The Peter Principle states that employees tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. In a sophisticated simulation study, Pluchino et al confirmed a version of the principle. However, they also noted that their model has the counterintuitive consequence that “the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members”. We argue that what promotion rule (...) is used can in general influence employee productivity. Accommodating this psychological aspect of promotion is noted as an open problem by Pluchino et al. Using an amended simulation model we verify that if the incentive induced by promoting the best is strong enough, then that strategy will be optimal. In a final simulation experiment we consider the effect on the efficiency of an organization of using “double standard” promotion strategies, i.e., strategies that depend on the official promotion rule being different from the de facto promotion rule. We show that double standard promotion strategies can be highly efficient, although we also note that in using such strategies the employer may take an unacceptable medium to long term risk. (shrink)

This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic.

Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums--for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before (...) He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor. (shrink)

Following the trend of sharing, and associating being on-line with being 'on-life', many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web. In Europe, recent proposals for regulation include an explicit 'Right to be Forgotten'; this right stated in the European Commission Proposal for Regulation COM 2011/12 does not emerge without controversy. It is being criticised on several grounds, including clashing with other rights, such as (...) freedom of expression, as well as setting the terrain for censorship. Besides the purely legal aspects of the proposed provisions, the chapters of this volume discuss how those legal provisions correspond in practice to worldviews and how individual and collective memory must be governed. They look into the deeper consequences of such provisions to construction of identity, culture and community formation, and how such a right affects how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget. (shrink)

Tom 1. Rannekhristianskiĭ gnosticheskiĭ tekst v rossiĭskoĭ kulʹture (21 i︠a︡nvari︠a︡ 2011 g.) -- Tom 2. Sudʹby religiozno-filosofskikh iskaniĭ Nikolai︠a︡ Novikova i ego kruga (15-17 okti︠a︡bri︠a︡ 2012 g.).

The Central American country of Guatemala committed itself to democratic values and processes in its election of December, 1985. Guatemala, like most other Central American countries, has been through the dictator-constitution-election revolving door many times. For almsot half a century, Guatemala has been afflicted with coups, general-presidents and dictator-presidents. Again, in 1985, Guatemala created a new constitution with provision for democratic presidential elections monitored and declared "democratic" by a score of other nations. The new president, Vinicio Cerezo, and his Minister (...) of Education, Eduardo Meyer Maldonado, emphasized that the elementary school, the only formal educational institution attended by the majority of Guatemalans, must provide those learning experiences required to develop, to nourish and to sustain democracy in Guatemala. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an extraordinarily original thinker, whose influence on twentieth-century thinking far outside the bounds of philosophy alone. In this engaging Introduction, A.C. Grayling makes Wittgenstein's thought accessible to the general reader by explaining the nature and impact of Wittgenstein's views. He describes both his early and later philosophy, the differences and connections between them, and gives a fresh assessment of Wittgenstein's continuing influence on contemporary thought.

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. A. H. Halsey presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. The book examines the literary and scientific contributions to the origin of the discipline, and the challenges faced by the discipline at the dawn of a new century.

Il testo analizza, in maniera ampia e analitica, un lavoro su Edourd Le Roy.

Study on Islamic prayers and medical ethics.

Verse work on Jaina doctrines and philosophy; translation in Hindi with explanation.

Upshot: Since all my commentators express some reservation about the distinction between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of knowledge in general, and its applicability and relevance in the domain of religious belief in particular, I will address the question of why this distinction is important and whether these two modes of knowledge can be communicated. Further questions I try to address include: Can a radical constructivist be an atheist, or alternatively a religious believer? What exactly would these designations mean? Is (...) it at all possible to discuss meaningfully the question of whether God exists? Can two or more people ascertain whether they in fact share their concept of a God? (shrink)