The Salters’ Hall controversy was a watershed event in the history of English Dissent. Some historians have interpreted the controversy as an early sign of the theological demise of the English General Baptists and the English Presbyterians. Conversely, the controversy has also been used to demonstrate the theological steadfastness of the English Particular Baptists and Congregationalist in the eighteenth century. Yet some of the earliest accounts of the Salters’ Hall controversy maintain that the controversy was not about the doctrine of (...) the Trinity, but rather the requirement of subscription to extrabiblical words and phrases. This was the view of the revered divine Edmund Calamy, who refused to be involved in the controversy, even at the potential expense of his reputation. Edward Wallin, a Particular Baptist subscriber at Salters’ Hall, held a similar view of the controversy. While some historians acknowledge these accounts, they seem to ultimately doubt their truthfulness. This hesitancy is likely due, in part, to the fact that there were a few anti-Trinitarians among the nonsubscribers at Salters’ Hall. Furthermore, the English General Baptists and the English Presbyterians did deviate from theological orthodoxy later in the century. However, those who question the motives of the Non-subscribers at Salters’ Hall fail to take into account a theologically orthodox, nonsubscribing tradition among the English General Baptists and the English Presbyterians found in the writings of Thomas Grantham and Richard Baxter. In sum, one’s orthodoxy at Salters’ Hall cannot be determined solely on the basis of one’s view of subscription. (shrink)

To effectively pursue ethical action, the business community must recognize that the fundamental form of human association is not the "social contract" into which persons enter as atomic individuals, making partial commitments to each other for the purpose of gaining limited common ends or of satisfying certain laws. The fundamental form of human association is rather the face to face community in which ongoing commitments are the rule and in which aspects of every individual''s experience are conditioned by the continuing (...) membership. The following discussion initiates a preliminary phase in the consideration of what constitutes ethical issues associated with the business applications of expert systems. The focus is on knowledge based expert system applications in public accounting, specifically in the audit domain. Prior research on the development and use of expert systems in auditing has focused on a limited set of ethical issues. Niebuhr''s theory of the "the responsible self" is used here to broaden the scope of what constitutes an ethical issue and provides a framework for identifying responsible action. Within this framework, an action is responsible if it takes into consideration ongoing relationships among the stakeholder groups affected. Actions prior to the development of the system along with the potential consequences for the system must be considered. The discursive requirements that provide the context and conditions necessary for implementing the proposed theoretical framework are presented and an illustration of how the responsibility ethic can be implemented in the audit expert system domain is developed. (shrink)

The public accounting profession has long relied on its reputation for integrity and veracity as justification for its professional status and monopoly privilege predicated on claims of acting in the public interest. If such status and privilege are to be justified and sustained, serious consideration of what constitutes ethical behavior, how such behavior is motivated as well as an explicit recognition of the rights and interests of affected parties constitutes an ethical imperative for the profession. Traditionally, work on ethics and (...) auditing is quite narrow, failing to recognize the social context of individual actions, failing to identify the relevant constituencies of the profession, and failing to articulate processes through which the constituencies interests can be identified. Generally, the accounting literature has taken a cognitive perspective on ethical decision making which views the resolution of ethical dilemmas as primarily a function of the moral makeup of the actor responding within the context of the Code of Professional Conduct. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the theoretical base of ethical research, specifically within the area of professional accounting and more generally in the area of business. We propose the application of structuration theory in conjunction with stakeholder theory and a responsibility ethic. The application of stakeholder theory is a means for identifying affected constituencies. A responsibility ethic recognizes the situatedness of an individual within an ongoing professional community. Structuration theory provides a theoretical framework for articulating and investigating both the structures within which action is carried out as well as the interaction between the social structures and the actors. Taken together, the theories allow for an enhanced ability to define ethical behavior within a business context and to understand the contextual antecedents and consequences of ethical acts. (shrink)

With the demise of Andersen, LLP and new legislation that puts an end to self-governance in public accounting, the effectiveness of current models of accounting ethics have been seriously called into question. We argue that the profession suffers from fundamental limitations in its ethical framework that makes it impossible to effectively address ongoing ethical problems. The dominant representation of professional behavior is an agency model of ethics, in which the ultimate responsibility for identifying and dealing with ethical dilemmas resides with (...) the individual. We argue that structural forces such as control over resources, meaning systems, and community norms and values also have a strong influence on the actions of accountants and that these must also be considered. The recent legitimation crisis has forced the accounting profession and its constituencies to begin to recognize and address the structural aspects of ethics as they enable and constrain action. We propose a framework based on structuration theory and learning theory that allows for systematic, multi-level investigation of the structural forces that cause ethical dilemmas to arise and to be recognized and that influence the manner in which they are analyzed and resolved. This framework should be capable of continual critique and reconfiguration as environmental conditions change. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman is arguably the most well-known theorist in postmodern ethics. He argues that to develop and enforce universal ethical laws or codes leads to an abdication of individual moral responsibility. Actors rely on external rules and a rational consideration of costs and benefits rather than on moral impulse. In order to recognize and act upon moral impulse, the moral agent must both recognize and understand the Other. We operationalize these ideas, applying them to the development of advanced information technology (...) (AIT) in organizations. We propose that a stakeholder theory of enabling can be used to formulate processes that will give form and voice to the Other by providing mechanisms for face-to-face interactions and dialogue. Applying the principles of affirmative postmodern ethics through an enabling stakeholder oriented system development process explicitly allows for the examination of moral concerns which might otherwise be overlooked, ignored, or silenced. (shrink)

