The lattice of r.e. equivalence relations has not been carefully examined even though r.e. equivalence relations have proved useful in logic. A maximal r.e. equivalence relation has the expected lattice theoretic definition. It is proved that, in every pair of r.e. nonrecursive Turing degrees, there exist maximal r.e. equivalence relations which intersect trivially. This is, so far, unique among r.e. submodel lattices.

Jessica Flanigan argues that individuals have the right to self-medicate. Flanigan presents two arguments in defense of this right. The first she calls the epistemic argument and the second she calls the rights-based argument. I argue that the right to self-medicate hangs and falls on the rights-based argument. This is because for the epistemic argument to be sound agents must be assumed to be epistemically competent. But, Flanigan’s argument for a constitutionally mandated right to self-medicate models agents as epistemically incompetent. (...) For Flanigan, agents are different at the pharmacy than they are at the polls. I identify this behavioral asymmetry and advocate a symmetric and realistic behavioral postulate for both arguments. The result, however, is that the success of the epistemic argument becomes contingent which fails to justify a constitutionally mandated right. I proceed to raise skepticism about the rights-based argument as well. I conclude that there is reason to be skeptical that these arguments can justify a constitutionally mandated right to self-medicate. Ultimately, a bottom-up approach to pharmaceutical ethics is preferable. (shrink)

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

The idea of a new aestheticism is now explicit in both philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory with the publication of Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art and an anthology of essays edited by John Joughin and Simon Malpas critiquing the anti-aestheticism of literary theory. Both are significant in marking a wider trend reacting to, broadly speaking, intellectualised and historicised accounts of art, refocusing on the idea of appreciation itself, and working away from the emphasis on ideology and disregard for (...) the particularity of works in, especially, literary theory. This broader context also includes renewed debates running within philosophical aesthetics about non-perceptual aesthetic properties and the aesthetic experience of conceptual artworks, and about beauty in art, considerations that have engaged two philosophers normally identified by their commitment to art theoretical and historical (and by extension, non-aesthetic) accounts of artistic making and viewing, namely Noël Carroll and Arthur Danto. So Carroll acknowledges that what's at stake is an aesthetic theory of art that is potentially 'back in business', while Danto's 'surprising' theoretic re-engagement with the concept of beauty has been noted by Diarmuid Costello. (shrink)

Extrapolating from Carroll’s four domains of corporate social responsibility and Pyramid of CSR, an alternative approach to conceptualizing corporate social responsibility is proposed. A three-domain approach is presented in which the three core domains of economic, legal, and ethical responsibilities are depicted in a Venn model framework. The Venn framework yields seven CSR categories resulting from the overlap of the three core domains. Corporate examples are suggested and classified according to the new model, followed by a discussion of limitations (...) and teaching and research implications. (shrink)

This new selection of Thoreau’s essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day—the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums—and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau’s readers as they followed his developing ideas over time. Jeffrey S. Cramer, award-winning editor of six previous volumes of works by Thoreau, offers the most accurate text available for each essay and provides convenient on-page annotations. (...) He establishes context and guides the reader through unfamiliar allusions and references, plumbing the depths of Thoreau’s writings with unprecedented insight. Among the essays in this book: · The Last Days of John Brown · Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience] · Thomas Carlyle and His Works · Natural History of Massachusetts · and many more. (shrink)

This new selection of Thoreau’s essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day—the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums—and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau’s readers as they followed his developing ideas over time. Jeffrey S. Cramer, award-winning editor of six previous volumes of works by Thoreau, offers the most accurate text available for each essay and provides convenient on-page annotations. (...) He establishes context and guides the reader through unfamiliar allusions and references, plumbing the depths of Thoreau’s writings with unprecedented insight. Among the essays in this book: · The Last Days of John Brown · Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience] · Thomas Carlyle and His Works · Natural History of Massachusetts · and many more. (shrink)

Part of the accepted scholarly lore about Kierkegaard is that he holds that “existence”—human existence—and “the System” are mutually incompatible. For Kierkegaard, human being cannot be understood in terms of a nice, neat, complete systematic package; he shows, on this view, that the Hegelian attempt to grasp all of reality in terms of a philosophical system will always fail to grasp the reality of at least one thing: the concrete, living, existing individual human being.

