Many international business training programs present a viewpoint of cultural relativism that encourages business people to adapt to the host country's culture. This paper presents an argument that cultural relativism is not always appropriate for business ethics; rather, a code of conduct must be adapted which presents guidelines for core ethical business conduct across cultures. Both moral and economic evidence is provided to support the argument for a universal code of ethics. Also, four steps are presented that will help ensure (...) that company ethical standards are followed internationally. (shrink)

Corporate change and employee dislocation are inevitable in a free market. However, the current employment relationship in the U.S. that affords a perceived employment safety net is contrary to the natural canon of honesty. Employees cannot be guaranteed employment when a company fails or a product is no longer viable. Attempts to provide costly employment safety nets cause a firm to allocate resources to nonproductive programs that may ultimately cause a loss of competitiveness. These strategies to provide alternate employment may (...) provide only short-term solutions. But even short-term safety nets against unemployment may be sending employees unrealistic messages ... a permanent safety net against unemployment. As a result, employees may lose incentive to be innovative in creating their own personal safety nets. The resolution is candor about the risk of employment. A false employment safety net is not what employees want or need and in the long run it may be detrimental to American competitiveness. (shrink)

I am idebted to members of the Wellington Logic Seminar for useful discussions of work of which this essay forms part, in particular to M. J. Cresswell for comments in the earlier stages of the investigation and to R. I. Goldblatt who suggested the definition ofB infD supu and made numerous other suggestions.

The tsunami effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting many aspects of scientific activities. Multidisciplinary experimental studies with international collaborators are hindered by the closing of the national borders, logistic issues due to lockdown, quarantine restrictions, and social distancing requirements. The full impact of this crisis on science is not clear yet, but the above-mentioned issues have most certainly restrained academic research activities. Sharing innovative solutions between researchers is in high demand in this situation. The aim of this paper is (...) to share our successful practice of using web-based communication and remote control software for real-time long-distance control of brain stimulation. This solution may guide and encourage researchers to cope with restrictions and has the potential to help expanding international collaborations by lowering travel time and costs. (shrink)

Recording and manipulating neuronal ensemble activity is a key requirement in advanced neuromodulatory and behavior studies. Devices capable of both recording and manipulating neuronal activity brain-computer interfaces should ideally operate un-tethered and allow chronic longitudinal manipulations in the freely moving animal. In this study, we designed a new intracortical BCI feasible of telemetric recording and stimulating local gray and white matter of visual neural circuit after irradiation exposure. To increase the translational reliance, we put forward a Göttingen minipig model. The (...) animal was stereotactically irradiated at the level of the visual cortex upon defining the target by a fused cerebral MRI and CT scan. A fully implantable neural telemetry system consisting of a 64 channel intracortical multielectrode array, a telemetry capsule, and an inductive rechargeable battery was then implanted into the visual cortex to record and manipulate local field potentials, and multi-unit activity. We achieved a 3-month stability of the functionality of the un-tethered BCI in terms of telemetric radio-communication, inductive battery charging, and device biocompatibility for 3 months. Finally, we could reliably record the local signature of sub- and suprathreshold neuronal activity in the visual cortex with high bandwidth without complications. The ability to wireless induction charging combined with the entirely implantable design, the rather high recording bandwidth, and the ability to record and stimulate simultaneously put forward a wireless BCI capable of long-term un-tethered real-time communication for causal preclinical circuit-based closed-loop interventions. (shrink)

The Mongol in Our Midst F G Crookshank Originally published in 1925. "A brilliant piece of speculative induction" Saturday Review Combining anthropology, psychology, geography, science and medicine, this volume was a ground-breaking study in the area of race, ethnicity and eugenics, when first published and has to be read in the appropriate historical, social and scientific context of the early twentieth century. 120 pp, 24 b&w plates Prometheus or Biology and the Advancement of Man H S Jennings Originally published in (...) 1925 "This volume is one of the most remarkable that has yet appeared in this series." Times Literary Supplement "An exceedingly brilliant book." New Leader This volume provides a lucid summary of the striking advances of the early 20 th century in biological knowledge, genetics, and the theory of evolution. 88pp Metanthropos or the Body of the Future Ronald Campbell Macfie Originally published in 1928 "An exceptionally stimulating book…" Saturday Review "Should certainly be read by a large public." The Lancet Drawing on the history of evolution and geology, this volume examines the role of society on physical, emotional and psychological changes in the population of Western Europe during the early twentieth century, whilst attempting to predict genetic developments of the future. 88pp. Pygmalion or the Doctor of the Future R M Wilson Originally published in 1925 "No doctor worth his salt would venture to say that Dr.Wilson was wrong." Daily Herald "Dr Wilson has added a brilliant essay to this series." Times Literary Supplement The author foresees an evolution in the personality of the doctor, who will become less of a scientist, more of a humanist, and use every spiritual agency, as well as every practical measure, to restore the human body and soul to health. 66pp. The Conquest of Cancer H W S Wright Originally published in 1925 "Eminently suitable for general reading. The problem is fairly and lucidly presented." F G Crookshank Whilst affirming that the causes and treatment of cancer will never be solved by the efforts of the medical profession alone, this volume provides an accessible source of information on cancer and proposes routine examination for those people aged 40 and over as the best means of defence against cancer. 82pp. (shrink)