Annual reports are an important element in the genre of corporate public discourse. The reporting practices mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all publicly traded corporations are intended to render the annual reports a legitimate and trustworthy medium through which management communicates information related to the financial performance of the firm. The following discussion represents an inaugural attempt to investigate the ethical characteristics of the discourse found in corporate annual reports using Habermas' principles of communicative action. In preparing (...) the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the report, managers are charged with providing narrative information for investors and other interested third parties relevant to assessing the firm's financial condition. Previous rhetorical studies of the narrative portions of annual reports argue that they serve as means for both legitimate and distorted communication. We investigate this communication medium through the lens of Habermas' norms for communicative action, which require communicators to be comprehensible, truthful, sincere, and legitimate. The study represents an initial attempt to operationalization Habermas' principles of communicative action and to employ a methodology that facilitates their application to research within a business context. From one perspective, consistent with agency theory as specified by neoclassical economics, it would seem that firms anticipating worse-than-expected financial performance would be less likely to exhibit the Habermasian principles necessary for undistorted communication because they would attempt to strategically influence the message being communicated about the firm's financial position. Instead, employing rhetorical analysis software, Diction 5.0, we found that firms expecting both good and bad earnings surprises exhibited a higher level of communicative action than a composite average firm. Although preliminary in nature, our findings suggest that firms anticipating large earnings surprises, either high or low, use the narrative portion of the annual report as a vehicle through which to communicate information about managements' veracity and trustworthiness as well as the firm's financial position. (shrink)

New forms of information technology, such as email, webpages and groupware, are being rapidly adopted. Intended to improve efficiency and effectiveness, these technologies also have the potential to radically alter the way people communicate in organizations. The effects can be positive or negative. This paper explores how technology can encourage or discourage moral dialogue -- communication that is open, honest, and respectful of participants. It develops a framework that integrates formal properties of ideal moral discourse, based on Habermas' theory of (...) communicative action, with properties of informal communication that help sustain good moral conversations. Ten criteria distilled from these works form the basis of a template that can be used for assessing the positive and negative impacts of emerging information technologies on moral dialogue. (shrink)

We analyse Hutto & Myin's three arguments against computationalism [Hutto, D., E. Myin, A. Peeters, and F. Zahnoun. Forthcoming. “The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation In Its Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, edited by M. Sprevak, and M. Colombo. London: Routledge.; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]. The Hard Problem (...) of Content targets computationalism that relies on semantic notion of computation, claiming that it cannot account for the natural origins of content. The Intentionality Problem is targeted against computationalism using non-semantic accounts of computation, arguing that it fails in explaining intentionality. Theion Problem claims that causal interaction between concrete physical processes and abstract computational properties is problematic. We argue that these a... (shrink)

Let N, O and S denote the set of nonnegative integers, the graph of the constant 0 function and the graph of the successor function respectively. For sets $P, Q, R \subseteq N^2$ operations of transposition, composition, and bracketing are defined as follows: $P^\cup = \{\langle x, y\rangle | \langle y, x\rangle \epsilon P\}, PQ = \{\langle x, z\rangle| \exists y\langle x, y\rangle \epsilon P & \langle y, z\rangle \epsilon Q\}$ , and [ P, Q, R] = ∪n ε M(PnQR (...) n). THEOREM. The class of recursively enumerable subsets of N2 is the smallest class of sets with O and S as members and closed under transposition, composition, and bracketing. This result is derived from a characterization by Julia Robinson of the class of general recursive functions of one variable in terms of function composition and "definition by general recursion." A key step in the proof is to show that if a function F is defined by general recursion from functions A, M, P and R then F = [ P∪, A∪ M, R]. The above definitions of the transposition, composition, and bracketing operations on subsets of N2 can be generalized to subsets of X2 for an arbitrary set X. In this abstract setting it is possible to show that the bracket operation can be defined in terms of K, L, transposition, composition, intersection, and reflexive transitive closure where K: X → X and L: X → X are functions for decoding pairs. (shrink)

