Based on an analysis of 44 cases in Canada, Tunisia, and Cameroon, this research attempts to determine the fundaments of sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) in an international perspective and to shed the light on the potential impact of economic, institutional, and cultural dimensions upon diverse levels of sustainability in smalland medium-size firms (SMEs). Neo-institutional and entrepreneurship theories were combined in an integrative conceptual model to fully embrace the meanings and practices of SE and to question the "culture free" argument of some (...) prescriptions as well as some international programs. The analysis of the rationale behind entrepreneurs committed to sustainability in the three countries compared to less engaged firms shows that entrepreneurs' individual values are crucial in all cases. Socio-cultural specificities and institutional realities can, however, be more or less inductive to the adoption of sustainable practices in SMEs. This study also demonstrates that external stimuli are needed in Tunisia and Cameroon to reach the same environmental involvement as found in Canada. Moreover, support programs to assist SMEs with the adoption of sustainable practices and communication about the issue have to be tailored to the entrepreneur's motives, the firms' levels of openness to sustainability, the socio-cultural practices already embedded, and the countries' priorities. Implications for policy, management, and research are also discussed. (shrink)

Intended for high school and college students studying ancient Greece and Rome as part of a larger world history curriculum, this book's coverage of key wars and battles; important leaders, armies, organizations, and weapons; and other aspects of conflict will enable readers to better understand the complex role warfare played in ancient Western civilization.

Spence develops and applies a normative model based on rationalist and virtue ethics as well as stoic philosophy to assess the impact of technology on wellbeing. Through developing this model, Spence offers a novel and important examination of the benefit of technology to our society as a whole.

Professor J. B. Schneewind's recent excellent volume Mill's Ethical Writings has drawn attention to the necessity of studying Mill's notes to chapter XXIII of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind for a clear understanding of his theory of the moral sentiments. There are notes, however, by J. S. Mill to other chapters of that work, which should not be forgotten, because they elucidate the associationist theory of motivation which is obscurely appealed to in chapter IV of (...) Utilitarianism. Critics of Mill from F. H. Bradley onwards have made erroneous statements about the psychology that underlies Mill's justification of the principle of utility. But if Mill was going to support his ethics with a psychological theory, he should have expressed that theory at length and unambiguously in his ethical treatise. In what follows, it is pointed out where critics have been unfair to Mill through their apparent ignorance of his notes to the Analysis and of his conception of sympathy; but it is also shown that there is a puzzling inconsistency between the notes and a key passage in Utilitarianism, chapter IV. Finally, the theory of habitual volition, which is expressed at the close of that chapter, is examined. Critics have paid little attention to this theory, but it entails a serious modification of psychological hedonism, and Mill obviously attributed great importance to it. (shrink)

In this article we take further the debate on the ethics of competitive intelligence gathering, which until now has been very limited. Drawing on empirical research from a mobile telephone company in the United Kingdom, we present the case that while mystery shopping is not the worst activity in which an organization might be involved, it is basically unethical. Mystery shopping involves deception and the obtaining of competitive information under false pretences. Common arguments are that ‘everyone is doing it’ and (...) that the information is in the public domain. Neither of these points convincingly justifies the requirement for an employer to ask an employee to lie and deceive others on behalf of the company. The use of students and those in low power positions in the organization is a further concern. (shrink)

