; 64.9% female) without current psychopathology, randomly allocated to 3 groups: motivational feedback (FB; n = 25; participants learned about (...) the fit between their implicit motives and explicit goals), FB + congruence-enhancement training (CET; n = 22; participants also engaged in exercises to increase the fit between their implicit motives and goals), and a no-intervention control group (n = 27), were administered measures of implicit motives, personal goal commitments, happiness, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction 3 weeks before (T1) and 6 weeks after (T2) treatment. Results: On two types of congruence measures derived from motive and goal assessments, treated participants showed increases in agentic (power and achievement) congruence, with improvements being most consistent in the FB+CET group. Treated participants also showed a trend-level depressive symptom reduction, but no changes on other well-being measures. Although increases in overall and agentic motivational congruence were associated with increases in affective well-being, treatment-based reduction of depressive symptoms was not mediated by treatment-based agentic congruence changes. Conclusion: These findings document that motivational congruence can be effectively enhanced, that changes in motivational congruence are associated with changes in affective well-being, and they suggest that individuals’ implicit motives should be considered when personal goals are discussed in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

The scientific paradigm which I rely upon in the framework of this article is quantum mechanics, whose “cognitive revolution” consisted of replacing the classical principle of separability with the principle of nonseparability or global intercorrelation. According to this intercorrelation, highlighted at the subatomic level, the part cannot be separated from the whole, because every part has a global and instantaneous connection with the whole universe. For this reason the foundation of the world cannot be the part, but the whole, which (...) is therefore logically and ontologically prior to the part, i.e., self-consistent. Consequently, the principle of global intercorrelation elucidates and validates some of the oldest philosophical problems and intuitions about the unity or self-consistency of the world. An example in this sense is the bootstrap theory of American physicist Geoffrey Chew, which presents such striking similarities to the metaphysical system of Leibniz's Monadology that the two intertwine and mirror each other, like twin souls, to the extent that it could be stated that if Chew’s bootstrap theory represents the explanatory physical level of Leibniz’s metaphysics, then, analogously, Leibniz’s Monadology represents the explanatory metaphysical level of Chew’s physics. (shrink)

This interactive book is designed to help readers deepen their relationship with the Divine by connecting to the vibrancy of life. This cosmic message of hope is meant to be read without hurry, while taking time to ponder and absorb the wisdom of these great mystics.

W.S.F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. Themes and Theories, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2009, 576 pages.

Vasile Frãteanu, Tratat de metafizicã Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002.

Teachers’ job satisfaction has been the subject of many studies that tried to identify its main sources. Based on the social cognitive career theory, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between personality traits, goals orientation, and teachers’ job satisfaction. A total of 321 Romanian teachers completed an online questionnaire. The results demonstrated new insights regarding the relationships between psychological variables and teachers’ job satisfaction. Cognitive rigidity, as a mechanism to resistance to change, mediates between conscientiousness and teachers’ job (...) satisfaction. Moreover, the moderation role of learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction. These findings emphasize that school management needs to offer teachers information and explain the change’s benefits if they want to prevent individual resistance to change and decrease satisfaction related to their work. (shrink)

800x600 Normal 0 21 false false false RO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabel Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Review of Joseph Steiff (ed.), Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy. The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2011), 376 pages.

By 2050, global livestock production is expected to double—growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector—with most of this increase taking place in the developing world. As the United Nation’s four-hundred-page report, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options , documents, livestock production is now one of three most significant contributors to environmental problems, leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and increased health problems. The paper draws on the UN report as well as a flurry of other (...) recently published studies in order to demonstrate the effect of intensive livestock production on global warming and on people’s health. The paper’s goal is to outline the problems caused by intensive livestock farming and analyze a number of possible solutions, including legislative changes and stricter regulations, community mobilizing, and consumers choosing to decrease their demand for animal products. (shrink)

Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and related resources that are relevant to plant science, (...) with a detailed description of the Plant Ontology (PO). We discuss the challenges of building an ontology that covers all green plants (Viridiplantae). Key results: Ontologies can advance plant science in four keys areas: 1. comparative genetics, genomics, phenomics, and development, 2. taxonomy and systematics, 3. semantic applications and 4. education. Conclusions: Bio-ontologies offer a flexible framework for comparative plant biology, based on common botanical understanding. As genomic and phenomic data become available for more species, we anticipate that the annotation of data with ontology terms will become less centralized, while at the same time, the need for cross-species queries will become more common, causing more researchers in plant science to turn to ontologies. (shrink)

The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open (...) Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers. (shrink)

The presence of agriculture is diminishing in today’s society: it provides only a small percentage of jobs, and the number of visible farms that can provide exposure to agricultural processes is continuously decreasing. We hypothesize that the direct involvement with farm activities or interaction with farmers and visual appreciation of agricultural processes of all kinds, influences rural inhabitants’ relationship to agriculture. We assume that the latter plays a role in how far inhabitants are attached to their place, and more specifically, (...) perceive rural place. In this paper, we aim to initiate a discussion on this complex social relationship and suggest a model to capture fine interactions between relationship to agriculture and rural place attachment. We examine the direct and indirect effects from the density of resident farmers on these interactions. We set up a model using data from empirical research in Germany conducted in 2016. We surveyed rural inhabitants and interviewed farmers in villages purposefully sampled based on high and low density of resident farmers. To reveal underlying relationships among the latent constructs and more directly measurable indicators, as well as the indirect effect of farm presence on place attachment through its effect on forming perceptions about agriculture, we operationalized our analysis using a structural equation model. Besides a good model fit, our initial results indicate that rural inhabitants form stronger relationship to agriculture when the density of resident farmers is higher. Further, farm presence and attachment to rural place are positively related, but needs to be better captured. (shrink)

One of the major themes of discussion in the art and especially the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries was the body rather than the soul. In the beginning this seemed to be the case mostly because of the natural processes related to the transforming events of maturation and death of the human body and mind. However, towards the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th century, a certain shift took place from the common perspective on (...) the body to a rather scientific literary approach. Our attempt is to notice and make the necessary connections between the concepts of nature (both human and external/physical nature) and the innovative technologies implemented in the then society, with a later reference to the new accidental and commercial facets of death felt as destruction of nature especially in the work of the American Romantic writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Being aware that they are highly spoken of in view of their transcendentalism as a particular philosophy dealing with the bond between man and nature, we will slowly come to terms with this type of concerns and connect them to the conflicting reality of industrialization as a sudden and repressive phenomenon within the society of men. Finally our point is that this very phenomenon caused the two writers to make a historical detour and use their formation as naturalist thinkers in order to make sense of their century’s deaths and diseases. This is to say that even from a Romantic perspective, the concern for the body is surprisingly concrete, while these writers’ transcendentalist concerns for the soul are prolix though without substance. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of Edward Schillebeeckx’s insights on different perceptions of revelation as related to concepts like salvation, God, church, human experience and creation in the work Jesus in Our Western Culture. The incentive of Schillebeeckx’s hermeneutical method in nowadays Western phenomenology, upon which God “breathed his breath of life”, triggered our interest in meanings which Schillebeeckx ascribes to human history as the realm of God’s work for the benefit of men and women. This meaning is suggested in (...) the very beginning of the book by its original Dutch title If Politics is not Everything. As stated in this work’s introduction, Schillebeeckx’s main theme is the origin of salvation in the humanum, from the Abba experience to nowadays revelatory events. Our attempt is to see how Schillebeeckx’s humanum, which is the embodiment of human experience of consciousness, becomes relevant for the Christian doctrines and why Schillebeeckx reckons that bringing them together would impact both his worldview and Western culture. (shrink)

