This landmark work provides a systematic introduction to systems of modal logic and stands as the first presentation of what have become central ideas in philosophy of language and metaphysics, from the "new theory of reference" and non-linguistic necessity and essentialism to "Kripke semantics.".

This study examined the potential for a new area of corporate social responsibility washing: gender equality. Companies are increasingly recognized for advertisements promoting gender equality, termed “femvertisements.” However, it is unclear whether companies that win femvertising awards actually support women with an institutionalized approach to gender equality. A quantitative content analysis was performed assessing company leadership team listings, annual reports, CSR reports, and CSR websites of 61 US-based companies to compare the prevalence of internal and external gender-equality CSR activities of (...) companies that have won femvertising awards. When controlling for number of employees and annual revenue, award-winning companies committed to more internal efforts that support women than non-award-winning companies. However, no significant differences were found in the number of external efforts or representation in female leadership between companies with and without award-winning femvertisements. Overall, a majority of award-winning companies engaged in less than ten of the possible 23 gender-equality CSR activities, suggesting these companies’ female empowerment commercials were often not in line with their broader CSR activities. While more research is needed in this area, we propose the term “fempower-washing” to describe CSR-washing in the context of gender equality. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDas Ziel einer so genannten Personalisierten Medizin ist es, verfügbare oder neue Interventionen zielgerichteter einzusetzen, um so ihren Nutzen zu optimieren. Mit dieser Zielsetzung sind an eine Prüfung der Zielerreichung die gleichen Anforderungen zu stellen wie an jede andere Intervention. Der Nutzen ist durch aussagefähige Studien, typischerweise also prospektive, kontrollierte Interventionsstudien, zu belegen. Dort, wo es um den Kern personalisierter Medizin, nämlich die Verbindung von Diagnostik und Behandlung geht, ist genau diese Verbindung in Form einer statistischen Wechselwirkung zu belegen. Enrichment-Designs (...) allein beantworten diese Frage nicht. Die Bewertung von Methoden der personalisierten Medizin ist problemlos in das Konzept evidenzbasierter Medizin einzubinden. (shrink)

Given the rise of populist parties in Germany and the charge that multiculturalism is dead, the present research examines how everyday Germans formulate an account of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. We employ a critical discursive psychological analysis and focus particularly on the arguments used to criticize cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Asynchronous online interviews were conducted with eighteen native-born German citizens. The data analysis shows that participants criticized cultural diversity and multiculturalism by deploying ‘Leitkultur-style’ nationalistic discourses and normalizing the hierarchical relations (...) between immigrants and Germans. Participants also questioned multiculturalism as an ideology and everyday practice and moved back and forth between diverging accounts. These discourses reinforce dominant ideologies that place immigrants’ responsibility to assimilate and adopt German cultural norms and values. Our findings suggest that there are critical, flexible, and contradictory social markers of multiculturalism that have significant ramifications for policy and to everyday people who face the real task of living with cultural diversity. (shrink)

Das Ziel einer so genannten Personalisierten Medizin ist es, verfügbare oder neue Interventionen zielgerichteter einzusetzen, um so ihren Nutzen zu optimieren. Mit dieser Zielsetzung sind an eine Prüfung der Zielerreichung die gleichen Anforderungen zu stellen wie an jede andere Intervention. Der Nutzen ist durch aussagefähige Studien, typischerweise also prospektive, kontrollierte Interventionsstudien, zu belegen. Dort, wo es um den Kern personalisierter Medizin, nämlich die Verbindung von Diagnostik und Behandlung geht, ist genau diese Verbindung in Form einer statistischen Wechselwirkung zu belegen. Enrichment-Designs (...) allein beantworten diese Frage nicht. Die Bewertung von Methoden der personalisierten Medizin ist problemlos in das Konzept evidenzbasierter Medizin einzubinden. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

À rebours de la thèse sur la modernité comme une époque où la rationalisation aurait pris le dessus sur la dimension esthétique et affective, Reckwitz repère les différentes étapes de la construction d’un capitalisme esthétique, où l’inventivité revêt désormais un rôle crucial. Tandis que la créativité était brandie par les avant-gardes artistiques du xix e et du xx e siècle comme un idéal permettant de subvertir les normes sociales, la créativité représente aujourd’hui elle-même une norme incontournable. « Soyez créatifs » (...) : cette injonction paradoxale s’applique désormais à tous les sujets du capitalisme tardif. Extrait de sa grande étude sur L’Invention de la créativité, ce chapitre replace l’enjeu de l’esthétisation au cœur de ce que Reckwitz nomme le « dispositif de la créativité ». (shrink)