It is argued that the preservation of truth by an inference relation is of little interest when premiss sets are contradictory. The notion of a level of coherence is introduced and the utility of modal logics in the semantic representation of sets of higher coherence levels is noted. It is shown that this representative role cannot be transferred to first order logic via frame theory since the modal formulae expressing coherence level restrictions are not first order definable. Finally, an inference (...) relation, calledyielding, is introduced which is intermediate between the coherence preservingforcing relation introduced elsewhere by the authors and the coherence destroying, inference relation of classical logic. (shrink)

This book is less about disjunction than about the English word ‘or’, and it is less for than against formal logicians—more exactly, against those who maintain that formal logic can be applied in certain ways to the evaluation of reasoning formulated in ordinary English. Nevertheless, there are many things to interest such of those persons who are willing to overlook the frequent animadversions directed against their kind in the book, and this review will concentrate on them.

Uruguay is a prime example of how a peripheral country creatively digested foreign experiences and became not only Latin America’s first welfare state democracy, but also a pioneer of free, compulsory, and lay education, the work of two political generations, positivist varelistas and Krausist batllistas. This article, based on new archival sources, contemporary newspapers, official publications, and monographs by protagonists argues that one of their consistent reference points, largely ignored in historiography, was Belgium, a country founded almost at the same (...) time as Uruguay and admired for its liberal constitutionalism. Uruguayan reformers’ fascination with Belgium, but also their risk awareness, increased when, from the 1860s, both countries implemented conflictual secularizing school reforms that aimed at belated cultural nation-building. (shrink)

Scholars of Plato are divided between those who emphasize the literature of the dialogues and those who emphasize the argument of the dialogues, and between those who see a development in the thought of the dialogues and those who do not. In this important book Russell Dancy focuses on the arguments and defends a developmental picture. He explains the Theory of Forms of the Phaedo and Symposium as an outgrowth of the quest for definitions canvassed in the Socratic dialogues, by (...) constructing a Theory of Definition for the Socratic dialogues based on the refutations of definitions in those dialogues, and showing how that theory is mirrored in the Theory of Forms. His discussion, notable for both its clarity and its meticulous scholarship, ranges in detail over a number of Plato's early and middle dialogues, and will be of interest to readers in Plato studies and in ancient philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate nonnormal modal systems in the vicinity of the Lewis system S1. It might be claimed that Lewis's modal systems are the starting point of modern modal logics. However, our interests in the Lewis systems and their relatives are not historical. They possess certain syntactical features and their frames certain structural properties that are of interest to us. Our starting point is not S1, but a weaker logic S1$^0$. We extend it to S1$^0$D, which can be (...) considered as a deontic counterpart of the alethic S1. Soundness and completeness of these systems are then demonstrated within a prenormal idiom. We conclude with some philosophical remarks on the interpretation of our deontic logic. (shrink)

In [3] I argued for a particular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals. The arguments were based upon some linguistic considerations of the general character of what we mean when we say such and such. I urged that a semantics for subjunctive conditionals ought to provide a distinct representation of the subjunctive mood of a sentence, and should take seriously the fact that subjunctive conditionals admit distinctions of tense. The envisaged semantics took the subjunctive conditional to be about occasions, and (...) the central problem discussed was, accordingly, how to represent what must count as the same occasion in spite of whatever changes were required to make the antecedent of the conditional true. (shrink)

This monograph revisits Uruguay’s remarkable transformation from a volatile product of ‘balkanisation’ in the River Plate area into Latin America’s first welfare-state democracy, associated with President José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–7, 1911–15). Central to the country’s belated polity formation and nation-building was its school reform. The author investigates this, for the first time, from its start in 1868 under José Pedro Varela to the end of Batlle’s second term and argues that continuities in change prevailed over the alleged rupture of (...) 1903, including at the level of normative ideas. Moreover, by placing Uruguay into the broader context of what scholars have called the “Corridor of Ideas” from Santiago de Chile through Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Porto Alegre, this pioneering study also shows how Uruguay acted as a crossroads of intellectuals and a laboratory for the contestation, assimilation, and merger of global and autochthonous political and pedagogical philosophies. Jens R Hentschke is Professor of Latin American History and Politics at Newcastle University in the UK. (shrink)

Dancy (philosophy, Florida State U.) presents two new interpretations of the evidence regarding the metaphysical ideas of two important figures in Plato's Academy, Eudoxus and Speusippus, and of Aristotle's reaction to those ideas.