O objetivo do texto é não apenas explicar a contribuição da filosofia de Nietzsche no atual debate em torno da filosofia das emoções, por meio da aproximação teórica com o emocionismo de Jesse Prinz – especialmente da abordagem das emoções entendidas como sentimento –, mas, sobretudo, defender a tese da compatibilidade da abordagem cognitiva e não cognitiva das emoções. Assim, se por um lado, emoções são acompanhadas de sinais somáticos, por outro lado, emoções também representam preocupações (Prinz) ou avaliações (...) (Nietzsche) sobre algo no mundo. A tese compatibilista auxilia na solução de duas sérias objeções ao sentimentalismo: a determinação do conteúdo das emoções e a individualização das experiências emocionais. Essa conclusão é mais bem compreendida, além disso, por meio da hipótese disposicional. (shrink)

Drawing from a long history of feminist writing grounded in personal reflection and informal dialogue between feminist thinkers, Cobb and Godden-Rasul present an email-based conversation with Jess Lishak, the outgoing Women’s Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. The conversation draws on Cobb and Godden-Rasul’s experience as feminist academics engaged in critical institutional practice through such initiatives as editing the Inherently Human blog, organising the Inspirational Women of Law exhibition, and participating in university working groups on campus-based harassment and (...) violence. In asking Lishak to reflect on her journey to feminism and her experiences of activism, the conversation ranges over such issues as personal influences and experiences, strategies for securing institutional support, encouraging student engagement with feminism, and campaigning tactics. The conversation developed out of a “Campus Feminisms” event in March 2016, which explored the rise of exciting new grassroots single-issue campaigns and political mobilisations by students in higher education, and was organised by Cobb and Godden-Rasul at Newcastle University, UK. Undergraduate and postgraduate students shared their personal struggles and achievements in bringing feminist ideas and campaigns to their university campuses. Lucy Morgan, the Gender Equality Officer at Newcastle University Students’ Union, offered inspiring reflections on her efforts to reinvigorate the ‘F’ word, in the face of simultaneous student apathy and backlash. Many of these campus-based mobilisations have demanded better institutional responses to sexual violence against women. At around the same time, Cobb was beginning a new role as the co-chair of the University of Manchester’s first Task & Finish Group on Sexual Violence and Harassment on Campus. This followed Universities UK’s decision to create a taskforce to consider options for improving institutional responses to student safety. In the process, Cobb crossed paths with Lishak, who had been appointed a member of the UUK Taskforce in light of her path-breaking students’ union work addressing violence against women. Since Lishak was an exemplar of this new feminist wave in higher education, one that was still inadequately understood by feminist academics despite often working side-by-side within the same institutions, the authors embarked on this conversation in order to better understand the relationship between academic and student feminist activism on campus. As Lishak makes clear in her own reflections, there is nothing inevitable about the synergies between these movements, but there is potentially a great deal that could be achieved through their closer engagement. (shrink)

Philosophy of perception has recently become one of the most important and most central sub-fields of philosophical research. The aim of this volume is to give a representative sample of the new approaches in philosophy of perception that are responsible for this explosion of philosophical interest. Perceiving the World contains eleven original essays, written specially for this book by some of the leading contemporary philosophers of perception: Jonathan Cohen, JTr(me Dokic, Fred Dretske, Andy Egan, Benj Hellie, Sean D. Kelly, M.G.F. (...) Martin, Mohan Matthen, Adam Pautz, Jesse J. Prinz, and Susanna Siegel." "Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He has published articles in various journals on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and aesthetics."--BOOK JACKET. (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)

F. LeRon Shults explores DeleuzeOCOs fascination with theological themes and shows how his entire corpus can be understood as a creative atheist machine that liberates thinking, acting and feeling."e.