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with significantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modifiers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often defies current phrase-based statistical decoders. We present a conditional random field sequence classi- fier that detects the full scope of Arabic noun phrase subjects in (...) verb-initial clauses at the Fβ=1 61.3% level, a 5.0% absolute improvement over a statistical parser baseline. We suggest methods for integrating the classifier output with a statistical decoder and present preliminary machine translation results. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to the CommentariesSean A. SpenceIn “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry,” I have attempted to present an argument from the perspective of materialist neuroscience, pushing the latter to its logical conclusion: that if the human nervous system is consistent in its properties, then the only place for “free will” is in the non-conscious processes which underpin conscious awareness. This argument I have based on two supports: the (...) “spatial” and the “temporal” (Spence, 1995).I have contended that the sense of freedom may be lost from certain actions, thereby implying that “freedom” is a sensory process distinct from action. This might be conceptualized as having a distinct functional distribution within the nervous system (a spatial distinction). I have also argued that conscious awareness of events occurs at a finite delay, the period of “neuronal adequacy,” after those events themselves. The point here is that neurochemical events giving rise to phenomenology are likely to require a period of time (no matter how short) for their genesis. The process is “on line” before we perceive it (a temporal distinction). Thus the “freedom to act,” a motor process, is necessarily non-conscious at the point of initiation.I am grateful to Frith, Libet and Stephens for their comments. In the most part our disagreements are likely to be those of emphasis, perhaps compounded by my uses of the term “free will.”I have no major disagreement with Frith’s comments. I would, however, emphasize that it is likely that the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, does tell us something regarding intended actions. It is, for example, absent prior to the involuntary movements seen in Tourette’s syndrome (Obeso et al. 1982), and reduced in akinetic patients with Parkinson’s disease (Dick et al. 1989) or medial frontal lobe lesions (Deecke et al. 1987). The latter groups have difficulty initiating intended, internally generated, actions.With regard to the suspicion of dualism in my diagrams, the point is well taken, but I am attempting to describe a functional distinction, the precise coordinates of which remain obscure. It may well be that “consciousness” occupies no fixed location but is an activity temporarily co-extant with that association cortex (or cortices) subserving the sensory modality (or modalities) experienced phenomenologically (see Bottini et al. 1995).I have based much of my “temporal” argument on Libet’s work, and I am grateful for his response. Nevertheless, I am still of the opinion that there is a central inconsistency with his argument that conscious control exerts a veto on acts which is somehow free of material constraints. [Indeed he states that he has “no quarrel with the view that even a fully voluntary act is initiated unconsciously (non-consciously)”.] Whereas I can [End Page 99] not prove that this power of veto does not evade neurochemical processes, or that it somehow acts instantaneously and independently, with no origin in unconscious processing, I can say that I have restricted myself to arguing within a materialist perspective, with the aim of “pushing it” to its extreme. The free will which Libet retains in consciousness is one which is unique, and unconstrained by materialism. It is dualism in disguise!Stephens implies that there is a non-argument regarding consciousness acting as an initiator of events. The suggestion is that no one would argue this. Yet this is Libet’s argument. It cannot be disproved, but it is clearly (internally) inconsistent with Libet’s own impressive body of work.As for the role of consciousness in action, I have, I think, invoked a position similar to that adopted by Stephens; that consciousness is more a sensory state, allowing awareness of actions, and their consequences, and perhaps thereby facilitating the function of non-conscious initiators. It is clearly necessary for the performance of the “higher” acts which we equate with human nature, but it is not sufficient. (Indeed many of the most creative insights have “emerged” into consciousness [see Boden, 1992].) The man with a paralyzed arm may wish for his arm to move but to no avail. Over time function may slowly reappear. But if his lesion is such that he is unaware of his impairment (anosognosia), then his prognosis may... (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

This editorial to the special issue addresses the often overlooked question of the ethical nature of social enterprises. The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has previously been dominated by enthusiasts who fail to critique the social enterprise, focusing instead on its distinction from economic entrepreneurship and potential in solving social problems. In this respect, we have found through the work presented herein that the relation between social entrepreneurship and ethics needs to be problematized. Further, we find that a range of conceptual (...) lenses and methodological approaches is valuable as the social entrepreneurship field matures. (shrink)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective on Heidegger's thinking (...) of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with (...) the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the philosophy of biology has emerged from the shadow of the philosophy of physics to become a respectable and thriving philosophical subdiscipline. The authors take a fresh look at the life sciences and the philosophy of biology from a strictly realist and emergentist-naturalist perspective. They outline a unified and science-oriented philosophical framework that enables the clarification of many foundational and philosophical issues in biology. This book will be of interest both to life scientists and philosophers.

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Following on from ecological theories of perception, such as the one proposed by [Gibson, J. J. . The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin] this paper reviews the literature on the multisensory interactions underlying the perception of flavor in order to determine the extent to which it is really appropriate to consider flavor perception as a distinct perceptual system. We propose that the multisensory perception of flavor may be indicative of the fact that the taxonomy currently used to (...) define our senses is simply not appropriate. According to the view outlined here, the act of eating allows the different qualities of foodstuffs to be combined into unified percepts; and flavor can be used as a term to describe the combination of tastes, smells, trigeminal, and tactile sensations as well as the visual and auditory cues, that we perceive when tasting food. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

Is consciousness multisensory? Obviously it is multisensory in certain ways. Human beings typically possess the capacity to have experiences in at least the five familiar sensory modalities, and quite possibly in a number of other less commonly recognised modalities as well. But there are other respects in which it is far from obvious that consciousness is multisensory. This chapter is concerned with one such respect. Οur concern here is with whether consciousness contains experiences associated with distinct modalities at the same (...) time. We will describe those who endorse a positive answer to this question as endorsing a multisensory view (MSV) of the structure of consciousness, and those who endorse a negative answer to this question as having a unisensory view (USV) of the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

Involvement is an important element of good research and a route to impact. In line with early organizational analysis, we advocate involvement with research stakeholders and investing in the necessary communication and rhetorical skills.

