Recent perspectives on community investments suggest that they are opportunities for firms to create value for shareholders and other stakeholders. However, many corporate managers are still influenced by a widely held belief that such investments erode profits and are therefore unjustifiable from an agency perspective. In this paper, we refine and test theory regarding countervailing forces that influence community-based firm performance. We hypothesize that high levels of available slack will be associated with higher community-based performance, but that this relationship will (...) be moderated by three important governance variables: board independence, investment fund ownership, and CEO ownership. We find support for our hypotheses in longitudinal study of a large sample of U.S. corporations. (shrink)

This paper introduces Richard Rorty’s notion of the liberal ironist and his vision of a liberal utopia and explores the implications of these for philosophical questions concerning morality, as well as morality in general. Rorty’s assertions of the contingency of language, society and self are explored. Under the contingency of language, the figure of the ironist is defined, and Rorty’s conception of vocabularies is discussed. Under the contingency of society, Rorty’s definition of liberalism, his opposition of literary culture to materialist (...) and metaphysical culture, and his notions concerning utopian politics are discussed. Under the contingency of self, Rorty’s critique of Kantian and his appropriations of Deweyan and Freudian conceptions of morality are presented. Other key factors discussed are Rorty’s theory of the separation of the private and public spheres of life and his ideas concerning cruelty and human solidarity. In this way, a critical analysis of Rorty’s proposed balance between private, ironic doubt and public, liberal social hope is presented and assessed in terms of its merit as a system of thought suited to the needs of post-metaphysical, liberal societies. (shrink)

Siopis has always engaged in a critical and controversial way with the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Africa. For politically sensitive artists whose work has involved confronting the injustices of apartheid, the current post-apartheid situation has forced a reassessment of their practice and the terms on which they might engage with the fundamental changes which are now affecting all of South African society. Where mythologies of race and ethnicity have been strategically foregrounded in the art of any engaged (...) artist, to the exclusion of many other concerns, the demise of apartheid offers the possibility of exploring other dimensions of lived experience in South Africa. For feminists, this is potentially a very positive moment when questions of gender – so long subordinated to the structural issue of ‘race’ under apartheid – can now be explored. Penny Siopis’ work has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white middle-class women and black domestic labour during apartheid. Siopis’ work engages with how the appropriation of black women's time, lives, labour and bodies has shaped her ‘own’ history. (shrink)

Israel Scheffler views moral education as having two major objectives: inculcating minimum standards of decent conduct and developing rationality in moral deliberation and judgment. The latter is to be achieved by engaging students in discussions of moral issues in such a way that they come to appreciate and follow standards of rational deliberation and judgment – standards that Scheffler explicates primarily in terms of impartiality. This paper argues that the conception of rational moral deliberation and discussion underlying Scheffler's approach to (...) moral education is inadequate, and suggests an alternative conception that gives far more prominence to the problem of interpreting the meaning of substantive moral concepts and determining how they apply to particular cases. (shrink)

The possibility of a harmony between the psychological doctrine of Aristotle and that of Plato marks a significant issue within the context of the debate surrounding Aristotle’s putative opposition to or harmony with Plato’s philosophy. The standard interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the soul being purely hylomorphic leaves no room for harmonisation with Plato, nor does a functionalist interpretation that reduces Aristotle’s psychological doctrine to physicalist terms. However, these interpretations have serious drawbacks, both in terms of ad-hoc explanations formulated in (...) the developmentalist mode, and the misconstruing of some of the fundamental features of Aristotle’s psychological doctrine. A dualist interpretation that accepts Aristotle’s doctrine of some part of the soul being properly incorporeal, separable and immortal overcomes these drawbacks and, significantly, opens the door for Platonic harmonisation. Furthermore, it can be shown that the kind of immortality in question is also in line with the Platonic stance, due to a deep similarity between the conceptions of metaphysical and moral personhood held by Plato and his student. However, this Aristotelian dualism is not Platonic dualism simpliciter. Rather, it is best understood in terms of the division of labour between Aristotle and Plato suggested by the Neoplatonic commentators generally, and Simplicius in particular. I argue that though questions surrounding these issues and particularly the issue of reincarnation remain, an account of Aristotle’s psychological doctrine as dualist and in harmony with Plato’s view of the soul can be shown to be stronger than both standard hylomorphic and functionalist accounts, both exegetically and philosophically. (shrink)

