In this paper we describe and explore a management tool called the Caux Round Table Self-Assessment and Improvement Process (SAIP). Based upon the Caux Round Table Principles for Business — a stakeholder-based, transcultural statement of business values — the SAIP assists executives with the task of shaping their firm’s conscience through an organizational self-appraisal process. This process is modeled after the self-assessment methodology pioneered by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program. After briefly describing the SAIP, we address three topics. (...) First, we examine similarities and differences between the Baldrige approach to corporate self-assessment and the self-assessment process utilized within the SAIP. Second, we report initial findings from two beta tests of the tool. These illustrate both the SAIP’s ability to help organizations strengthen their commitment to ethically responsible conduct, and some of the tool’s limitations. Third, we briefly analyze various dimensions of the business scandals of 2001–2002 (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc.) in light of the ethical requirements articulated with the SAIP. This analysis suggests that the SAIP can help link the current concerns of stakeholders — for example, investors and the general public — to organizational practice, by providing companies with a practical way to incorporate critical lessons from these unfortunate events. (shrink)

Mayo Clinic is recognized as a worldwide leader in innovative, high-quality health care. However, the Catholic mission and ideals from which this organization was formed are not widely recognized or known. From partnership with the Sisters of St. Francis in 1883, through restructuring of the Sponsorship Agreement in 1986 and current advancements, this Catholic mission remains vital today at Saint Marys Hospital. This manuscript explores the evolution and growth of sponsorship at Mayo Clinic, defined as “a collaboration between the Sisters (...) of St. Francis and Mayo Clinic to preserve and promote key values that the founding Franciscan sisters and Mayo physicians embrace as basic to their mission, and to assure the Catholic identity of Saint Marys Hospital.” Historical context will be used to frame the evolution and preservation of Catholic identity at Saint Marys Hospital; and the shift from a “sponsorship-by-governance” to a “sponsorship-by-influence” model will be highlighted. Lastly, using the externally-developed Catholic Identity Matrix (developed by Ascension Health and the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota), specific examples of Catholic identity will be explored in this joint venture of Catholic health care institution and a secular, nonprofit corporation (Mayo Clinic). (shrink)

We address how the leaders of a Catholic business school can articulate and assess how well their schools implement the following six principles drawn from Catholic social teaching : produce goods and services that are authentically good; foster solidarity with the poor by serving deprived and marginalized populations; advance the dignity of human work as a calling; exercise subsidiarity; promote responsible stewardship over resources; and acquire and allocate resources justly. We first discuss how the CST principles give substantive content and (...) meaning to the Good Goods, Good Work, and Good Wealth framework in The Vocation of the Business Leader and then discuss their congruencies and tensions with the UNGC and UNPRME principles. Next, we describe the Catholic Identity Matrix, an assessment tool that provides a quantitative and qualitative portrait of how well a Catholic business school integrates, within the scope of its mission and capacities, the three goods and related CST principles in its strategies, policies, activities, and processes. The concluding section discusses implications for ongoing UNGC and UNPRME assessment, reporting, and development efforts, and addresses the generalizability of our approach to business schools who draw their inspiration and moral principles from other faith-based or secular traditions. (shrink)

A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and particulars. (...) It focuses on contemporary views and issues throughout, rather than on the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper I shall venture into an area with which I am not very familiar and in which I feel far from confident; namely into phenomenology. My main motive is not to get away from standard, boring, methodological questions like those of induction and demarcation; but the conviction that a phenomenological account of the empirical basis forms a necessary complement to Popper's falsificationism. According to the latter, a scientific theory is a synthetic and universal, hence unverifiable proposition. In (...) fact, in order to be technologically useful, a scientific hypothesis must refer to future states-of-affairs; it ought therefore to remain unverified. But in order to be empirical, a theory must bear some kind of relation to factual statements. According to Popper, such a relation can only be one of potential conflict. Thus a theory T will be termed scientific if and only if T is logically incompatible with a so-called basic statement b, where b is both empirically verifiable and empirically falsifiable. In other words: T is scientific if it entails ¬b; where b, hence also ¬b, is an empirically decidable proposition. (shrink)

