Information cultures consist of the values, beliefs and behaviour relating to information ownership and management, while information ethics applies to the moral application of data. The author’s experience of Russia and its information culture provides a striking case study of the disastrous social and business consequences of an absence of information ethics. This paper was delivered in its original form at the First World Congress of Business, Economics and Ethics of the International Society of Business, Economics and Ethics , held (...) in Reitaku University, Tokyo, in July 1996. The author is Associate Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut 06430–5195. (shrink)

T echnocrati c fundamentalis m (neocons ) an d theocrati c fundamentalis m (teocons) ar e t w o manifestation s o f politica l though t v e r y restrict i v e o f democra c y . Th e f irst on e ha s a highe r incidenc e i n th e f iel d o f econo m y an d th e secon d on e i n tha t o f the (...) religion , bu t bot h imp l y a stron g challeng e fo r th e democrati c State . Thi s a r ticl e deals wit h th e mor e o r les s fo r ma l conjunctio n bet w ee n bot h kind s o f fundamentalism , that appear s an d acts , e v e n a t a globa l l e v el , a s a v e r y conse r v at i v e reactio n agains t the mai n demand s o f c i vi c laicis m an d o f pr o g ress i v e policies . Th e autho r maintain s that th e an s w e r t o thes e n e w fundamentalisms , li k e t o th e ol d d o gmatisms , i s no t a t all th e relat i vism , bu t th e critica l an d aut o critica l thought . Th e poin t i s t o ad v ance , with thi s critica l attitude , i n th e const r uctio n o f n e w democrati c fo r mulations , pr o vided wit h a mor e stron g fundamen t i n te r m s o f ethica l l e gitima c y an d socia l l e gitimation. (shrink)

This article examines humanist works written in the immediate aftermath of Stefano Porcari's failed conspiracy against Pope Nicholas V. While they were designed to flatter the pope and support papal claims to temporal power, these works use images and adopt rhetorical startegies that are republican and not, as one would expect, imperial in origin. The humanists were so devoted not only to classical form, but also to Roman republican ideals that they sometimes present Porcari positively, have heroes of the Roman (...) republic comment on the modern papacy, and construct a strained theory of papal liberty. (shrink)

This review identifies at least six different kinds of fellow-feeling in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The six kinds are (i) the mirroring of emotions; (ii) altruism; (iii) judgment of pitch of emotions/actions; (iv) judgment of merit of emotions/actions; (v) friendship-and-love; and (vi) aspiration that leads to admiration. Smith does not list them side-by-side. This side-by-side listing promises to help thinkers to see how to assemble them to construct a coherent and systematic framework on how to amalgamate three moments (...) of behavior: the emotional, the rational, and the moral. (shrink)

Cypriot hagiography attests the presence of women deacons during the 5th and 7th centuries. This paper presents the ordination of these women, and tries to clarify the role of ministry played out in different places on the island, according to three hagiographic testimonies: Acts of Heraclides, Vita Epiphanii, Vita Auxibii.

V.1. On the sociology of knowledge and the sciences -- v. 2. On civilising processes, state formation and national identity -- v. 3. On sociology and the humanities.

Plato. The republic.--Aristotle. Politics.--Cicero, M. T. On the commonwealth.--John of Salisbury. The prince versus the tyrant.--Machiavelli, N. The prince and the people.--Hobbes, T. The state of nature and the Leviathan.--Locke, J. The right of revolution.--Marx, K. and Engels, F. Bourgeois and proletarians.--Bakunin, M. A. The Paris Commune and the idea of the state.--Mill, J. S. On liberty.--Lenin, V. I. Marxism and the withering away of the state.--Hitler, A. Race and the folkish state.--Mao Tse-tung. From the masses, to the masses.--Che Guevara, (...) E. Create two, three, many Vietnams. (shrink)