Positivism, the predominant philosophy of Latin America’s elites at the end of the nineteenth century, found its exemplary expression in Brazil’s castilhismo and Mexico’s porfiriato. Argentina, in contrast, seemed to have deviated from the norm of ‘enlightened dictatorships’. After the end of the Rosas tyranny in 1852, authoritarianism had been discredited. Early positivism, as embodied by Teacher-President Sarmiento, could barely be distinguished from liberalism and no single political philosophy was able to exert hegemony. However, the significance of ‘scientific politics’ should (...) not be downplayed. As this article argues, the merger, in the 1880s, of Comtean positivism and teacher training revolutionised education policies that aimed at erasing frontier backwardness and inserting future generations into an export-led economy, oligarchic polity, and homogenous national organism. Normal schools, especially Sarmiento’s Escuela de Parana´, acted as laboratories for the assimilation, merger, and contestation of European, North American, and autochthonous scientific, philosophical, and pedagogical traditions. (shrink)

The author argues that polity and policies of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo cannot be fully understood without exploring the legacy of Rio Grande do Sul. The southern state’s first republican governor, Júlio de Castilhos, had taken inspiration in Auguste Comte’s multifaceted political philosophy and inculcated its authoritarian traits into political institutions. Yet, he and his followers substantially adapted Comte’s positivism to the specific economic and political circumstances in their republiqueta sui generis. In contrast to Comte, the State merged temporal and (...) spiritual powers to pursue evolutionary political changes, a balanced socioeconomic modernisation, and the incorporation of the populus qua paternalistic public policies, and all this with a strong focus on education. Changing contexts resulted in further adjustments, when Vargas became governor in 1928: an ‘orderly’ inclusion of the opposition into the polity, a stronger state interventionism in the economy and labor market, and an experimentation with state corporatism. These experiences paved the way for this comtismo-turned-castilhismo-turning-varguismo to enter the national stage two years later. Despite all the compromises with other contenders for power that Vargas had to make thereafter, he and his gaúcho and other co-opted protégés remained united in the strong belief in technical solutions to social problems and a quest for rational institutions to carry out transformative policies. For them, the State was to be agent of development, tutor of corporate interest groups, and now also guarantor of national security. While highlighting the significant, and still underestimated, impact of French positivism on Vargas’s first 15 years in government, the article places emphasis on the pragmatic dimensions of its appropriation, propagation, and reinterpretation by two generations of state-builders. (shrink)

We argue that thoughts are structures of concepts, and that concepts should be individuated by their origins, rather than in terms of their semantic or epistemic properties. Many features of cognition turn on the vehicles of content, thoughts, rather than on the nature of the contents they express. Originalism makes concepts available to explain, with no threat of circularity, puzzling cases concerning thought. In this paper, we mention Hesperus/Phosphorus puzzles, the Evans-Perry example of the ship seen through different windows, and (...) Mates cases, and we believe that there are many additional applications. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE'S PROGRAM Aristotle says outright that the law of non-contradiction cannot be demonstrated: you can't prove everything, and among the things you ...

This study examines the similarities and differences in pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley corporate ethics codes and codes of conduct using the framework of structuration theory. Following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation in 2002 in the United States, publicly traded companies there undertook development and revision of their codes of ethics in response to new regulatory requirements as well as incentives under the U.S. Corporate Sentencing Guidelines, which were also revised as part of the SOX mandates. Questions that remain are (...) whether these new or revised codes are effective means of communicating changed ethical foci and attitudes in organizations. Centering resonance analysis (CRA) is used to identify differences and similarities across time and industries by analyzing word networks of 46 pre- and post-SOX corporate codes of ethics. Analyses focus on content and structure of generated word networks as well as resulting factors that emerged from the texts. Results are interpreted from the structuration perspective that content and structure of codes are constrained and enabled by system structures while they function to produce and reproduce those structures. Results indicate that corporate codes of ethics are formal discourses of ethics, laws, and control. Code structure has changed across time, with an increased emphasis on compliance in post-SOX codes. Implications for research and practice are discussed in light of findings. (shrink)