The discussion of ethics, corporate responsibility and its educational dimensions focuses primarily on CSR, corporate citizenship and philanthropic theory and practise. The partnership between Microsoft Corporation and UNHCR was launched to help the victims of the Kosovo crisis, at the same time as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gained momentum, and in particular, at the same time as Microsoft experienced a decrease in stock value. This case study sheds light on a decade of Microsoft Corp. efforts to align business (...) objectives with refugee aid, by use of corporate expertise and company revenues. As a leader in technology and corporate citizenship, can Microsoft bridge the digital divide for the disadvantaged and arouse the unlimited potential of tomorrow’s leaders, as the company claims in its communications? Is the partnership beneficial to UNHCR, in line with corporate objectives of “doing big things” and “doing good”? (shrink)

In classical India, Jain philosophers developed a theory of viewpoints ( naya-vāda ) according to which any statement is always performed within and dependent upon a given epistemic perspective or viewpoint. The Jainas furnished this epistemology with an (epistemic) theory of disputation that takes into account the viewpoint in which the main thesis has been stated. The main aim of our paper is to delve into the Jain notion of viewpoint-contextualisation and to develop the elements of a suitable logical system (...) that should offer a reconstruction of the Jainas’ epistemic theory of disputation. A crucial step of our project is to approach the Jain theory of disputation with the help of a theory of meaning for logical constants based on argumentative practices called dialogical logic . Since in the dialogical framework the meaning of the logical constants is given by the norms or rules for their use in a debate, it provides a meaning theory closer to the Jain context-sensitive disputation theory than the main-stream formal model-theoretic semantics. (shrink)

This special issue of History of the Humane Sciences intends to shed light on a series of psychopathological entities that do not target well defined conditions and experiences, but rather aim at delimiting zones of uncertainty that defy psychopathology’s order of things: mild diagnoses or subthreshold disorders, borderline conditions, culture bound syndromes, or ideas of dimensions and dimensionality. While these categories have come to play an increasingly central role in psychiatric and psychological thinking during the last 50 years, historians and (...) social scientists have had remarkably little to say about how they have been created, what they have been used for, and what kind of realities they have helped to shape. In this introductory article we propose the concept of ‘psychopathological fringes’ to refer to these categories that are located somewhere at the border of psychopathological classifications and refer to zones of conceptual underdetermination. The notion of fringes serves to highlight both the conceptually and the socially marginal nature of the conditions, personal identities, and worlds delimited by these categories. The fringes of psychopathology are zones of vagueness, of epistemic uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. This introduction proposes a first incursion in these zones. It suggests some of the reason why they might have had attracted little interest in the past and why they may be more salient recently. It follows some analytical clues that might help chart a way through it and proposes a map through the collection of articles included in this issue. (shrink)

Identifying, locating and interpreting both what is present and what is not present in theory and data lies at the core of scientific practice. Most experienced researchers know that social reality and psychological phenomena cannot always be apprehended directly, and that the forces that shape them must often be inferred rather than positively demonstrated. Yet, the important analytical problems raised by “absence” have rarely occupied the centre stage in professional journals. The aim of this paper is to sensitise researchers to (...) the problem of absence. It considers the various guises in which absences may appear, their repercussions in the research process, and the solutions that researchers have used to render absences visible. The paper focuses on the issue of absence as it appears in theory and research on social representations. A typology of absence, structured in terms of the research process, is proposed. The typology is intended purely as a heuristic tool. It identifies and discusses forms of theoretical, methodological, empirical and analytical/interpretive absences. This typology is used to explore forms of absence and their interrelationships throughout the research process in three studies on social representations. The discussion as a whole contributes to reaffirming the radical character of the theory of social representations by stressing how the latter locates the space of explanation at the interface between individual and collective representations, between social and cognitive processes, between intentional and non-conscious dynamics, and between material and symbolic realities. (shrink)

Achieving an ambitious goal frequently requires succeeding in a sequence of intermediate tasks, some being critical for the final outcome, and others not. However, individuals are not always able to provide a level of effort sufficient to guarantee success in all such intermediate tasks. The ability to manage effort throughout the sequence of tasks is, therefore, critical when resources are limited. In this paper, we propose a criterion of importance that is person- and context-specific, as it is based on how (...) an individual should optimally allocate a limited stock of exhaustible efforts over tasks. We test this importance criterion in a laboratory experiment that reproduces the main features of a tennis match. We show that our importance criterion is able to predict the individuals’ performance and it outperforms the Morris-importance criterion that defines the importance of a point in terms of its impact on the probability of achieving the final outcome. (shrink)