Richard Jeffrey's generalization of Bayes' rule of conditioning follows, within the theory of belief functions, from Dempster's rule of combination and the rule of minimal extension. Both Jeffrey's rule and the theory of belief functions can and should be construed constructively, rather than normatively or descriptively. The theory of belief functions gives a more thorough analysis of how beliefs might be constructed than Jeffrey's rule does. The inadequacy of Bayesian conditioning is much more general than Jeffrey's (...) examples of uncertain perception might suggest. The ``parameter α '' that Hartry Field has introduced into Jeffrey's rule corresponds to the "weight of evidence" of the theory of belief functions. (shrink)

While classical schools today typically exhibit a carefully considered approach to the linguistic arts of the trivium, the equally important mathematical arts of the quadrivium have received relatively little consideration. This being so, mathematics is often approached in ways that are not distinctly classical. This article seeks to establish the importance of the quadrivial arts as a means of ascending from lower to higher things. Though most know Plato’s comparison of a lack of education to being imprisoned in a cave, (...) relatively few are familiar with the role the quadrivial arts play in ascending from the cave. Because the mathematical arts cultivate and direct the imagination, they enable students to move beyond sensible particulars to the formation of forms and figures by the mind. Thus, the mathematical arts help free us from an undue preoccupation with lower things and direct us toward the pursuit of knowledge and what truly is. (shrink)

How should the Bible be used in Christian ethics? Although this question has been addressed many times, little attention has gone to how the Bible actually has functioned in constructing theological ethics. In this book, Siker describes and analyzes the Bible's various uses in the theology and ethics of eight of the twentieth century's most important and influential Christian theologians: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Bernhard Haring, Paul Ramsey, Stanley Hauerwas, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. In approaching (...) each author, Siker organizes his study around five related questions. First, which biblical texts does each author in fact use, and, second, in what ways do they use these texts? How does each envision the authority of the Bible? What kind of hermeneutic does the author employ? Finally, what has each author's particular approach to the Bible yielded in terms of Christian Ethics, or, in other words, what are the practical results? Siker ends each chapter with a critical evaluation of the various problems and prospects for the author's use of Scripture, and concludes the study with a comparison and contrast of all the authors' respective appropriations of the Sermon on the Mount. (shrink)

It was his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another inveterate journal keeper, who urged Thoreau to keep a record of his thoughts and observations. Begun in 1837, Thoreau’s journal spans a period of twenty-five years and runs to more than two million words, coming to a halt only in 1861, shortly before the author’s death. The handwritten journal had somewhat humble origins, but as it grew in scope and ambition it came to function as a record of Thoreau’s interior life as (...) well as the source for his books and essays. Indeed, it became the central concern of the author’s literary life. Critics now recognize Thoreau’s journal as an important artistic achievement in its own right. Making selections from the entirety of the journal, Cramer presents all aspects of Thoreau: writer, thinker, naturalist, social reformer, neighbor, friend. No other single-volume edition offers such a full picture of Thoreau’s life and work. Cramer’s annotations add to the reader’s enjoyment and understanding. He provides notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau’s life. The relation between Journal passages and the texts of works published in the author’s lifetime receive special emphasis. A companion to _Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition_, this gift edition of the Journal will be dipped into and treasured, and it makes a welcome addition to any book lover’s library. (shrink)

It was his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another inveterate journal keeper, who urged Thoreau to keep a record of his thoughts and observations. Begun in 1837, Thoreau’s journal spans a period of twenty-five years and runs to more than two million words, coming to a halt only in 1861, shortly before the author’s death. The handwritten journal had somewhat humble origins, but as it grew in scope and ambition it came to function as a record of Thoreau’s interior life as (...) well as the source for his books and essays. Indeed, it became the central concern of the author’s literary life. Critics now recognize Thoreau’s journal as an important artistic achievement in its own right. Making selections from the entirety of the journal, Cramer presents all aspects of Thoreau: writer, thinker, naturalist, social reformer, neighbor, friend. No other single-volume edition offers such a full picture of Thoreau’s life and work. Cramer’s annotations add to the reader’s enjoyment and understanding. He provides notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau’s life. The relation between Journal passages and the texts of works published in the author’s lifetime receive special emphasis. A companion to _Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition_, this gift edition of the Journal will be dipped into and treasured, and it makes a welcome addition to any book lover’s library. (shrink)

Explores the sublime as an unmasterable excess of beauty that marks the limit of representation, in language that requires a firm grasp on the concepts and terminology of modern (that is, pre-postmodern) philosophy.