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in the rituals of (...) Wall Street. Metaphors can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

The main purpose of the article is to show that the assumption of a power or force which connects cause and effect is an essential characteristic of our concept of cause. The article is divided in two parts. In the first one I present the criteria of the Agency Theory of Causality which I appreciate as correct. I show why, according to my point of view, this theory assumes the idea of force connecting cause and effect, and I propose (...) that the idea originates in the experience of “being compelled or induced” to undertake an action. In the second part of my article, I analyse an argument in favour of the opinion of Backwards Causation presented by Michael Dummett. Dummett’s argument demonstrates that just as the fatalist does not have arguments against those who believe in causality, so those who do not believe in backwards causation do not have arguments against those who do believe in it. I show that it is also the other way round: people who believe in causality cannot convince the fatalist, and people who believe in backwards causation cannot convince people not already convinced. So the two different opinions (the belief in causality and the belief in the absence of causality in its different forms) are both compatible with the empirical experience. The difference is to be looked for in an unverifiable assumption, and my proposal is that the difference lies in the opposite assumptions regarding the force connecting the events in consideration. At the end, I investigate the apparent implausibility of backwards causation. I believe that the reason it is regarded as implausible has to do with the experience that localize force as the factor that links cause and effect. (shrink)

The main scientific problems of chemical bonding were solved half a century ago, but adequate philosophical understanding of chemical combination is yet to be achieved. Chemists routinely use important terms ("element," "atom," "molecule," "substance") with more than one meaning. This can lead to misunderstandings. Eliminativists claim that what seems to be a baseball breaking a window is merely the action of "atoms, acting in concert." They argue that statues, baseballs, and similar macroscopic things "do not exist." When macroscopic objects (...) like baseballs move, exceedingly large numbers (1025) of microscopic components coordinate their activities. Understanding how this happens requires attention to the interactions that link parts into larger units. Eliminativists say that everything that truly exists has causal relationships in addition to those of its components—"nonredundant causality." This paper holds that if a number of entities interact in such a way that the effect of that collection on test objects is different than it would have been in the absence of the interaction, then identification of that collection as a single composite agent is warranted, for purposes to which that difference is relevant. Ordinary "chemical substances" (both elementary materials such as dihydrogen and compounds such as water) fulfill this version of the requirement of nonredundant causality. Other sorts of chemical coherences, including chemical dissipative structures (e.g., flames), also fulfill that criterion. All these types of coherences qualify as "substances" (as that term is used in philosophy) even though they are not all "chemical substances.". (shrink)

Quels sont les secrets pour acquérir des connaissances? Comment optimiser la transmission des savoirs? Comment apprendre? Comment apprendre à apprendre? Comment improviser pour apprendre? Comment apprendre pour improviser? Quels sont les facteurs pertinents qui facilitent les apprentissages? Sur quels licteurs les enseignants, les parents et tous ceux qui désirent apprendre peuvent-ils intervenir pour faciliter les apprentissages? Cet ouvrage répond à toutes ces questions en explorant les nouvelles approches innovantes des sciences de l'éducation relatives aux apprentissages. Il défiait ce qu'est une (...) écologie de l'éducation. Inscrit l'écologie de l'éducation dans un projet anthropologique. Pense les articulations à l'oeuvre entre l'éducation, la langue, la société, la politique et la culture. Analyse les relations qu'entretiennent ceux qui apprennent avec leur environnement. Repère ce qui peut motiver les apprenants à apprendre. Rend compte des bénéfices qu'ils peuvent en retirer. Par des exemples précis et des propositions concrètes et pratiques, Eric Dicharry nous permet de repenser nos relations au savoir et à la connaissance. Pour rédiger celte recherche et obtenir des sources de première main, l'auteur s'est immergé pendant un an dans deux écoles d'improvisation au Pays basque. II ne reste désormais au lecteur qu'à suivre pas à pas l'auteur sur son terrain pour partager avec lui sa quête de connaissance. (shrink)