BackgroundThe discovery of biomarkers of ageing has led to the development of predictors of impending natural death and has paved the way for personalised estimation of the risk of death in the general population. This study intends to identify the ethical resources available to approach the idea of a long-lasting dying process and consider the perspective of death prediction. The reflection on human mortality is necessary but not sufficient to face this issue. Knowledge about death anticipation in clinical contexts allows (...) for a better understanding of it. Still, the very notion of prediction and its implications must be clarified. This study outlines in a prospective way issues that call for further investigation in the various fields concerned: ethical, psychological, medical and social.MethodsThe study is based on an interdisciplinary approach, a combination of philosophy, clinical psychology, medicine, demography, biology and actuarial science.ResultsThe present study proposes an understanding of death prediction based on its distinction with the relationship to human mortality and death anticipation, and on the analogy with the implications of genetic testing performed in pre-symptomatic stages of a disease. It leads to the identification of a multi-layered issue, including the individual and personal relationship to death prediction, the potential medical uses of biomarkers of ageing, the social and economic implications of the latter, especially in regard to the way longevity risk is perceived.ConclusionsThe present study work strives to propose a first sketch of what the implications of death prediction as such could be - from an individual, medical and social point of view. Both with anti-ageing medicine and the transhumanist quest for immortality, research on biomarkers of ageing brings back to the forefront crucial ethical matters: should we, as human beings, keep ignoring certain things, primarily the moment of our death, be it an estimation of it? If such knowledge was available, who should be informed about it and how such information should be given? Is it a knowledge that could be socially shared? (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The Ontology Summit 2012 explored the current and potential uses of ontology, its methods and paradigms, in big systems and big data: How ontology can be used to design, develop, and operate such systems. The systems addressed were not just software systems, although software systems are typically core and necessary components, but more complex systems that include multiple kinds and levels of human and community interaction with physical-software systems, systems of systems, and the socio-technical environments for those systems which can (...) include cultural, legal, and economic components. The focus themes used for this exploration were Big Systems Engineering, Big Data Challenge, Large Scale Domain Applications, and cross-cutting aspects Ontology Quality, and Federation and Integration of Systems. The Ontology Summit 2012 consisted of over three months of intensive virtual collaborative elaboration of these issues in presentations, panels, and group email. The culmination of these activities was a face-to-face Symposium at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, 12–13 April 2012. The primary product of this Ontology Summit is the communiqué reported here. But there are other products, some continuing as collaborative, more specifically focused analysis and modeling efforts aligned with various open standards activities. Behind all of these particular products, of course, is the real overriding purpose of the Ontology Summit 2012, which was: the joint collaboration of three distinct communities, the ontology, systems engineering and big systems stakeholder communities, who came together to address common problems, create common understanding and propose common solutions. (shrink)

Le parcours que je me propose de faire par la pensée cartésienne passe par les moments suivants : d’abord, on essaie de découvrir dans la pensée médiévale tardive, en prenant comme référence non pas seulement Nicolas de Cues, mais aussi quelques aspects du nominalisme, l’émergence d’une métaphysique du pouvoir qui a, elle aussi, comme point de départ, le concept d’infini ; deuxièmement, on essaie de démontrer comment cette métaphysique du pouvoir passe, en Descartes, par sa théorie de la création (...) des vérités éternelles, par les noms qu’il va privilégier pour parler de Dieu et par le concept de causa sui ; troisièmement, on voit comment cette métaphysique du pouvoir se réfléchit dans une anthropologie de la volonté qui réinterprète, d’une façon tout à fait particulière, le motif médiéval de l’homme en tant que « imago Dei » ; finalement, on voit comment l’essence de la pensée « sub specie machinae » peut être vue, en même temps, comme une affirmation du pouvoir de l’homme dans une anticipation du « verum ipsum factum » de Vico, déjà anticipé aussi dans la pensée cusaine et dans sa conception créatrice de la connaissance humaine. (shrink)

Sentences that exhibit sensitivity to order (e.g. 'John and Mary arrived at school in that order' and 'Mary and John arrived at school in that order') present a challenge for the standard formulation of plural logic. In response, some authors have advocated new versions of plural logic based on fine-grained notions of plural reference, such as serial reference (Hewitt 2012) and articulated reference (Ben-Yami 2013). The aim of this article is to show that sensitivity to order should be accounted for (...) without altering the standard formulation of plural logic. In particular, sensitivity to order does not call for a fine-grained notion of plural reference. We point out that the phenomenon in question is quite broad and that current proposals are not equipped to deal with the full range of cases in which order plays a role. Then we develop an alternative and unified account, which locates the phenomenon not in the way in which plural terms can refer, but in the meaning of special expressions such as 'in that order' and 'respectively'. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche looks at the phenomena of imaginative contagion up to the point of madness, as in the case of the visions of sorcerers and werewolves. Although Malebranche relies on a psycho-physiological description, it becomes obvious that the responsibility for such contagions is not to be attributed to those who were expected to be the cause, that is would-be sorcerers, but to those who picked up on their deeds and gave them some importance. It is therefore the material conditions (...) of these stories and the use made by them of the social and intellectual authorities that should be underlined. In the final analysis, the Malebranchian reflexion on imaginative contagion is a critique of the writers of such stories and of the anxiety they may produce in their readers' minds. At this point, the general explanatory schema according to which a contagion is due to the action of a strong imagination upon a weaker one is no longer relevant. For as regards the writer, given that he is impressed by the visionary's tales and has himself a strong imagination, this makes him all the more responsible for what he writes. (shrink)

La « richesse des femmes » tient en Normandie une place bien particulière. Le cadre juridique de la coutume normande repousse singulièrement le régime de droit commun des époux, et confère à la dot un régime spécifique qui exclut les filles des successions paternelles en présence de frères, et qui met le mari en position d’usufruitier de la dot. Cependant, l’étude - élargie à d’autres variables que la seule quantification de la dot - des pratiques matrimoniales des milieux marchands rouennais (...) au tournant des 17 et 18e siècles, et d’un lignage noble de la région d’Evreux de 1662 à 1759, montre qu’il existe une distance entre coutume et pratique. Chez les marchands de Rouen, on constate une rupture entre une phase d’atonie dans la décennie 1690, caractérisée par une assez forte endogamie socioprofessionnelle et topographique dans laquelle la dot joue un rôle compensatoire, et les premières années du 18e où les cas d’exogamie associée à des conventions matrimoniales et une publicité sans précédent marquent un processus de distanciation sociale dans lequel la dot n’intervient plus que comme une variable parmi d’autres. Les alliances matrimoniales du vieux lignage normand des Lombelons dévoilent à la fois une ouverture vers d’autres groupes sociaux, et une fermeture par des conventions matrimoniales et successorales discriminatoires pour la femme, dont la dot, entre autres, est un élément central de la stratégie de maintien. (shrink)