Small businesses in developing countries, as part of global supply chains, are sometimes assumed to respond in a straightforward manner to institutional demands for improved working conditions. This article problematizes this perspective. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data from Tirupur’s knitwear export industry in India, we highlight owner-managers’ agency in avoiding or circumventing these demands. The small businesses here actively engage in irresponsible business practices and “evasion” institutional work to disrupt institutional demands in three ways: undermining assumptions and values, dissociating consequences, (...) and accumulating autonomy and political strength. This “evasion” work is supported by three conditions: void, distance, and contradictions. Through detailed empirical findings, the article contributes to research on both small business social responsibility and institutional work. (shrink)

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical conceptions of (...) hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy. (shrink)

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

Eric Martin and Daniel N. Osherson present a theory of inductive logic built on model theory. Their aim is to extend the mathematics of Formal Learning Theory to a more general setting and to provide a more accurate image of empirical inquiry. The formal results of their study illuminate aspects of scientific inquiry that are not covered by the commonly applied Bayesian approach.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th Century. A major figure in the development of phenomenology, his work also profoundly influenced many of the intellectual movements that followed in his wake, from Sartre's Existentialism to Derrida's deconstructionism. Towards the Definition of Philosophy brings together two seminal lectures that mark a breakthrough moment in Heidegger's thought and introduces the major themes that he would develop in his opus Being and Time.

For more than a century now, researchers have acknowledged the existence of seemingly arbitrary crossmodal congruency effects between dimensions of sensory stimuli in the general population. Such phenomena, known by a variety of terms including 'crossmodal correspondences', involve individual stimulus properties, rely on a crossmodal mapping of unisensory features, and appear to be shared by the majority of individuals. In other words, members of the general population share underlying preferences for specific pairings across the senses. Crossmodal correspondences between complementary sensory (...) cues have often been referred to as synesthetic correspondences but, we would argue, differ from full-blown synesthetic experiences in a number of important ways, including the fact that there are no idiosyncratic concurrent sensations. Recent psychophysical evidence suggests that such crossmodal correspondences can modulate multisensory integration by helping to resolve the crossmodal binding problem. Here, we propose a model to account for the effects of crossmodal correspondences between complementary auditory and visual cues and critically review their relation to full-blown synesthesia. (shrink)

This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (shrink)

An essential all-in-one introduction, Ethics for Engineers provides in-depth coverage of major ethical theories, professional codes of ethics, and case studies in a single volume. Incorporating numerous practical examples and about 100 review questions, it helps students better understand and address ethical issues that they may face in their future careers. Topics covered include whistle-blowing, the problem of many hands, gifts, bribes, conflicts of interest, engineering and environmental ethics, privacy and computer ethics, ethical technology assessment, and the ethics of cost-benefit (...) analysis and risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

Perceptual similarity is one of the most fiercely debated topics in the philosophy and psychology of perception. The documented history of the issue spans all the way from Plato – who regarded similarity as a key factor for human perceptual experience and cognition – through to contemporary psychologists – who have tried to determine whether, and if so, how similarity relationships can be established between stimuli both within and across the senses. Recent research on cross-sensory associations, otherwise known as crossmodal (...) correspondences – that is, the existence of observable consensual associations, or mappings, between stimuli across different senses – represents an especially interesting field in which to study perceptual similarity. In fact, most accounts of crossmodal association that have been put forward in the literature to date evoke perceptual similarity as a key explanatory factor mediating the underlying association. At the same time, however, these various accounts raise several important theoretical questions concerning the very nature of similarity, with, for example, the sensory, affective, or cognitive underpinnings of similarity judgements remaining unclear. We attempt to shed light on these questions by examining the various accounts of crossmodal associations that have been put forward in the literature. Our suggestion is that perceptual similarity varies from being phenomenologically-based to conceptually-based. In particular, we propose that the nature of the associations underlying similarity judgements – whether these associations are phenomenologically-, structurally-, emotionally-, or conceptually-based – may be represented in a two-dimensional space with associative strength on one axis, and cognitive penetrability on the other. (shrink)

The Liar paradox arises when we consider a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. If such self-referential sentences exist? and examples like?This sentence is not true? certainly suggest this?, then our logic and standard notion of truth allow to infer a contradiction: The Liar sentence is true and not true. What has gone wrong? Must we revise our notion of truth and our logic? Or can we dispel the common conviction that there are such self-referential sentences? (...) The present study explores the second path.0After comparing the Liar reasoning in formal and informal logic and showing that there are no Gödelian Liar sentences, the study moves on from the semantics of self-reference to the metaphysics of expressions and proposes a novel solution to the Liar paradox: Meaningful expressions are distinct from their syntactic bases and exist only relative to contexts. Detailed semantico-metaphysical arguments show that in this dynamic setting, an object can be referred to only after it has started to exist. Hence the circular reference needed in the Liar paradox cannot occur, after all. As this solution is contextualist, it evades the expressibility problems of other proposals. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 120 - 142 This paper aims to contribute to the debate over epistemic versus non-epistemic readings of the ‘hinges’ in Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_. I follow Marie McGinn’s and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s lead in developing an analogy between mathematical sentences and certainties, and using the former as a model for the latter. However, I disagree with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations concerning Wittgenstein’s views of both relata. I argue that mathematical sentences as well as certainties are (...) true and are propositions; that some of them can be epistemically justified; that in some senses they are not prior to empirical knowledge; that they are not ineffable; and that their primary function is epistemic as much as it is semantic. (shrink)