Die Autorinnen und Autoren präsentieren in diesem Buch Argumente, die die Unmöglichkeit des Reduktionismus aus philosophischer, naturwissenschaftlicher bzw. mathematisch-logischer Perspektive zu begründen suchen. Der Reduktionismus behauptet, dass Eigenschaften auch von komplexen Systemen vollständig auf ihre Bestandteile zurückgeführt werden können. Diese Position ist einflussreich, aber umstritten. Im Jahr 2019 hat der Kurt Gödel Freundeskreis einen Essaywettbewerb veranstaltet, um schlagende Argumente gegen den Reduktionismus zu finden. Unter den internationalen Teilnehmern waren neben weltweit führenden Forschern auch Wissenschaftler, die noch am Beginn ihrer Kariere (...) stehen. Dieser Band versammelt die Beiträge der Preisträger und weitere ausgewählte Aufsätze. Aus dem Inhalt: · Kausalität als antireduktionistisches Hausmittel – Martin Breul · Reduktionismus im Diskurs – Hanna Hueske · Monads, Types, and Branching Time – Kurt Gödel’s approach towards a theory of the soul – Tim Lethen · The limits of reductionism: thought, life, and reality – Jesse M. Mulder · True or Rational? A Problem for a Mind-Body Reductionist – Michał Pawłowski · Why reductionism does not work – George F. R. Ellis · Physik ohne Reduktion – Rico Gutschmidt · Is there an Axiom for everything? – Jean-Yves Béziau · Unerklärliche Wahrheiten – Marco Hausmann · Gödel, mathematischer Realismus und Antireduktionismus – Reinhard Kahle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CREATOR AND CAUSALITY: A CRITIQUE OF PRE-CRITICAL OBJECTIONS ANDREW BEARDS University of Oalgary Calgary, Alberta IN SOME QUARTERS arguments ias to the existence or non-existence of God are still regarded as intellectually respectaible. Indeed, interest in such arguments is not restricted to those with a strictly philosophical or theological training. Every so often one may observe some specialist from the physical sciences taking an interest in the philosophical discussion (...) of cosmological issues. Such has been the case with the recent contributions of the physicist Paul Davies.1 However, such contributions are likely to invite from the philosopher the response that the generalized notions which the scientist attempts to transpose from the particular field of his scientific interest are the very notions which feature in the current debates on the philosophy and methodology of the sciences. Such debates bring into question the status of these scientific notions and therefore render any putative generalized or even metaphysical application of them problematic. Discussions of natural theology, then, often appear to be conducted in a manner which tends to take too much for granted with regard to the terms employed. The notion of causality, central to such,argumentation, is a case in point. Often enough a simple ":billiard hall" image of causal interaction seems to he all that one is required to keep before the mind in order to follow the lines of argument involved, he they ~or or aiga.inst the postulation of a First Cause. Thus, in the often referred to r:adio.debate on the existence of God between 1 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: T'ouchstone Books, 1984). 573 574 ANDREW BEARDS Bertrand Russell and Fl1ederick Copleston, Russell simply averred that he did not feel compelled to accept that a causal chain extended heyond the ·World to some First Cause. For, indeed, if one imagines a line of billiard halls transmitting momentum one to the other, there is nothing unintelligible about picturing a first!billiard hall initiating the process apparently unaided. Hume has surely taught us that much. If one is to heed the present debates raging in that arena known as the philosophy of science (by which term one can understand epistemology, metaphysics and virtually ·any other topic tr:aditiona1ly designated philosophical), then one can.be forgi¥en for asking how the question as to the existence of God could he raised in an intelligiible manner. For if one is to agree with Richa1d J. Bernstein's assertion that contemporary philosophy manifests, in the ma.in, 1a rebellious attitude to the "father figure,, of the methodical Descartes,2 then one can be equally well impressed by the fact that this " rebellious spirit" is no Jess informed iby a respect for the Kantian attempt to descry the parameters of valid human knowing. And was it not the Kantian achievement to have dispelled the oibfuscation of metaphysics, thereby eliminating the grounds which were helieved to have substantiated a rational affirmation of the existence of God? The term 'Pre-Critical ' in the title of this essay is, therefore, intended as an e¥ocation of the Kantian demand for a critical v;alidation of the terms employed in philosophical argumentation. However, I shall attempt to advance the thesis that the Kantian enterprise does not, in fact, result in a happy resolution of the problems which it sets for itself. This is, of course, a thesis which could 'be proposed f.rom a number of divergent philosophical standpoints. It is my intention to argue here, however, that the work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan provides,a more satisfactory method for the carrying through of the critical endeavour to validate epistemologi2 Richard J, Bernstein, Beyond Objectwism and.Relatwism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 18. CREATOR AND CAUSALITY 575 cally the philosophical,statements we propose. I believe it is the merit of Lonergan's work to have developed positions on the hasis of an explication of the exigences operative in criticism itself, such that any criticism of this explication will he rbut an example of an incoherent criticism,attempting to invalidate its own procedures.3 In what follows I shall attempt to develop the above-mentioned argument to the effect... (shrink)

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modelling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the ‘reversal of Platonism’ for which Deleuze had called in (...) his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modelling and simulation and the social scientific use of ‘assemblage theory’. The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement. (shrink)

The paper shows that, contrary to what has been held since the sixteenth-century mathematician Christoph Clavius, there is no application of consequentia mirabilis (CM) in Greek mathematical works. This is shown by means of a detailed discussion of the logical structure of the proofs where CM is allegedly employed. The point is further enlarged to a critical assessment of the unsound methodology applied by many interpreters in seeking for specific logical rules at work in ancient mathematical texts.

Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much m advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his act DEGREES from an impersonal point of view.... It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he (...) is a descendant of the past he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. Herbert S. (shrink)