The first major publication in English on the bamboo slips excavated from a late fourth century B.C. Chu-state tomb at Guodian, Hubei, in 1993. The slip texts include both Daoist and Confucian works, many previously unknown. Thie monograph is a full account of the international conference held on these texts, at which leading scholars from China, the United States, Europe, and Japan analyzed the Laozi materials and a previously unknown cosmological text. In addition, the contents include nine essays on topics (...) such as the archaeological background of the discovery, conservation of the slip-texts, and the relation of the Guodian Laozi materials to the received Laozi text. An annotated edition of the Guodian Laozi materials and the cosmological text are included, as well as a critical bibliography with summary of Chinese scholarship on the Guodian texts in the year following the conference. (shrink)

In this surprising book, Allan V. Horwitz argues that our current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit only a small number of serious psychological conditions and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Social Work Values and Ethics -- Chapter 2: Managing Ethical Issues -- Chapter 3: Social Justice -- Chapter 4: Client Autonomy, Self-Determination, and Informed Consent -- Chapter 5: Privacy, Confidentiality, and Exceptions -- Chapter 6: Professional Competence, Incompetence, and Impairment -- Chapter 7: Cultural Competence, Humility, Awareness, and Responsiveness -- Chapter 8: Professional Boundaries, Dual Relationships, and Conflicts of Interest -- Chapter 9: Responsibilities in Practice Settings -- Chapter 10: Access to Services -- Chapter 11: Honesty (...) and Integrity -- Chapter 12: Social Work Accountability and Regulation -- Chapter 13: Risk-Benefit Management -- Chapter 14: Conclusion. (shrink)

Overtuigd dat de zorg voor de overlevingskansen van toekomstige generaties en van kwetsbare gebieden op onze planeet helemaal bovenaan op de agenda hoort, haalt Luk Bouckaert het ecopersonalisme vanonder het stof. Hij geeft het opnieuw een gezicht en een agenda. In zijn warm pleidooi nodigt hij niet alleen uit om de overstap te maken van 'ego' naar 'eco', maar maakt hij ook duidelijk dat in geen enkel denken de ecologische kwetsbaarheid mag ontbreken."--Back cover.

This contribution aims at reactivating the charming idea of ‘angelic economics’ launched in a reflective note by Laszlo Zsolnai in 2015. In the first section we explore the role of angels in theology and arts and focus on the Annunciation as a paradigmatic scene to understand their meaning. The second section deals with the enigmatic presence of future generations who do not exist but, on the other hand, have a moral voice and a moral impact. Can we consider angels as (...) representatives of future generations? The third section distinguishes three models of exploring the future: scientific prediction models utopian and dystopian blueprints and spiritual methods of representing the future. The main point in this section is: to what extent do these models give space to the voice of future generations? (shrink)

The Liber Amicorum in honour of Professor Laszlo Zsolnai’s 60th birthday expresses a deep feeling of gratitude towards a colleague, who is a pioneering academic in the field of business and economic ethics. In the introductory chapter you will find an overview of his philosophy, career and publications. What binds together his work and life is a spiritual humanism inspired by Buddhist, Christian and eco-philosophical sources. His disinterested way of ‘doing things’ explains the circle of friendship around his person and (...) work. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville is known for his strange liberalism. One of the reasons therefore has to be found in his lesser known strange religious belief. The three main elements that determined his belief were his aristocratic and profoundly religious education, the dramatic loss of his faith after reading eighteenth century French philosophers and his conviction that the stability of the American democracy was mainly due to religious mores. These elements explain why Tocqueville appeared in his publications as an obvious believer, (...) hardly bothered by any dubiety, while internally he was a restless doubter, sometimes a panicky infidel and occasionally some sort of believer anyway. The focus of this article is a meticulous dissection of Tocqueville’s personal belief by contrasting it with approaches of religion that look familiar at first sight. Although Tocqueville had the highest esteem for Pascal, his wager was not really tempting to him. James’ will to believe seemed far more attractive, yet Tocqueville’s thinking was too empirical to fit with it. Kant furnished strong arguments to overcome this obstacle, and in that respect he offered a solid philosophical ground to consider Tocqueville’s outlook on religion as an authentic religious belief. But what Tocqueville has never found was a religious ground to Christianity. As a matter of fact, Christianity was Tocqueville’s philosophical belief, rather than his religious belief. (shrink)

In Experiment, Right or Wrong, Allan Franklin continues his investigation of the history and philosophy of experiment presented in his previous book, The Neglect of Experiment. Using a combination of case studies and philosophical readings of those studies, Franklin again addresses two important questions: (1) What role does and should experiment play in the choice between competing theories and in the confirmation or refutation of theories and hypotheses? (2) How do we come to believe reasonably in experimental results? Experiment, (...) Right or Wrong makes a significant contribution to an important area in contemporary history and philosophy of science. Philosophers and historians of science, physicists, and advanced students in these areas will find much of interest in this engaging study. (shrink)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory (...) like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia. (shrink)

This book claims that Aristotle followed an aspect theory of predication.