Forms of thought are involved whenever we name, describe, or identify things, and whenever we distinguish between what is, might be, or must be the case. It appears to be a distinctive feature of human thought that we can have modal thoughts, about what might be possible or necessary, and conditional thoughts, about what would or might be the case if something else were the case. Even the simplest thoughts are structured like sentences, containing referential and predicative elements, and studying (...) these structures is the main task of philosophical logic. This clear and accessible book investigates the forms of thought, drawing out and focusing on the central logical notions of reference, predication, identity, modality and conditionality. It will be useful to students and other interested readers in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and philosophical logic. (shrink)

The last phase of Greek philosophy has until recently been less intelligently studied than any other, and in our understanding of its development there are still lamentable lacunae. Three errors in particular have in the past prevented a proper appreciation of Plotinus' place in the history of philosophy. The first was the failure to distinguish Neoplatonism from Platonism: this vitiates the work of many early exponents from Ficinus down to Kirchner. The second was the belief that the Neoplatonists, being ‘mystics,’ (...) were necessarily incomprehensible to the plain man or even to the plain philosopher. To have encouraged the persistence of this superstition in the nineteenth century is the least pardonable of Creuzer's many sins. The third was the chronological confusion involved in the ascription to Saint Paul's contemporary of the works of the pretended Dionysius Areopagita, which contain a fully-developed Neoplatonic theology. Though the fraud had been exposed by Scaliger, these writings continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century to be used as evidence that the ‘Nsoplatonic trinity’ was an inferior imitation of the Christian one. When this false trail was at length abandoned the fashion for orientalizing explanations persisted in another guise: to the earliest historians of Neoplatonism, Simon and Vacherot, the school of Plotinus was ‘the school of Alexandria,’ and its inspiration was mainly Egyptian. Vacherot says of Neoplatonism that it is ‘essentially and radically oriental, having nothing of Greek thought but its language and procedure.’ Few would be found to-day to subscribe to so sweeping a pronouncement; but the existence of an important oriental element in Plotinus' thought is still affirmed by many French and German writers. (shrink)

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in the rituals of (...) Wall Street. Metaphors can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

Este artigo começa por proceder à caracterização do Estado soberano, perspectivando-o como forma concreta e historicamente situada de organização política e inserindo-o no contexto dos demais modelos que o precederam. De seguida, constata a profunda crise que sobre ele se abateu, manifesta na incapacidade que apresenta, seja para explicar os fenómenos políticos com que nos deparamos diariamente, seja para constituir matriz adequada para a compreensão e explicação do mundo em que vivemos. Por último, lembra os direitos do homem desenvolvidos na (...) sequência da II Guerra Mundial do último século, explorando, por um lado, o carácter profundamente inovador que assumem e, por outro, a revolução que vêm introduzindo no sistema estatal de organização política. Tudo isto em apoio do principal argumento que se apresenta: quebrando o monopólio sobre o direito e o poder político que a modernidade havia consignado aos Estados, os direitos do homem emergem como uma das exigências mais eloquentes de um modelo novo de organização social e política, capaz de corresponder às necessidades que se fazem sentir, de universalidade, de solidariedade e de integração, também em termos jurídicos e políticos. /// This article opens with a characterization of the sovereign State, understood as a material and historically situated form of political organization and inserted in the context of the models that preceded it. In a second moment, it witnesses the profound crisis that has befallen it, evident in its incapacity, either to explain the political phenomenon we face daily, or to constitute an adequate framework for the under-standing and the explanation of the world we live in. Finally, it looks at human rights, as developed after the Second World War of the last century, exploring, on the one hand, their profoundly innovative character and, on the other, the revolution they are introducing in the State system of political organization. All of this in support of the main argument presented: breaking the monopoly over the law and political power that modernity had attributed to the States, human rights emerge as an eloquent demand for a new model of political organization, capable of corresponding to the demands of universality, solidarity and juridical and political integration that are felt in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Decisions related to animal welfare standards depend on farmer’s multiple goals and values and are constrained by a wide range of external and internal forces. The aim of this paper is twofold, i.e., to develop a theoretical framework for farmers’ AW decisions that incorporates farmers’ goals, use and non-use values and to present an approach to empirically implement the theoretical framework. The farmer as a head of the farm household makes choices regarding production to maximize the utility of the household. (...) The overall utility of the farmer is determined by his multiple objectives. For the analysis of multi-objective problems, the multiple criteria decision - making paradigm provides an appropriate theoretical framework. However, theories from the field of social-psychology are needed to facilitate the identification of all relevant aspects in the decision making. The practical use of the conceptual framework is demonstrated using a simple numerical application of a multi-objective programming model. Two workshops were devoted to examining the scientific consistency and the practical usefulness of the approach. Implementing this approach will increase knowledge of the main factors and barriers that determine farmers’ decisions with regard to AW standards. This knowledge is relevant during the development of new AW concepts that aims to supply products that comply with above-legal AW standards for middle-market segments. (shrink)

