“It is the creation of the paternalistic but secretive company which produces moral indifference towards its employees”. This Turner & Newall case‐study highlights the significance of how a corporate morality or a thought world can affect the ethical conduct of the individuals in the organization. Geoffrey Tweedale is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Business History, and Richard C. Warren is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies, at The Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Aytoun Street, (...) Manchester. M1 3GH. Acknowledgments. This study draws partly on a study funded by the Wellcome Trust. Also to be thanked are David Jeremy and Andrew Lock. Michael O’Connor of Chase Manhattan Bank kindly provided court transcripts and other records from the Bank’s collection of non‐confidential T&N materials. (shrink)

This paper explores the American bankruptcy system -- especially the Chapter 11 code -- which since 1978 has allowed insolvent companies the opportunity to restructure and reorganise with the benefit of court protection from creditors. Particular attention is focused on asbestos companies, such as Johns--Manville, which have been among the most consistent and controversial filers for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. The history of asbestos and Chapter 11 is explored, against the backdrop of the burgeoning asbestos crisis, caused by increasing mortality (...) and litigation. Some of the business and ethical issues involved are highlighted by examining in detail a recent bankruptcy (Federal Mogul/T&N in 2001) that has implications in both Britain and America. Chapter 11 bankruptcy is evaluated, particularly in the light of the trend towards similar mechanisms of insolvency in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. It is concluded that, certainly as regards the experience with asbestos, Chapter 11 offers an inefficient and inequitable method of rehabilitating or rescuing failing businesses. (shrink)

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and the locations (...) from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters. (shrink)

The DNA in human cells is continuously undergoing damage as consequences of both endogenous processes and exposure to exogenous agents. The resulting structural changes can be repaired by a number of systems that function to preserve genome integrity. Most pathways are multicomponent, involving incision in the damaged DNA strand and resynthesis using the undamaged strand as a template. In contrast, O6-alkylguanine-DNA alkyltransferase is able to act as a single protein that reverses specific types of alkylation damage simply by removing the (...) offending alkyl group, which becomes covalently attached to the protein and inactivates it. The types of damage that ATase repairs are potentially toxic, mutagenic, recombinogenic and clastogenic. They are generated by certain classes of carcinogenic and chemotherapeutic alkylating agents. There is consequently a great deal of interest in this repair system in relation to both carcinogenesis and cancer chemotherapy. BioEssays 24:255–266, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.; DOI 10.1002/bies.10063. (shrink)

Doing the best we can in the world as it is requires that appropriate account be taken of The object of this essay is to examine what amounts to feasibilitydesirability considerations.feasibilitycoming in degrees objects that the advisee controls feasibility ofought-implies-can” principle, a point of departure that frames feasibility considerations in a dismissive or otherwise inadequate way.

This book brings together several internationally known authors with conflicting views on the subject, providing a lively and informative overview of this...

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Studies of conditioning in simple systems are best interpreted in terms of the formation of excitatory links. The mechanisms responsible for such conditioning contribute to the associative learning effects shown by more complex systems. If a dual-system approach is to be avoided, the best hope lies in developing standard associative theory to deal with phenomena said to show propositional learning.

We identify three points of intersection between economics and ethics: the ethics of economics, ethics in economics and ethics out of economics. These points of intersection reveal three types of conversation between economists and moral philosophers that have produced, and may continue to produce, fruitful exchange between the disciplines.

ArgumentDuring the two decades before the turning point in Copernicus's personal and scientific development in 1510, he had experience of political activity which has been largely ignored by the existing Copernicus literature but part of which is reconstructed in outline in this paper. Given the close linkage between politics and astrology, Copernicus's likely reaction to astrology is re-examined here. This reconstruction also suggests that the turning point in 1510, when Copernicus left his post as secretary to his uncle Lucas Watzenrode (...) the prince-bishop of Warmia, was not only linked to Copernicus's first version of his heliocentric theory in theCommentariolus, but also to major political setbacks being experienced by Watzenrode during these years, and with the publication of Copernicus's translation of theLettersof Theophylactus Simocatta. Some of these considerations contribute to maintaining the view that Copernicus and his work were in several respects exceptional. (shrink)