Ethical issues related the responsible conduct of research involve questions concerning the rights and obligations of investigators to propose, design, implement, and publish research. When a principal investigator transfers institutions during a grant cycle, financial and recognition issues need to be addressed to preserve all parties’ obligations and best interests in a mutually beneficial way. Although grants often transfer with the PI, sometimes they do not. Maintaining a grant at an institution after the PI leaves does not negate the grantee (...) institution’s obligation to recognize the PI’s original ideas, contributions, and potential rights to some forms of expression and compensation. Issues include maintaining a role for the PI in determining how to take credit for, share and publish results that involve his or her original ideas. Ascribing proper credit can become a thorny issue. This paper provides a framework for addressing situations and disagreements that may occur when a new PI continues the work after the original PI transfers. Included are suggestions for proactively developing institutional mechanisms that address such issues. Considerations include how to develop solutions that comply with the responsible conduct of research, equitably resolve claims regarding reporting of results, and avoid the possibility of plagiarism. (shrink)

During the twentieth century a number of competing accounts of Lenin’s theory and practice have sought to reclaim its true meaning from ossification under Stalinism. One account popular today is the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks written in 1914 and 1915. According to thinkers such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic represent a radical break from classical dialectical materialism. For these Hegelian-Marxists, Lenin’s acerbic remarks on Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics reveal him as (...) the forerunner of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse and represent a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the dialectics of revolution. In this article I submit these arguments to the test of a fine grained textual analysis. I conclude, opposite to the Hegelian-Marxist narrative, that Lenin neither intended to nor accomplished a refoundation of Marxist dialectics in 1914. The notion of quantity-quality leaps Lenin adds to his works.. (shrink)

Although an important feature of firms’ corporate social responsibility, the strategic pressures behind firms’ corporate philanthropy are not well researched or understood. This research note argues that firms’ CP and firms’ corporate political activity may share common strategic antecedents; forces in firms’ political environment may shape both CP and CPA. Using S&P 500 data in a longitudinal analysis, the authors find evidence suggesting that industry-level political uncertainty increases firm propensity for engaging in both CP and CPA, above and beyond the (...) propensity to engage in either as a stand-alone strategy. The authors use this preliminary evidence to explore political marketplace contingencies for the relationship between CP and CPA. CSR literature indicates that CP can benefit firms by creating and enhancing their relational wealth and institutional legitimacy. Such benefits may also serve firm interactions with government policy makers—a dynamic largely ignored until recently. The authors’ findings may indicate that, due to its institutional signaling ability and impact on firms’ reputations, CP may allow firms to differentiate themselves or stand out from others when faced with political uncertainty, and that these outcomes should be considered when firms engage in CP. (shrink)

A working theory can involve a compromise between pragmatic application and pure theory. This is illustrated by the development of Coombs's theory of data. The original version of the theory purported to guide investigators in the use of scaling techniques, but subsequent revisions including a logico-mathematical statement of the theory do not show whether the practical recommendations made earlier still apply. These practical recommendations, some of which Coombs has discarded to obtain a comprehensive theory, are important in spite of shortcomings (...) as they reveal differences between attitude and mental test data. The different forms of Coombs's theory point to the existence of a general problem, how to find a compromise between practice and pure theory. (shrink)

