A recent proposal to formulate physics in terms of finite-information variables is examined, concentrating on its consequences for classical mechanics. Both shortcomings and promising avenues are discussed.

The aim of the present investigation was to describe and to classify significant ethical problems encountered by the members of the staff during the daily clinical work at a hospital medical department. A set of definitions was prepared for the purpose, including the definition of a 'significant ethical problem'. During a three month period 426 inpatients and 173 outpatients were admitted. Significant ethical problems were encountered during the management of 106 in-patients (25 per cent) and 9 out-patients (5 per cent). (...) No significant difference was found between the frequency of ethical problems in female and male patients, but a positive correlation was noted between the number of problems and the patients' age. The problem types were classified according to a problem list. The results of this investigation suggest that greater attention must be paid to discussions about ethical problems among doctors and other categories of health personnel and that, among others, medical students ought to be taught the analysis of ethical problems. (shrink)

The name of the third author was incorrect in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Tournament-like promotion systems are the default in audit firms, which are generally internally owned professional partnerships. While awarding promotions in a contest-like fashion stimulates contestants’ motivation and productivity, it may also upset an organizations’ ethical climate and trigger ethically adverse behaviors. Since nearly all research on promotion tournaments in management has been conducted in public firms, little is known about how these incentive systems operate in professional partnerships. In this study, we analyze how the perception of the two controllable design (...) parameters of promotion tournaments—the relative pay spread between winners and losers and tournament breadth in terms of the number of contestants that compete for a prize—affects audit firm behavior. Survey results provide evidence that the tournament’s perceived breadth prompts adverse behavior, as it does in public firms. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the perceived pay spread has no significant effect on adverse behavior, but triggers desirable behaviors instead. Our study suggests that promotion tournaments indeed provide powerful incentives, but also that understanding the unintended consequences of these incentives on organizational ethical climates and behavior requires tournament theory to be contextualized when it is applied in new settings like internally owned professional partnerships. (shrink)

Tournament-like promotion systems are the default in audit firms, which are generally internally owned professional partnerships. While awarding promotions in a contest-like fashion stimulates contestants’ motivation and productivity, it may also upset an organizations’ ethical climate and trigger ethically adverse behaviors. Since nearly all research on promotion tournaments in management has been conducted in public firms, little is known about how these incentive systems operate in professional partnerships. In this study, we analyze how the perception of the two controllable design (...) parameters of promotion tournaments—the relative pay spread between winners and losers and tournament breadth in terms of the number of contestants that compete for a prize—affects audit firm behavior. Survey results provide evidence that the tournament’s perceived breadth prompts adverse behavior, as it does in public firms. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the perceived pay spread has no significant effect on adverse behavior, but triggers desirable behaviors instead. Our study suggests that promotion tournaments indeed provide powerful incentives, but also that understanding the unintended consequences of these incentives on organizational ethical climates and behavior requires tournament theory to be contextualized when it is applied in new settings like internally owned professional partnerships. (shrink)

In this exploratory study, we present findings from semi-structured interviews with 11 self-identified lesbian and gay (LG) humanitarian aid workers of Doctors without Borders (MSF). We investigate their perceptions of workplace inclusion in terms of perceived satisfaction of their needs for authenticity and belonging within two organizational settings, namely office and field. Through our combined deductive and inductive approach, based on grounded theory, we find that perceptions of their colleagues’ and supervisors’ attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizational inclusiveness practices (...) play a role in LGs’ perceived authenticity, but not belonging, in the workplace. However, these organization-level characteristics do not account for between-participant differences in perceived authenticity. Therefore, we inductively construct a typology of three groups, which we coined conscious first-missioners, authentic realists, and idealistic activists, based on how LG humanitarian aid workers assess and deal with not being able to be their authentic selves when they are in the field, because homosexuality is illegal in many project countries. Conscious first-missioners are separated from the other two groups based on having gone to the field once, whereby they felt in control over the decision on how to manage their sexuality. Alternatively, authentic realists and idealistic activists alike felt they did not really have a choice in how to manage their sexuality, but handled that differently. We find the importance of one’s sexuality as well as adherence to the overarching organizational mission relevant individual-level factors herein. Furthermore, we find disclosure of sexual identity to be strongly context-dependent, as participants are ‘out of the closet’ in the office, but go back into the closet when they enter the field, with different country contexts even leading to different decisions concerning self-disclosure, thus demonstrating the importance of careful sexual identity management. This so-called disclosure dilemma, we find, may not be merely an individual choice, but rather a shared dilemma involving multiple stakeholders, such as the organization and fellow team members. We discuss the findings’ contributions to existing literature on LGs’ workplace experiences and implications for future research on inclusion of sexual and other invisible minorities in the workplace. (shrink)