Arising in the study of Quantum Logics, PBZ \(^{*}\) -_lattices_ are the paraorthomodular Brouwer–Zadeh lattices in which the pairs of elements with their Kleene complements satisfy the Strong De Morgan condition with respect to the Brouwer complement. They form a variety \(\mathbb {PBZL}^{*}\) which includes that of orthomodular lattices considered with an extended signature (by endowing them with a Brouwer complement coinciding with their Kleene complement), as well as antiortholattices (whose Brouwer complements are trivial). The former turn out to have (...) directly irreducible lattice reducts and, under distributivity, no nontrivial elements with bounded lattice complements, since the elements with bounded lattice complements coincide to the sharp elements in distributive PBZ \(^{*}\) -lattices. The variety \(\mathbb {DIST}\) of distributive PBZ \(^{*}\) -lattices has an infinite ascending chain of subvarieties, and the variety generated by orthomodular lattices and antiortholattices has an infinity of pairwise disjoint infinite ascending chains of subvarieties. (shrink)

The purpose of this article was to gain a deeper understanding of Arendt’s educational philosophy, her perspective of political involvement as a kind of political education, and natality as the fundamental nature of education. The current study has extended past research by elucidating Arendt’s view of participatory democratic politics, her analysis of citizenship education programs, and her assessment of the crisis of education. The findings of this study have implications for Arendt’s idea of pedagogical authority, the specific character of Arendt’s (...) contribution to political theory, and her grasp on the link between citizenship and education. (shrink)

Arising in the study of Quantum Logics, PBZ $$^{*}$$ -lattices are the paraorthomodular Brouwer–Zadeh lattices in which the pairs of elements with their Kleene complements satisfy the Strong De Morgan condition with respect to the Brouwer complement. They form a variety $$\mathbb {PBZL}^{*}$$ which includes that of orthomodular lattices considered with an extended signature (by endowing them with a Brouwer complement coinciding with their Kleene complement), as well as antiortholattices (whose Brouwer complements are trivial). The former turn out to have (...) directly irreducible lattice reducts and, under distributivity, no nontrivial elements with bounded lattice complements, since the elements with bounded lattice complements coincide to the sharp elements in distributive PBZ $$^{*}$$ -lattices. The variety $$\mathbb {DIST}$$ of distributive PBZ $$^{*}$$ -lattices has an infinite ascending chain of subvarieties, and the variety generated by orthomodular lattices and antiortholattices has an infinity of pairwise disjoint infinite ascending chains of subvarieties. (shrink)

The Invisible World Beyond the Perceptual One. The purpose of this paper is to show the effects of the invisible world on the visible. The way in which the conscious, which we feel, is affected by the subconscious, which we too often do not perceive. Our life is affected by a hidden mechanism, by a shadow mechanism. Everything starts from the inside, from thinking, vision, mission, objectives… everything starts with a philosophical discourse amplified by a social one.

Using the format of the assignment itself, we describe an assignment we have been using for the past seven years: Change Making Letter. Students are asked to pick an issue which directly affects them, identify a specific problem, think of a possible solution, as well as anticipate objections and respond to them. This letter should be about something the student genuinely cares about and has personal experience with, not a big national or international issue. While arguing for the importance of (...) the change making letter, we describe the advantages of this assignment, how the assignment is structured, and how faculty can modify it to meet a variety of classes and pedagogical goals. (shrink)

The Adventure of the Image Through the Conflict of Interpretations. Starting from the self-image, through the image adventure landscape seen as an ensemble of conflict of interpretation, not only from a single glance or direction, whether it is evasive or complex, we follow our decipherment and transformation, be it process or state. Through multiple hypostases, whether isolated or open, I will focus on certain details that will be addressed as a dimension by means of text or material reproduction, or through (...) the passage of the same image we face each time through the filter of our own existence. We stop the other or ourselves against the other, thus removing the observer or viewer, thus providing not only distinct perspectives on the same subject or the same situation or even the same consequences, but also giving him the opportunity to choose how to relate to the internal and external environment, thus convincing that, to a lesser extent, or greater, he is the one who drives everything. This approach is based not only on the adventure of self-image in the archive of own experiences but also from the outside, from the archive of common experiences perceived by other people. (shrink)