To uncover the main dimensions of sport personality traits, a lexical study was conducted. In the first two phases, 321 adjectives denoting the way somebody practices sports were selected. In the third phase, 555 respondents self-rated the adjectives. Congruence analyses provided evidence of six factors, five of which are sport personality trait factors plus one physical individual difference factor. Marker scales from the sport personality trait factors show convergent correlations with the generic HEXACO personality obtained years earlier. Furthermore, meaningful (...) relations with the six most frequently practiced sport and leisure activities were observed. Contextualized sport personality trait factors can be useful in research on sport preferences, sport behaviors, and sport outcomes. (shrink)

The Kiki-Bouba effect comprises a relation between two abstract figures and two non-words: the star-shaped figure is called 'Kiki' and the rounded figure 'Bouba'. The effect is explained by a sound-vision synaesthesia: certain sounds are associated with certain shapes in a non-arbitrary manner.When we asked the participants to decide which of the two figures, the star-shaped or the rounded one, to call yin and which yang, some 85% choose the star-shaped figure as yin. There are previous cases of synaesthesia where (...) personality is attributed to numbers or letters. In our results, the word Kiki is overall happy, clever, small, thin, young, unpleasant, and nervous. The starshaped figure is overall clever, tall, small, slim, nervous, unpleasant, and upper-class. That is, the correspondence above all concerns the qualifying adjectives clever, unpleasant, and nervous, as well as the physical appearance small and thin. This brings us to the fat-thin effect. Cinema, literature, comics, and children's programmes are full of contrasting figures: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Laurel and Hardy , Asterix and Obelix, Tintin and Captain Haddock, Bert and Ernie , or the Spanish comic about very naughty twin boys called Zipi and Zape . Our main conclusion is that first names and last names are not entirely arbitrary. There is a correspondence between names and physical characteristics and concepts . The Kiki-Bouba effect is a semantic one. (shrink)

In contemporary discussion of the philosophy of religion, or for that matter of any branch of philosophy, the names of Whitehead and Wittgenstein are not often linked. Whitehead's later work is, for the most part, treated as a rather specialized interest, an attractively under-cultivated field for the enterprising thesis-writer perhaps, but well away from the main centres of current philosophical activity. And what he has to say about specifically religious or theological issues 1 becomes simply one ramification of an (...) ingenious but somewhat eccentric system. Nonetheless, there is at least this much justification for considering it in relation to the much more influential and widely discussed views of Wittgenstein. Whitehead has some original things to say about God, Wittgenstein some original reasons for thinking that Whitehead's brand of originality is here radically misplaced. And the possibility or otherwise of such theological originality is an issue of very considerable importance for the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This issue of Mélusine pursues the research initiated in 1982 on the surrealist book, without giving the last word on such a complex subject. Demonstrating erudition worthy of La Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, the contributors propose new ideas and points of view. By the sheer abundance of technical terms, the articles would have astonished the avant-garde poets and artists in question, who were so very fond of entertainment. Some contributors examine the illustrated book, the artist's book and the (...) book-object in general as surrealist publications, while others focus on a single book or even on the non-book imagined by André Breton.In her introduction, editor Andrea Oberhuber describes the evolution of .. (shrink)

Os discursos científicos são os principais veiculadores do modelo da diferença incomensurável entre os sexos, a partir do qual homens e mulheres passam a ser diferenciados em função de seus órgãos reprodutivos, hormônios e cromossomos. Portanto, pretende-se realizar uma investigação conceitual dedicada ao escrutínio do conceito biológico da natureza no que diz respeito à sexualidade, a partir da análise de fontes filosóficas que consideram criticamente o discurso científico tradicional.