To start thinking about the Gregory Skovoroda phenomenon and its promising interconnectedness with the culture of the hoped for, we want from a series of somewhat unexpected considerations and parallels that we hope will reflect both the subject matter itself and the prospects for the future. It is well-known that Kharkov entered the modern history of Ukraine as the “second capital of our statehood, as the capital of constructivist modern Ukraine of the 1920s, which, and this is often forgotten, favoring (...) Kyiv and the West of Ukraine, became the birthplace and epicenter of a powerful national-cultural movement Ukrainianization. It was in Kharkov that a unique aesthetic phenomenon was born and flourished - literature and art of the firing Renaissance. (shrink)

This major new study by one of the most penetrating and persistent critics of philosophical and scientific orthodoxy, returns to Aristotle in order to examine the salient categories in terms of which we think about ourselves and our nature, and the distinctive forms of explanation we invoke to render ourselves intelligible to ourselves. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author (...) of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

... 243-) INTRODUCTION §§243- constitute the eighth 'chapter' of the book. Its point of departure is a natural query with respect to the conclusion of the ...

This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ Uses broad (...) categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

This major new study by one of the most penetrating and persistent critics of philosophical and scientific orthodoxy, returns to Aristotle in order to examine the salient categories in terms of which we think about ourselves and our nature, and the distinctive forms of explanation we invoke to render ourselves intelligible to ourselves. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author (...) of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

This volume collects P. M. S. Hacker's papers on Wittgenstein and related themes written over the last decade. Hacker provides comparative studies of a range of topics--including Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology, conception of grammar, and treatment of intentionality--and defends his own Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy.

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to (...) be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal. (shrink)

The author clarifies the existential philosophy that is implicit in Kurt Goldstein's philosophy of organism (Goldstein, 1963; 1995). Situated in response to the growing trend that psychological phenomena are reducible to the nervous system, the author argues for the reverse: that the significance of nervous system activity can only be understood by viewing it as background to foreground performances. Like the organization of perception into meaningful figure-- ground Gestalts, the existential modes of embodiment, sociality, temporality, spatiality, and attunement are organized (...) together to accomplish foreground performances. It is only within this context that the activity of the nervous system may be understood as significant or insignificant. Speech is given as an example. The article concludes with a commentary on how the trend of reducing psychological phenomena to neurological phenomena has impaired our understanding of brain disorders and psychological disorders. (shrink)

Collection of essays around the work of H.L.A. Hart.

This fourth and final volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations covers pp 428-693 of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis.

Incorporating significant editorial changes from earlier editions, the fourth edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_ is the definitive _en face_ German-English version of the most important work of 20th-century philosophy The extensively revised English translation incorporates many hundreds of changes to Anscombe’s original translation Footnoted remarks in the earlier editions have now been relocated in the text What was previously referred to as ‘Part 2’ is now republished as _Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment_, and all the remarks in it (...) are numbered for ease of reference New detailed editorial endnotes explain decisions of translators and identify references and allusions in Wittgenstein's original text Now features new essays on the history of the _Philosophical Investigations_, and the problems of translating Wittgenstein’s text. (shrink)

P. M. S. Hacker 1. The ‘confusion of psychology’ On the concluding page of what is now called ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote.

Law, Morality and Society Essays in Honour of H.L.A Hart.