Given the important role that business media play in corporate life, scarce attention has been paid to the role of media in the construction and popularization of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this article, we understand media as a key infomediary and examine how the business press has framed and presented CSR over the last 10 years. Based on a content analysis of how CSR is presented in two English-language business newspapers with an international readership, we develop a framework for (...) understanding the role of business media setting the corporate CSR agenda. The results show that business media contribute to the construction of what CSR means in corporate practice by creating links between CSR and certain corporate activities, between CSR and arguments that strengthen the view of CSR as a business case, and between CSR and certain spokespersons. These links contribute to create a notion of what CSR stands for, what it means in practice, and why it is important that one should pay attention to. (shrink)

I present a possible worlds semantics for a hyperintensional belief revision operator, which reduces the logical idealization of cognitive agents affecting similar operators in doxastic and epistemic logics, as well as in standard AGM belief revision theory. (Revised) belief states are not closed under classical logical consequence; revising by inconsistent information does not perforce lead to trivialization; and revision can be subject to ‘framing effects’: logically or necessarily equivalent contents can lead to different revisions. Such results are obtained without resorting (...) to non-classical logics, or to non-normal or impossible worlds semantics. The framework combines, instead, a standard semantics for propositional S5 with a simple mereology of contents. (shrink)

Huck Finn’s emotional responses constitute perfectly good moral reasons not to betray his friend, even though Huck is unable to recognise them as such.

We will show that there is a strong form of emergence in cell biology. Beginning with C.D. Broad's classic discussion of emergence, we distinguish two conditions sufficient for emergence. Emergence in biology must be compatible with the thought that all explanations of systemic properties are mechanistic explanations and with their sufficiency. Explanations of systemic properties are always in terms of the properties of the parts within the system. Nonetheless, systemic properties can still be emergent. If the properties of the components (...) within the system cannot be predicted, even in principle, from the behavior of the system's parts within simpler wholes then there also will be systemic properties which cannot be predicted, even in principle, on basis of the behavior of these parts. We show in an explicit case study drawn from molecular cell physiology that biochemical networks display this kind of emergence, even though they deploy only mechanistic explanations. This illustrates emergence and its place in nature. (shrink)

Using a two-part instrument consisting of eight vignettes and twenty character traits, the study sampled 141 employees of a mid-west financial firm regarding their predispositions to prefer utilitarian or formalist forms of ethical reasoning. In contrast with earlier studies, we found that these respondents did not prefer utilitarian reasoning. Several other hypotheses were tested involving the relationship between people's preferences for certain types of solutions to issues and the forms of reasoning they use to arrive at those solutions; the nature (...) of the relationship between utilitarian and formalist categories ; and the possibility of measuring ethical predispositions using different methods. (shrink)

A compilation of all previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics from the greatest of the generation of Cambridge scholars that included G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes.

As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these “gifts of the body” has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could—and some argue, should—override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that he (...) or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality—the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

This article focusses on the generality of the entities involved in a geometric proof of the kind found in ancient Greek treatises: it shows that the standard modern translation of Greek mathematical propositions falsifies crucial syntactical elements, and employs an incorrect conception of the denotative letters in a Greek geometric proof; epigraphic evidence is adduced to show that these denotative letters are ‘letter-labels’. On this basis, the article explores the consequences of seeing that a Greek mathematical proposition is fully general, (...) and the ontological commitments underlying the stylistic practice. (shrink)

The vocabulary of representation is better suited to an understanding of historiography than the vocabularies of description and interpretation. Since both art and historiography represent the world, they are closer to science than are criticism and the history of art because the interpretation of meaning is the specialty of the latter two fields. Historiography is less secure in its attempt to represent the world than art is; historiography is more artificial, more an expression of cultural codes than art itself. Historiography (...) is a suitable paradigm for studying certain philosophical problems, particularly epistemology, or codified representation. Representation always requires the presence of two sets of non-referential logical dummies; disturbing the symmetry between these logical dummies gives rise to the position of realism and idealism. Epistemology is strongly inclined to disturb this symmetry. The parallels between recent developments in art and those in historiography demonstrate how much historiography is part of the contemporary cultural world. The deficiencies of modern philosophy of history can largely be explained by its tendency to neglect the cultural significance of the writing of history. (shrink)

The avowed simplicity of thomasius' practical philosophy conceals its real complexity. His treatment of reason and will, Moral and political obligation, And freedom and authority particularly bears this out. The impact of his political philosophy was to transmute the operative ethos of absolutism by demonstrating that while absolute power was possible, Absolute authority was an absurdity.