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about (...) whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging paradigm of value-sensitive design. We explore the difficulties developers face when designing information technology for trust and show how our (...) analysis in conjunction with existing engineering design methods provides means to address these difficulties. Our main case concerns a concrete problem in the economic domain, namely the transfer of control from customs agencies to companies. Control of individual items is increasingly untenable and is replaced by control on the level of companies aimed at determining whether companies can be trusted to be in control of their business and to be in compliance with applicable regulations. This transfer sets the task for companies to establish this trust by means of information technology systems. We argue that this trust can be achieved by taking into account philosophical analyses of trust and by including both parties in the trust relationship as clients for whom the information technology systems are to be designed. (shrink)

Law and History contains a collection of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers past and present to answer legal questions. In common with earlier volumes in the Current Legal Issues series, it seeks both a theoretical and methodological focus. This volume covers a broad range of topics, from a discussion of the nature of norms in the middle ages to the role of war crimes trials in the twentieth century. (...) It includes wide-ranging historiographical discussions, which examine the nature and aims of the legal historian, as well as contributions which explore the methodology and aims of writers such as Coke, Maine, Weber, Montesquieu, and Kames, who sought to use historical models to explain law. A number of contributions examine developments in legal doctrine, particularly in the nineteenth century, including developments in the law of contract, administrative law, and perjury. These raise important questions about the nature of the legal categorizations which developed in that era. Law and History also includes a collection of contributons on the use of history in twentieth century trials, including the Nuremberg trials, the trial of the Gang of Four, and trials arising from the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. (shrink)

The author offers an outline of the contemporary pragmatist scene in American philosophy. He shows the continuity and common features of classic and recent pragmatisms of which the most crucial are antifoundationalism and antirepresentationalism. In his analysis he distinguishes two main currents of neopragmatist philosophy: 1. post-analytic , and 2. neo-classic lines. Finally he focuses on some characteristics of the Rortyan post-analytic neopragmatism as expressed in his last book Philosophy and Social Hope.

In Vita della mente e tempo della polis, Simona Forti gives the most convincing account to date of Hannah Arendt's unique path into “post-metaphysical thinking” and shows why it remains one of the most radical “thought-experiments” of this century. Forti's approach to Arendt's thought is centered on the problem of the relation between philosophy and politics, theoria and praxis. Her main thesis is that Arendt identifies the fundamental motivation that is operative in metaphysics as the “occlusion” and “removal” of (...) the originary phenomenon of politics, and thereby also the finitude, multiplicity, and temporality of the “human condition” that is constitutively bound to politics. Forti claims that by the re-memoration of such an “originary” understanding of politics, Arendt is able to deconstruct the tradition of metaphysics in a more radical fashion than Heidegger. Conversely, this “originary” or “authentic” politics, because it stands as the “other” of the whole apparatus of metaphysics, remains immune to a totalizing theorization of its domain, and this in two ways: no “system” of politics is possible, and the role played by theory in political action itself undergoes a thorough revaluation. This theoretical fragility of authentic praxis is precisely what does not permit, at the practical level, its stabilization and foundation. Hence the “tragic” fracture between praxis and theoria, their impossible reconciliation, that in turn becomes the proper matter of “thinking” after metaphysics. A “thinking” which is problematized by Forti through the analysis of the question of judgment in Arendt, whereby a new modality of the “life of the mind” is disclosed, one that lies beyond the very dualism of philosophy and politics. (shrink)

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Arguing against prevailing scholarly assumption, he argues that the Platonists turned to Aristotle only in order to elucidate Plato's doctrines and to reconstruct Plato's philosophy, and that they did not hesitate to criticize Aristotle when judging him to be at odds with Plato. Karamanolis (...) offers much food for thought to ancient philosophers and classicists. (shrink)