Leibniz' Verteidigung einer relationalen Auffassung von Raum und Zeit im Briefwechsel mit Clarke nimmt in keiner Weise Bezug auf Monaden. Infolgedessen haben einige Leibniz-Interpreten angenommen, Leibniz' relationale Auffassung von Raum und Zeit könne -wenn man sie hinreichend abstrakt versteht -von seiner außerordentlich mentalistischen Ontologie losgelöst werde. In der Tat hat der Gedanke einer Trennung der beiden Lehren etwas Bestechendes, da die relationale Auffassung plausibler erscheint als Leibniz' Metaphysik der Monaden. Vor allem haben Materialisten sich Leibniz' relationale Auffassung zu eigen gemacht (...) und seine mentalistische Ontologie verschmäht. Wie bestechend diese Trennung auch sein mag, die Kohärenz von Leibniz' relationaler Auffassung von Raum und Zeit hängt in entscheidendem Maße von seiner Monadologie ab. Wie Leibniz erkannte, glückt eine relationale Auffassung von Raum und Zeit nur dann, wenn einige grundlegende Bestandteile der Welt nicht grundsätzlich räumlich-zeitlich sind. (shrink)

The Allegory of the Cave (Pl. Resp. 514a1–520e2) is often analyzed in terms of metaphysical, epistemological, political, and psychic hierarchies that are clarified and reinforced by philosophical education. But the Allegory also contains an important historical allusion to the silver mining that took place in classical Attica. Examining the Cave in light of the enslaved miners around Lavrio leads us to reconsider the philosophical ‘liberation’ (λύσιν … τῶν δεσμῶν, 515c4) at the Allegory’s heart in the context of Athenian slavery and (...) Plato’s thoughts on the practice. Elsewhere in his work Plato generally uses servile metaphors in two ways: to depict ‘bad’ internal psychic subjection and ‘good’ submission to logos as manifested in various entities. This historical dimension of the Allegory works to undermine the ostensible naturalness of the slave/citizen distinction and suggest that philosophical education has the potential to ‘free’ the former and ‘subjugate’ the latter. The implication that these juridical categories are, to an extent, arbitrary and mutable reveals important differences between Plato’s views and those of his classical peers, and it adds to the dialogue’s protreptic dimension for its readers then and now. (shrink)

Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey Hartman explores the usefulness of Derrida's style of close reading for English and American scholarship and establishes its relevance to the division that has arisen between European and Anglo-American critical approaches. In addition, he discusses Derrida's exegesis in relation to theological commentary.

Originally published in 1940, this book contains an expanded English translation of Books 8 and 9 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. These two books are devoted to a discussion on the nature of friendship and the role it played in Greek life, and Percival supplies an introduction with a background to the subject of ancient friendship prior to Aristotle's formulation. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient friendship or the philosophy of Aristotle.

A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.

The LNAI series reports state-of-the-art results in artificial intelligence research, development, and education, at a high level and in both printed and electronic form.

Both Confucianism and the Bhagavad Gītā emphasize the moral authority of social roles. But how deep does the likeness between these ethical philosophies run? In this essay I focus upon two significant points of comparison between the role-based ethics of Confucianism and the Gītā: (1) the interrelation between formalized social roles and family feeling, and (2) the religious dimension of moral action. How is it that Confucians ground their social roles in family feeling, while the Gītā emphasizes rupture between role (...) and sentiment? Furthermore, are we to understand Confucianism as presenting a social philosophy that eschews religious concerns, whereas the Gītā denies the moral significance of family feeling in lieu of obtaining soteriological freedom? Examining the aesthetic and religious dimensions of the ethics of Confucianism and the Gītā clarifies a key distinction that both views implicitly make, albeit for divergent reasons: the difference between living one’s roles and playing one’s roles. (shrink)

The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s “mahat-buddhi” appears to be riddled with obscurity. Standard realist interpreters struggle to explain its cumbersome, textually unsupported bivalence, namely, how the mahat-buddhi can represent both a cosmological entity and a psychological capacity. Idealist readings, meanwhile, neglect the historically deep ontological meaning of this tattva by reducing it to a power of the transcendental ego. This paper moves beyond the impasse of the realism-idealism framework for interpreting the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and examines the mahat-buddhi through the existential phenomenology of (...) José Ortega y Gasset. It begins by re-framing classical Sāṃkhya metaphysics as an existential phenomenology of life, whereby life—as lived reality, not an external physical world or a field of mental experience—conveys the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti. From this, the paper then argues that the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take other-beings-as. (shrink)

In the last century, philosophers turned their attention to language. One place they have looked for clues about its nature is Plato’s Cratylus, which considers whether names are naturally or conventionally correct. The dialogue is a source of annoyance to many commentators because it does not take a clear position on the central question. At times, it argues that language is conventional, and, at other times, defends the view that language is natural. This lack of commitment has led to a (...) longstanding dispute over the outcome of the dialogue. I argue that the Cratylus provides no clear resolution to this problem because it presupposes certain unexamined metaphysical commitments about the nature of reality, which are in need of thorough investigation. (shrink)