Participatory and collaborative approaches in sustainability science and public health research contribute to co-producing evidence that can support interventions by involving diverse societal actors that range from individual citizens to entire communities. However, existing philosophical accounts of evidence are not adequate to deal with the kind of evidence generated and used in such approaches. In this paper, we present an account of evidence as clues for action through participatory and collaborative research inspired by philosopher Susan Haack’s theory of evidence. Differently (...) from most accounts of evidence for use in policies and interventions, our account combines action-oriented (the how) and actors-oriented (the who) considerations. We build on Haack’s theory and on the analysis of examples of participatory and collaborative research in sustainability science and public health research to flesh out six procedural criteria for the generation and mobilization of evidence in and from participatory research. Action-oriented criteria invite to look at evidence from a (a) foundherentist, (b) gradational and (c) quasi-holistic perspective. Actors-oriented criteria point out that evidence generation and utilization are (d) social, (e) personal, and (f) embedded. We suggest that these criteria may reinforce participatory and collaborative approaches to evidence co-production when addressing complex problems in sustainability science and public health allowing for the generation of a kind of practical objectivity. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity has seemingly become a paradigm for modern and meaningful research. Clearly, the interdisciplinary modus of deliberation enables to unfold relevant but quite different disciplinary perspectives to the reflection of broader scientific questions or societal problems. However, whether the comprehensive results of interdisciplinary reflection prove to be valid or to be acceptable in trans-disciplinary terms depends upon certain preconditions, which have to be fulfilled for securing scientific quality and social trust in advisory contexts. The present book is written by experts (...) and practitioners of interdisciplinary research and policy advice. It analyses topical and methodological approaches towards interdisciplinarity, starting with the current role of scientific research in society. The volume continues with contributions to the issues of knowledge and acting and to trans-disciplinary deliberation. The final conclusions address the scientific system as substantial actor itself as well as the relevant research and education politics. (shrink)

O mundo contemporâneo é o do exílio e não o da pátria, o da errância e não o do lugar. Razão pela qual nosso tempo foi denominado de “século breve”, em que os acontecimentos e os desaparecimentos de modos de vida e valores são acelerados, não permitindo o repouso para constituição de uma memória reparadora. Exílio, expatriamento e dispersão espacial são, pois, o emblema das migrações forçadas por guerras, perseguições políticas e diferentes formas de conflito, que produzem a “nostalgia do (...) inteiramente outro” diante da “vida mutilada”. Assim, a diferença entre duas figuras: a da viagem e a da partida, a odisseia e o êxodo, uma que vive no horizonte de um retorno, outra que anseia por uma pátria que não existe mais. A viagem contemporânea para uma terra de exílio tem algo de enigmático, pois populações inteiras atravessam os mares, assombradas pelos naufrágios e pela incerteza da chegada ou do encontro de um não lugar. Herdeiro problemático de um duplo trauma – o do extermínio dos judeus europeus durante o nazismo e, simultaneamente, o da expulsão dos palestinos de sua terra com a criação do Estado de Israel – Edward Saïd, um dos mais importantes intelectuais palestinos, refletiu sobre a questão da identidade em situações de exílio e estranhamento cultural, procedendo a uma genealogia do sentimento de desorientação, desrealização e perda de si que o exílio produz. Pois se, antes, cada um de nós tem o conforto de paisagens conhecidas, o aconchego do mundo entre os seus, o país estrangeiro representa a passagem do conhecido ao desconhecido, significa o enfrentamento de um incerto acolhimento, com incompreensões, desprezo e hostilidade do lugar a que se chegou. Reunindo, assim, sua formação de scholar em literatura nos Estados Unidos e de musicólogo e pensador geopolítico, Edward Saïd refletiu sobre a construção de um Oriente pelo Ocidente, pelo medium de escritores nos quais há a personagem fantasmada do Outro. (shrink)

In this paper a semantics for dynamic predicate logic is developed that uses sequence valued assignments. This semantics is compared with the usual relational semantics for dynamic predicate logic: it is shown that the most important intuitions of the usual semantics are preserved. Then it is shown that the refined semantics reflects out intuitions about information growth. Some other issues in dynamic semantics are formulated and discussed in terms of the new sequence semantics.

Companies do have ethical responsibility and are not protected by limited liability from the consequences of their actions. A company's record and the preception of its ethics affect its reputation and ensure long term success or failure.The financial community has a history of placing moral considerations above legal or opportunistic expedients. But we are often exposed to moral dangers and the dangers of contamination are increasing. Deregulation and the technological revolution are sharpening ethical conflicts.

Tradition in either of its two senses—the act of handing on , and what is handed on—is a particular instance of a law of human existence that men live in dependence on one another and by the processes of giving and receiving. So a sociologist can write, ‘If we are able to speak of real tradition, we must find the past spontaneously taken into account as the meaning of the present, without any discontinuity of social time, and without any consideration (...) of the past as irrelevant’ . ‘If democracy’, wrote Chesterton, ‘means that I give a man a vote even though he is my chauffeur, tradition means that I give a man a vote even though he is my great-great-grandfather’. What is handed on, however, is not existence of a purely biological kind, to remain always what it has been or to change very slowly over a space of aeons. Except in primitive tribes even tradition is not simply passed on as something static and timeless, and it is received by men who, though themselves in time, are not totally time-bound or restricted by what they receive. They believe themselves to be capable of significant action which is more than the repetition and reproduction of what has gone before. They are able to grasp a span of time and to call it history; they believe themselves to have a history, and they write history. (shrink)

Corporate governance is increasingly becoming an issue of global concern, not least because we are more and more living in a corporate world that transcends international boundaries. The main purpose and motivation of this study is to determine how the international community should motivate businesses in fostering exemplary corporate governance, therefore eliminating obstacles to ethically exemplary behavior. The empirical approach utilized here has been applied to 161 businesses, both listed and over-the-counter (OTC) companies, with the results indicating that ethical considerations, (...) corporate governance and organizational performance are inextricably linked and, to an extent, demonstrably proportional. This study also indicates a major finding that family management is a significant mediating variable of the ethical considerations of corporate governance and organizational performance. Finally, this study has developed an operational model of ethical considerations of corporate governance as a consultancy aid for businesses that wish to implement and/or boost their performance in respect to corporate governance. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:F.H. Bradley, Collected Works Volumes 1–5.

This paper explores the question of whether or not the law is a computable number in the sense described by Alan Turing in his 1937 paper ‘On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ Drawing upon the legal, social, and political context of Alan Turing’s own involvement with the law following his arrest in 1952 for the criminal offence of gross indecency, the article explores the parameters of computability within the law and analyses the applicability of Turing’s computability thesis (...) within the context of legal decision-making. (shrink)

Some humanist theologians within the French Reformed Church in the 17th century developed the notion that a disability of the intellect could exist in nature independently of any moral defect, freeing its possessors from any obligations of natural law. Sharpened by disputes with the church leadership, this notion began to suggest a species-type classification that threatened to override the importance of the boundary between elect and reprobate in the doctrine of predestination. This classification seems to look forward to the natural (...) history of mind that emerged later in the century. (shrink)