This book provides the reader with a detailed and captivating account of the story where, for the first time, physicists ventured into proposing a new force of nature beyond the four known ones - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and gravitation - based entirely on the reanalysis of existing experimental data. Back in 1986, Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, Carrick Talmadge and their collaborators proposed a modification of Newton's Law of universal gravitation. Underlying this proposal were three tantalizing pieces of (...) evidence: 1) an energy dependence of the CP (particle-antiparticle and reflection symmetry) parameters, 2) differences between the measurements of G, the universal gravitational constant, in laboratories and in mineshafts, and 3) a reanalysis of the Eötvos experiment, which had previously been used to show that the gravitational mass of an object and its inertia mass were equal to approximately one part in a billion. The reanalysis revealed that, contrary to Galileo's position, the force of gravity was in fact very slightly different for different substances. The resulting Fifth Force hypothesis included this composition dependence and also added a small distance dependence to the inverse-square gravitational force. Over the next four years numerous experiments were performed to test the hypothesis. By 1990 there was overwhelming evidence that the Fifth Force, as initially proposed, did not exist. This book discusses how the Fifth Force hypothesis came to be proposed and how it went on to become a showcase of discovery, pursuit and justification in modern physics, prior to its demise. In this new and significantly expanded edition, the material from the first edition is complemented by two essays, one containing Fischbach's personal reminiscences of the proposal, and a second on the ongoing history and impact of the Fifth Force hypothesis from 1990 to the present. <. (shrink)

This volume offers a general introduction to the field of semantics and provides coverage of the main perspectives.

Separate individual's disposition to take action does certainly not constitute a sufficient condition to engage in demonstrations. Doubtlessly, equal importance is due to organisational and institutional factors in society, and the individual's position in those. Ultimately, a demonstration is the result of a struggle between organizations for going control over individuals in order to support or defend their own objectives.In the mobilization process these organizations may make use of a diversity of mechanisms and techniques to control or to influence their (...) members, as there are : the exploitation of the affective and instrumental ties binding the individual to the organization ; the access to - and the use of - the mass-media ; the use of selective communication by the organizational leaders and the induction of frustration. Special attention is given to the role of the militant and the characteristics of his language in the mobilization proces. (shrink)

The first months of political life in Belgium in 1979 were essentially characterized by the great difficulties encoutered in the formation of a new cabinet. In 1979 Belgium lived its longest cabinet crisis in its history.As usual, the process of cabinet formation started with the nomination of an «informateur», followed by that of a «formateur». However, formateur Wilfried Martens did not succeed in forming a cabinet : oppositions on issues and strategies between the parties proved to a high to be (...) surmounted. The King there upon introduced an innovation: he designated two «mediators». These, however, also failed to find some ground for agreement. Eventually, after elaborate informal contacts, the resigning Prime-Minister, Paul Vanden Boeynants, was nominated as formateur. After a month of laborious negotiations he successfully completed his mission. However, he preferred to leave the post of Prime-Minister of the new five party cabinet to Mr. Martens, till then president of the FlemishChristian-Democrats. (shrink)

In this article an analysis is made of the voting behaviour of Members of Parliament and political parties after the parliamentary debate on the investiture of a new cabinet. The voting behaviour does differ from the classical coalition-opposition voting pattern. Indeed the emerging general pattern shows that a majorityof the members of the coalition parties - but by no means all of them - approve the governments' declaration and that a majority of the members of the opposition rejects it.Deviant voting (...) behaviour after this parliamentary debate is not a general phenomenon and mostly only some majority members vote contrary to their whip's instructions. This dissident stand is taken mainly when cabinets can rely on a broad parliamentary majority. This deviant voting seems to be positively correlated to the size of the coalition.The directly elected Members of Parliament most easily vote in an unorthodox manner. The individual Members of Parliament motivate their deviant vote referring to the opinion of their electorate. (shrink)