It is a widely held view among scholars and commentators on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre that his corpus can be roughly divided into an early, largely a-political, non-Marxist period, and a later, more overtly political, post-liberation period. InThe Early Sartre and Marxism, Sam Coombes seeks to problematise this interpretation of Sartre’s corpus by undertaking a re-evaluation of a wide array of pre-liberation and early post-liberation writings in order to establish the extent to which views fully consistent with a (...) certain brand of Marxism are already present therein. The later period, he argues, does not so much constitute a break from the early work as a more complete development of certain nascent themes and concerns. There are difficulties inherent in any claim that Sartre’s early work is consonant with Marxism, primarily due to the fundamental incompatibilities between Sartre’s ontological description of liberation as a project of individual freedom and the inherent hostility of interpersonal relations, and Marxism’s requirements of the development of class consciousness and social solidarity for revolutionary action. Nonetheless, the modest claim that through the 1930s and early ’40s themes and ideas are appearing in Sartre’s work that are indeed not abandoned but constitute the basis of Sartre’s later more directly Marxist writings is compelling and may serve to reopen fruitful speculative philosophical dialogue between Sartre’s early existentialism and Marxism. (shrink)

We have conducted a case study of Foxconn’s suicide crisis when 12 Foxconn employees committed suicide during the first 5 months of 2010. In this case study, we have examined Foxconn’s crisis communication strategies during the critical period and explored the failure in crisis communication in terms of the stakeholder approach. Our findings show that Foxconn adopted a mixed response strategy by trying to address the concerns of various stakeholders while refusing to take responsibility for the suicides. Foxconn’s failure in (...) the crisis was due to its imbalanced stakeholder relations that failed to recognize employees as important stakeholders, resulting in the failure to provide the ethics of care and justice that was warranted. Our findings suggest that an ethical stakeholder approach can complement Benoit’s and Coombs’ crisis communication theories and strategies. (shrink)

No interior do pensamento de Dewey, a gênese da estética merece mais atenção do que lhe é dada na literatura. Um aspecto, em especial, tem sido virtualmente negligenciado — com as notáveis exceções de Robins 2015, Ueno 2016, Hein 2017 e Granger 2018a e 2018b — a saber, os vínculos com Albert Coombs Barnes. Nossa hipótese é que Barnes desempenhou um papel relevante na “virada estética” da filosofia madura de Dewey. Neste artigo, nós tomamos um primeiro passo rumo ao esclarecimento (...) da relação entre eles e uma tentativa de mostrar a influência do colecionador de arte na obra do filósofo. (shrink)

It is a long‐standing debate within political philosophy generally whether we want our political outcomes to be right or whether we want them to be fair; while democratic theory has traditionally taken the latter focus, democracy can be defended in the former way as well; how that can be done is the subject of this chapter and the next. For epistemic democrats, the aim of democracy is to ‘track the truth’, while for procedural democrats, the aim is to embody certain (...) procedural virtues. When voters are choosing between only two options, both epistemic and procedural standards point in the same direction, and in that case, Condorcet's jury theorem reassures both epistemic and procedural democrats that the correct outcome is most likely to win a majority of votes; however, where there are three or more options on the table, recommendations of the different strands of democratic theory diverge. In these cases, plurality voting is arguably the simplest and possibly the most frequently used voting rule, and this chapter demonstrates that the Condorcet jury theorem can indeed be generalized from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over many options; other decision rules, Condorcet pairwise criteria, Borda count procedures, and the Hare and Coombs systems have also been shown to have considerable truth‐seeking powers. This chapter addresses the question of which of these alternative possible democratic decision rules are the most reliable truth‐tracker in the more general ‘many‐option’ case. (shrink)

In the 18th century Adam Smith argued that in a commercial society based on the division of labour, a rising standard of living for all was possible and desirable. At the same time Smith regretted that a preoccupation with material goods and social status had displaced a more expansive notion of human nature. This tension is a recurrent theme in European social thought. It underlies the social vision of the architects of postwar reconstruction and the welfare state in Australia after (...) the Second World War as it is presented in the writings of Herbert Cole Coombs. Coombs worked to achieve a rising standard of living for ordinary Australians but believed that both living standards and human development could best be achieved through publicly funded services rather than private consumption. Unlike Smith, whose moral philosophy sees human nature as a reflection of God’s nature, Coombs’s social vision was thoroughly secular. This study explores how, in the absence of a religious justification, Coombs formulated the conviction that a life bounded by the aspirations to own a house, a car and the consumer durables that were beginning to be available to ordinary people - in other words to be a ‘good provider’ - lacks an essential element of what it means to be fully human. (shrink)

ch. 1. Istorii︠a︡ sot︠s︡iologicheskikh ucheniĭ -- ch. 2. Nauchnai︠a︡ teorii︠a︡ obshchestva.

