We attempt in this paper to define a new field of study for philosophy: philosophy of management. We briefly speculate why the interest some managers and management writers take in philosophy has been so link reciprocated and why it needs to be. Then we suggest the scope of this new branch of philosophy andhow it relates to and overlaps with other branches. We summarise some key matters philosophers of management should concern themselves with and pursue one in some detail. We (...) conclude with an invitation. (shrink)
We attempt in this paper to define a new field of study for philosophy: philosophy of management. We briefly speculate why the interest some managers and management writers take in philosophy has been so link reciprocated and why it needs to be. Then we suggest the scope of this new branch of philosophy andhow it relates to and overlaps with other branches. We summarise some key matters philosophers of management should concern themselves with and pursue one in some detail. We (...) conclude with an invitation. (shrink)
In Book III of A Treatise on Human Nature,' Hume puts two questions which he says are distinct. The first concerns "the manner in which the rules of justice are established by the artifice of men." The second concerns "the reasons which determine us to attribute to the observance or neglect of these rules a moral beauty and deformity." Whatever his sympathies, the reader is bound to be struck by the sustained ingenuity of Hume's answer to the first question. He (...) is likely to be less impressed by the way in which Hume copes with the second. I shall be concerned with certain difficulties in Hume's treatment in the Treatise of this second question-difficulties which are of far more than exegetical interest. However, because the two questions are by no means as distinct as Hume declares-something which is rapidly made evident even by Hume's own discussion-I cannot exclude all reference to the first. What I shall avoid is any attempt to assess what is commonly received as Hume's answer to that question. Furthermore, I say next to nothing about what Hume takes just and unjust behaviour to consist in: about that remarkably confined area of human affairs which for Hume defines the limits within which people may be said to behave justly (and unjustly)-and, of course, to display other parasitic artificial virtues (and vices). My concern is rather with Hume's efforts to explain how there can be as well as natural, artificial virtues; how certain practices, whatever their detailed anatomies and inter-connexions, can be found morally estimable. And my conclusion is that his efforts are bound to fail. (shrink)
John S. Dunne says that in its most general form the ‘problem of death’ is this: ‘If I must some day die, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?’ His aim is to ‘discover what[men] have done or tried to do to make themselves immortal’ —or at any rate to prolong their lives indefinitely, a rather different matter. His book charts the adoption and subsequent rejection of a succession of historical ‘solutions’ to this problem: ‘surrogates’of one or (...) another kind for everlasting life, as he calls them. The surrogates he examines are many and varied: the shared experience of life and death; the appropriation of the dead by the living; immortal fame; immortal status; autonomous life and autonomous death; and others still. (shrink)
In an article called ‘Moral Scepticism’ Professor R. F. Holland displays in a pointed and often impressive way both the virtues and the vices of a tempting approach to certain fundamental issues in moral philosophy. The appeal to sanity and honesty may, when directed towards chronic philosophical perplexity, cease to be a virtue and become the vice of disingenuousness. And when a philosopher writes that ‘no clear idea is available to us of what moral scepticism amounts to’, that moral scepticism (...) would, if it were possible at all, have to be a ‘specially cooked-up affair’ by contrast with other varieties of scepticism, it is hard not to accuse him of just such a vice. (shrink)
THE ARTICLE DISCUSSES WHETHER THERE CAN EVER BE CONCLUSIVE GROUNDS FOR ACCEPTING ANY MIRACLE CLAIM WHATSOEVER. THE USUAL ’EMPIRICAL’ MODEL FOR THE MIRACULOUS IS EXAMINED AND REJECTED AS VARIOUSLY INCOHERENT. THE AUTHOR PROPOSES AND ELABORATES ON ALTERNATIVE ’ANALYTIC’ MODELS, ACCORDING TO WHICH A MIRACULOUS ACT IS A "CREATIVE" ACT. THE LOGIC OF CREATION IS EXAMINED, AND FURTHER PROBLEMS ADUMBRATED.