This theoretical study starts from the observation that nearly any social problem is hierarchically structured. In order to elucidate the importance of this hierarchical aspect for the eventual solution of the problem, the concepts «problem domain» and «context» are introduced. With respect to each problem the nature of the problem defining instance, the problem definition and the problem experience are considered under a double aspect : the three of them can be individual as well as collective. As for the problem (...) itself a distinction is made between a subjective and an objective component. One also examines the elements that make a problem into a real social problem.Eventually one observes that each problem situation leads to the formation of a «field of power» involving various problem defining instances, each with its particular problem definition and problem experience. A valuable solution to any problem can hardly be reached without taking into account each of the forces in this field of power. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking work, Allan Combs presents a wide-ranging survey of the nature and origins of consciousness research, viewing consciousness as a dynamic and self-organizing process with evolutionary potential. Combs reviews the work of evolutionary theorists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ken Wilber, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo. What emerges is a fascinating study of consciousness that discloses itself as a rich and ongoing act of self-creation, poised at the edge of chaos between past and future.

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up the (...) kind of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a "kingdom of ends." The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses. (shrink)

In the postwar history of the Dutch-language daily press in Belgium, the late fifties, marked by a trend!towards concentration, and the latter part of the seventies, notorious by the bankrupties of several newspapers, stand out as eras of turbulence. It is two particularly significant events occurring during the latter period, i.c. the 1976 insolvency of the prestigeous «Standaard» papers and that of «Volksgazet» two years later, which this article focuses upon. In his analysis of causes and suggested/chosen solutions, the author (...) highlights the political rather than the economic dimension of the events and their aftermaths, given that each of the failing newspapers - and -hence their survival - mattered politically, i.c. to the Christian Democrats and the Socialist party respectively. Central to this is the question of the measures considered/taken by the Belgian c.q. Flemish political authorities for having the newspapers. The course of events in each case is examined and the differences in terms of causal factors and measures taken/ omitted are noted. In the final analysis, the question arises as -to the relationship between certain political figures or groups on the one hand, and government agencies, which both «Volksgazet» and particularly the «Standaard» titles were heavily indebted to, on the other hand. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the work of Laszlo Zsolnai, a leading researcher and scholar in the field of the ethical and spiritual aspects of economic life, who has made significant contributions to the connection between ethics, spirituality, aesthetics and economic theory. The book offers a selection of essays concerned with the ethical, spiritual and aesthetic context within which economics as a social studies discipline should be situated in order to avoid the sort of dehumanising consequences that theories based on utility maximisation (...) and rational choice necessarily entail. It presents the economic activities of human beings not as some sort of preordained obedience to universal laws that operate independently of other human concerns, but, rather, as a part of the human desire for the Aristotelian good life. It looks at the various considerations –moral, spiritual and aesthetic – that take part in the formation of economic decisions in sharp contrast with theories that purport to explain economic phenomena solely on the basis of utility maximisation. (shrink)

This handbook by Allan Harkness will give you a variety of practical and creative ideas for making time with God a significant part of your life. You don't need any special qualifications. Are you ready to grow?

This book brings together a number of important essays on the intersection of servant leadership and social entrepreneurship, examining them through a shared focus on ‘the will to serve’. This combination bears out the insight that inspiring social and economic leaders are able to transform a conflictual human settlement into a collaborative and caring human community. The book seeks to answer the question of whether we can induce from their ‘way of doing things’ a model of civic entrepreneurship and leadership (...) that can inspire people in profit, non-profit and public organizations. It also examines the extent to which the will to serve is compatible with the will to maximize profit or the will to gain economic, political or religious power. Furthermore, it asks how far different spiritual traditions create different models and examples of servant leadership and social entrepreneurship. This book will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of business ethics, business spirituality and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The core of business ethics literature is based upon the stakeholder theory of the firm. The normative function of this theory is to internalise the concept of social responsibility into the definition of the firm (the firm as a social contract) and into the managerial practice (participative management, social and ethical audit). But why should we introduce this business ethics approach into the field of the non-profit sector, which by its origin and mission has already a strong social dimension? Is (...) there a genuine dilemma of social responsibility in non-profjt institutions? The first part of the paper will give a more theoretical answer to this question. The second part will illustrate the relevance of the business ethics approach by presenting an empirical application of the stakeholer theory in the Belgian-Flemish non-profit sector. (shrink)

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation.

Close-up insights on how experts in the field are re-interpreting ethical principles to create workable policies for today and tomorrow, from the creators of ...

本书是美国著名汉学家艾兰女士研究中国早期哲学思想中的本喻的新著,其切入点非常独特、方法新颖、具有创造性,对国内中国哲学思想史的研究会有积极的推动作用。.