This paper brings together the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston in speech-act theory with the aim of providing a deeper understanding of the nature of divine speaking through the medium of Scripture. Despite the fecundity of Wolterstorff's seminal work on the philosophical theology of Scripture, aspects of his speech-act centric account are underdeveloped and would benefit from the contributions of William Alston. In particular, his account of divine speech-acts could be fruitfully expanded by incorporating the concept of ‘taking (...) responsibility’ that is central to Alston's analysis of the nature of illocutionary acts. This would elucidate both the way in which readers of Scripture encounter divine practical authority in the reading process and the nature of the response of faith that is demanded of them. (shrink)

Several recent papers dealing with Plato's position on the imperfection of the phenomenal world draw heavily on the differences between two kinds of predicates in order to show the following: In the middle dialogues, Plato posits Forms only as referents of what the writers call incomplete predicates. He does not posit Forms as referents for complete predicates. When interpreters ignore the differences between these kinds of predicates, they ascribe too radical a view regarding the imperfection of the phenomenal world to (...) the middle dialogues. The ontology of these dialogues includes sensible particulars which retain their identity over time even though they are continually changing in some respect or other. (shrink)

A brief presentation of the major conclusions contained in the recently published monograph entitled "The Ascent to Law: Searches and Solutions," written over a period of many years. Chapter headings are: The law - an objective reality. The dogma of the law. The drama of scholarship. Searching. "The entire" substance of the law. Juridical constructs. The logic of laws. The secret of the law. Law - the highest purpose. Law in the life and fate of mankind.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

While Weber’s distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests is one of the most enduring aspects of his theoretical legacy, it has been subjected to little critical commentary. In this article, we revisit the theoretical legacy of interest-based explanation in social theory, with an eye to clarifying Weber’s place in this tradition. We then reconsider extant critical commentary on the ideal/material interest distinction, noting the primarily Parsonian rendering of Weber and the unproductive allegiance to ‘generic need’ readings of Weber’s action theory. (...) We reconstruct the basis of the ideal/material interest distinction in the work of Rudolph von Ihering and provide a sounder basis for its analytic role in Weber’s ‘grand’ project. (shrink)

The purpose of the present study was to address the shortcomings of Cronbach’s alpha concerning the semantic overlap between items. Using an example from a motivational measure, the correction of Cronbach’s alpha was applied by partialing out the effects due to conceptual overlap. The significance of Cronbach’s alpha was tested using simulated random data derived from the measure and by estimating the confidence intervals with known and unknown distributions. The results indicated that the uncorrected conceptual overlap coefficient alpha was equal (...) to 0.89 and 0.66 following the correction. After simulating the corrected statistical results, the distribution of alpha with random numbers had an estimate of 95%, equal to 0.41. The lower bound of the corrected alpha distribution was equal to 0.41, suggesting that the corrected alpha could easily belong to the distribution of alpha developed from simulated random numbers. Thus, the semantic overlap between items on a measure represents a significant threat to the validity of the alpha coefficient. (shrink)

Papers delivered at the joint meeting of the Hegel Society of America and the Hegel Society of Great Britain held at Merton College, Oxford, Sept. 1-4, 1981, to mark the 150th anniversary of Hegel's death. Includes bibliographical references and index.