I begin, as I shall end, with fictions. In a well-known tale, The Sandman , Hoffmann has a student, Nathaniel, fall in love with a beautiful doll, Olympia, whom he has spied upon as she sits at a window across the street from his lodgings. We are meant to suppose that Nathaniel mistakes an automaton for a human being . The mistake is the result of an elaborate but obscure deception on the part of the doll's designer, Professor Spalanzani. Nathaniel (...) is disabused quite by accident when he over-hears a quarrel between Spalanzani, who made Olympia's clockwork, and the sinister Coppelius, who contributed the eyes. (shrink)
Deep beneath the surface of Kant's theory of knowledge lies the metaphysical doctrine of noumena, things in themselves, intelligible entities . For lengthy periods these creatures are surprisingly unobtrusive and can be safely disregarded. But at certain points Kant hauls them to the surface and tries to put them to work in perplexing ways. My concern is not with these attempts, but with what can be learned, if not salvaged, from the metaphysical doctrine as it is expounded in the chapter (...) in the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena’. I shall start by giving, for the most part in Kant's own words, as blunt an account as possible of how he appears to reduce his own doctrine to nonsense. I shall then argue that such an account, while not straightforwardly wrong, ignores matters of very great interest. I shall do so in terms of two theories, which I distinguish, about the relationship between knowing, changing and conceptualizing. Finally, I shall draw some more and less general conclusions. (shrink)
IT SEEMS PLAUSIBLE TO DIVIDE ALLEGEDLY EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS, "SECULAR" OR OTHERWISE, INTO TWO BROAD CATEGORIES. THE FIRST CATEGORY COMPRISES EVENTS WHICH APPEAR TO BE EXTENSIONS OF THE FAMILIAR, SINCE THEIR CHARACTERIZATION APPARENTLY INCORPORATE A REFERENCE TO EVENTS WHICH ARE SCIENTIFICALLY COMMONPLACE. THE SECOND COMPRISES EVENTS WHICH APPEAR TO BE TOTAL BREAKS WITH THE FAMILIAR, SINCE APPARENTLY NO SUCH REFERENCES CAN BE ELICITED. THE WRITER EXAMINES IN DETAIL POSSIBLE BASES FOR THE DISTINCTION, IN CONNECTION, ESPECIALLY, WITH THE NOTION OF THE DEFEASIBILITY (...) OF AN ACTION. HE CONCLUDES THAT ALTHOUGH THE DISTINCTION CANNOT IN THE END BE SUSTAINED, ANY ATTEMPT TO PROVIDE A COHERENT LOGIC OF THE MIRACULOUS MUST TAKE ACCOUNT OF A NUMBER OF POINTS ARISING FROM THE EXAMINATION. (shrink)
My ultimate concern is with how it can be that the past, and in particular my past, matters, in broadly non-causal ways, to the present, and in particular my present. How can it matter to me to have done things, and to remember having done them? However, I take some time to get to this concern, for I believe it should not be there at all, or at any rate take the form it does. So this needs explaining first.
Fairly recently, I came upon the following passage in a review of a book by Colin M. Turnbull, called The Mountain People : A child dumped on the ground is seized and eaten by a leopard. The mother is delighted; for not only does she no longer have to carry the child about and feed it, but it follows that there is likely to be a gorged leopard near by, a sleepy animal which can easily be killed and eaten. An (...) old woman who has been abandoned falls down the mountainside because she is blind, so a crowd gathers to laugh at the spectacle of her distress. A man about to die of gunshot wounds makes a last request for tea. As he feebly raises it to his lips, it is snatched from him by his sister, who runs away delighted. A child develops intestinal obstruction; so his father calls in the neighbours to enjoy the joke of his distended belly. (shrink)
I try in this article to shed some light on what it is and what it is not to understand certain kinds of beliefs, of which religious belief is the most prominent instance. Much has been written on the subject, and I make no apologies either for taking for granted a context for discussion, or for disregarding a number of familiar issues. I try, in particular, to explain why a rather curious thesis about understanding religious belief has found wide acceptance (...) when, on the face of it, it cannot possibly be correct. I begin with one or two points about belief; I then take what I hope is a fresh look at two theses about understanding religious belief; and finally I draw some tentative conclusions about puzzlement, understanding and understandability. (shrink)
Fairly recently, I came upon the following passage in a review of a book by Colin M. Turnbull, called The Mountain People : A child dumped on the ground is seized and eaten by a leopard. The mother is delighted; for not only does she no longer have to carry the child about and feed it, but it follows that there is likely to be a gorged leopard near by, a sleepy animal which can easily be killed and eaten. An (...) old woman who has been abandoned falls down the mountainside because she is blind, so a crowd gathers to laugh at the spectacle of her distress. A man about to die of gunshot wounds makes a last request for tea. As he feebly raises it to his lips, it is snatched from him by his sister, who runs away delighted. A child develops intestinal obstruction; so his father calls in the neighbours to enjoy the joke of his distended belly. (shrink)
My concern is to understand how it is that contemplation of the past— better, of this or that preferred past—evokes in some people an impression which is distinctively weird. It is unmistakable; and anyone who has felt it will soon know what I am talking about. What is the impression, and whence the impressionability? To help identify my concern I shall let it emerge from some highly selective remarks about an issue in philosophy of history which is, by contrast, familiar (...) and respectable: the debate between constructionists and realists. We cannot conceivably have direct acquaintance with, direct access to, the past; by their very nature, past events are over and done with and so unavailable for inspection. This much both camps agree on. However, they differ massively over what follows from this truth. For the constructionist concludes that what he calls the ‘real past’, what actually happened, can play no part whatsoever in historical thought. It is necessarily hidden, and we can have no inkling of it. What, and all, the historian can sensibly claim to know is the ‘historical past’, something which is constituted by and exists only in relation to his thought. Against this, the realist maintains that of course historians do not, necessarily or even typically, constitute the past; rather, they construct accounts of it which will be true if they conform to it as it actually was and false if they do not. And he charges his opponent with a number of fundamental confusions: mistaking accounts of historical events for the events themselves, confusing epistemological matters with ontological, and worst of all equating knowledge with direct perceptual awareness. Now, the realist is, in basics at least, fairly obviously right. And his criticisms are reinforced when we note that constructionists tend to combine with their vision of the impenetrability of the ‘real’ past the thesis that we undoubtedly know that there is a real past, with real people and real events. However, this piece of knowledge must for him, like that of an intelligible world for Kant, ever remain contentless, ‘factually vacuous’. (shrink)
Discussing what Wittgenstein means by ‘the use’ of an expression, Dr Kenny writes: Does a word have a use provided that it can fit into acceptable sentences, or does its use have to make some difference in the world ? Wittgenstein's two favourite similes point in opposite directions. A game, like chess, has only syntactical rules; what goes on in chess has no effect on the world except indirectly through the consequence of winning and losing.