In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through ...

Data science, and the related field of big data, is an emerging discipline involving the analysis of data to solve problems and develop insights. This rapidly growing domain promises many benefits to both consumers and businesses. However, the use of big data analytics can also introduce many ethical concerns, stemming from, for example, the possible loss of privacy or the harming of a sub-category of the population via a classification algorithm. To help address these potential ethical challenges, this paper maps (...) and describes the main ethical themes that were identified via systematic literature review. It then identifies a possible structure to integrate these themes within a data science project, thus helping to provide some structure in the on-going debate with respect to the possible ethical situations that can arise when using data science analytics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the notion of value has been overly simplified and narrowed to focus on economic returns. Stakeholder theory provides an appropriate lens for considering a more complex perspective of the value that stakeholders seek as well as new ways to measure it. We develop a four-factor perspective for defining value that includes, but extends beyond, the economic value stakeholders seek. To highlight its distinctiveness, we compare this perspective to three other popular performance perspectives. Recommendations are made regarding (...) performance measurement for both academic researchers and practitioners. The stakeholder perspective on value offered in this paper draws attention to those factors that are most closely associated with building more value for stakeholders, and in so doing, allows academics to better measure it and enhances managerial ability to create it. (shrink)

As foreign direct investment in the U.S. continues to become both more visible and controversial, the general public remains skeptical about the corporate citizenship of these foreign affiliates. Four dimensions of corporate citizenship — orientations, organizational stakeholders, issues, and decision-making autonomy — were used to compare the inclinations of foreign affiliates with the domestic firms operating in the U.S. chemical industry. The only significant differences between the U.S. sample and those firms headquartered in other countries-of-origin were found in the area (...) of corporate citizenship decision making autonomy. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory focuses on how more value is created if stakeholder relationships are governed by ethical principles such as integrity, respect, fairness, generosity and inclusiveness. However, it has not adequately addressed strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests and how this perception can even lead some stakeholders to view the firm’s strategies as unethical. To fill the void, this paper directly addresses strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests, or what we refer to as harmful stakeholder (...) strategies. Specifically, it identifies factors associated with stakeholder perceptions of harm that are likely to cause them to consider a strategy unethical, examines the negative implications for firms that pursue such strategies in terms of likely stakeholder responses and damage to stakeholder relationships, and provides theory to help explain how firms are likely to respond to stakeholder claims that a strategy is unethical, based on factors such as the strategic importance of the claim to the firm, how long the strategy has been in use, the costs of remediation, the risk of stakeholder mobilization or new regulation, and whether firms can reasonably rationalize their actions. Assessing harm allows a firm to make a more accurate estimate of the costs of a strategy and can assist managers in allocating resources intended to reduce or remediate harm. (shrink)

One vigorous line of thought in contemporary moral philosophy, which I shall call ‘Neo-Aristotelianism,’ centers on three things: a rejection of traditional enlightenment moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism; a claim that another look at the ethical concerns and projects of ancient Greek thought might help us past the impasse into which enlightenment moral theories have left us; more particularly, an attempt to reinterpret Aristotle’s ethical work for the late twentieth-century so as to transcend this impasse.

"What is whole on earth? … [D]oesn't this building of the times upon each other make the whole of our species into a formless monstrous structure [zum unförmlichen Riesengebäude], where one carries away what another began to build, where what never should have been built remains standing and in centuries finally everything becomes One Ruin [Ein Schutt], amongst which, the more broken and crumbling it is, the more confidently the hesitating people live?" "Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte (...) der Menschheit1"With the subordination of Church to State introduced by the principle of “cuius…. (shrink)