This paper aims to introduce a robust framework for forecasting demand, including data preprocessing, data transformation and standardization, feature selection, cross-validation, and regression ensemble framework. Bagging ), boosting and extreme gradient boosting regression ), and stacking are employed as ensemble models. Different machine learning approaches, including support vector regression, extreme learning machine, and multilayer perceptron neural network, are adopted as reference models. In order to maximize the determination coefficient value and reduce the root mean square error, hyperparameters are set using (...) the grid search method. Using a steel industry dataset, all tests are carried out under identical experimental conditions. In this context, STACK1 and STACK2 models provided better performance than other models. The highest accuracies of R2 of 0.97 and 0.97 are obtained using STACK1 and STACK2, respectively. Moreover, the rank according to performances is STACK1, STACK2, XGBR, GBR, RFR, MLP, ELM, and SVR. As it improves the performance of models and reduces the risk of decision-making, the ensemble method can be used to forecast the demand in a steel industry one month ahead. (shrink)

Environmentalist philosophers often paint a holistic picture, stressing such things as the continuity of humanity with wider nature and our membership of the 'natural community' . The implication seems to be that a non-anthropocentric philosophy requires that we strongly identify ourselves with nature and therefore that we downplay any human/non-human distinction. An alternative view, I think more interesting and plausible, stresses the distinction between humanity and a nature valued precisely for its otherness. In this article I discuss some of its (...) main elements, and some of the difficulties involved with keeping nature's otherness in focus. Firstly (in sections 1-5), I try to clarify what I take to be the otherness-based position by distinguishing it from the apparently similar views of John Passmore, Robert Elliott and Keekok Lee, and some opposed holistic views, especially of J. Baird Callicott. Then, in the second half of the article (sections 6-7), I argue that if nature is valued in virtue of its otherness, this value is best thought of as an extrinsic, final and objective good, where 'objectivity' is a 'method of understanding', in Thomas Nagel's sense. Although I give some reasons for preferring an otherness account to certain alternative positions, I make no overall attempt to 'prove' that nature is valuable for its otherness. My aim is to show that, if it is, then this seems the best way to understand that value. (shrink)

Levinas’s Humanism of the Other may be seen as a meditation of King Lear. His philosophy offers what a critique of traditional and modern anti-humanism urgently needs: an ethics that precedes being. It provides a necessary ethical foundation needed to investigate questions of the human and humanity that Shakespeare examines so thoroughly in this powerful tragedy. Prefiguring Levinas’s later philosophy, Shakespeare dramatizes this humanism of the other through the suffering and vulnerability of the body. Lear’s and Gloucester’s parallel journeys are (...) both grounded in this vulnerability of the body and fragility of the mind that lead them to a humanism of the other. Moreover, the ethical good that precedes ontology, the saying, is profoundly staged through the characters of Cordelia and Edgar. This vision of King Lear, therefore, underlies and informs Levinas’s radical critique of traditional humanism and contemporary anti-humanism in his insistence on a humanism of the other. (shrink)

Collingwood’s “Libellus de Generatione: An Essay in Absolute Empiricism” was a tract of strenuous philosophical revisionism; never published, perhaps unpublishable, supposedly destroyed, it survived. He begins by stressing his obligations to David Hume; he offers his thematic: “absolute denial of any such concept as substance and the resolution of all reality into the reality of experience.” “The reality of mind is the process of its experience, its life, and nothing else”. Or, “the mind is a mirror... whose being is solely (...) the activity of reflecting”; it has no “substance of its own of which this activity is only a reflection”. Collingwood’s entire career as student and teacher... (shrink)

Hegel’s idealism is generally perceived as a system of rational sublation (Aufhebung) of all empirical contingencies: nothing resists notional mediation which, in a movement of negation of negation, establishes a rational totality. Already Schelling opposed to this complete sublation an “indivisible remainder” of empirical contingency. However, a close reading of Hegel makes it clear that the concluding moment of a dialectical movement of sublation is an empirical remainder which totalizes it, like the body of Christ in Christianity. And the same (...) goes for the process of “negation of negation”: it concludes with a failure of negation, and its ultimate form is a failed suicide where the subject survives as a living dead. Such a reading of Hegel makes him a thinker of our time which is the time of a failed negation: most of us live as survivors of our death, with life dragging on in depressive apathy. (shrink)