El presente trabajo conceptualiza la categoría de sufrimiento o dolor social desde un enfoque relacional y constructivista sobre la vida social y escolar. Particularmente, focalizamos en los desarrollos del psicoanálisis de Silvia Bleichmar, la sociología figuracional de Norbert Elias y el interaccionismo simbólico de David Le Breton. Sus perspectivas poseen una serie de puntos de confluencia: a) interpretan al sufrimiento como una emoción que imbrica procesos psico y sociogenéticos; b) conciben que el dolor remite a la relación entre cuerpo y (...) subjetividad; c) sostienen que el debilitamiento o la ausencia de lazos sociales significativos se encuentra en la base de las experiencias de padecimiento. (shrink)

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the potential of replacing (...) the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability. (shrink)

Ever since the early days of quantum mechanics it has been suggested that consciousness could be linked to the collapse of the wave function. However, no detailed account of such an interplay is usually provided. In this paper we present an objective collapse model where the collapse operator depends on integrated information, which has been argued to measure consciousness. By doing so, we construct an empirically adequate scheme in which superpositions of conscious states are dynamically suppressed. Unlike other proposals in (...) which “consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function,” our model is fully consistent with a materialistic view of the world and does not require the postulation of entities suspicious of laying outside of the quantum realm. (shrink)

Originally published in 1985, this is a short meditation by a great old man on people relating to other people who are dying, and the need for all of us to open ...

At Aur. Vict. Caes. 10.5, the reading lautus should be retained; -que is a dittography and should be deleted. At 13.3, satis should be emended into sagatis. This article also provides a brief analysis of Victor's references to clothing and attempts to explain why he comments on the Dacian costume at 13.3, the only ethnographic reference to clothing in the entire work.

"The Third Edition of Philosophical Foundations of Adult Education presents seven theoretical approaches to adult education: liberal, progressive, behaviorist, humanist, radical/critical, analytic, and postmodem. The book gives the historical grounding as well as the basic principles for each approach. In this edition each chapter has been revised and brought up to date. The chapter on radical adult education incorporates recent developments in radical education, phenomenology, feminist educational theory, and critical social theory. The book contains an entirely new chapter on postmodem (...) adult education.". (shrink)

A look at the nature of the universe, God, and our place within it explores the transformational role of consciousness in all human enterprise, offering inspirational insights into questions about religion, human existence, and good and evil.

This article contributes to the literature on national varieties of socially responsible investment (SRI) by demonstrating how Scandinavian SRI developed from the 60s and onwards. Combining findings on Scandinavian SRI with insights from previous research and institutional theory, the article accounts for the role of changes in societal values and norms, the mechanisms by which SRI practices spread, and how investors adopt and transform practices to suit their surrounding institutional contexts. Especially, the article draws attention to how different categories of (...) investors act as institutional entrepreneurs during specific historical periods, and how these roles come to shift as institutional rule systems of varying societal levels change. Thus, the insights gained are useful in the future research agenda concerned with advancing knowledge on idiosyncrasies and commonalities of national SRI manifestations, and to understand the reasons underlying such characteristics. (shrink)

'This book is a masterpiece of theoretical thought. It anticipates the actual achievements of much of what we now call sociolinguistics.

Confidentiality is a central bioethical principle governing the provider–patient relationship. Dating back to Hippocrates, new laws have interpreted it for the age of precision medicine and electronic medical records. This is where the discussion of privacy and technology often ends in the scientific health literature when Internet-related technologies have made privacy a much more complex challenge with broad psychological and clinical implications. Beyond the recognised moral duty to protect patients’ health information, clinicians should now advocate a basic right to privacy (...) as a means to safeguard psychological health. The article reviews empirical research into the functions of privacy, the implications for psychological development and the resigned sentiment taking hold regarding the ability to control personal data. The article concludes with a call for legislative, educational and research steps to readjust the equilibrium between the individual and ‘Big Data’. (shrink)

This article discusses the issue of abortion in the context of the dispute between progressive and neoconservative political forces in Brazil. The article analyses ADPF 442, a legal instrument known as a Motion of Noncompliance with a Fundamental Precept, which was lodged with the Supreme Court as part of a feminist litigation strategy in the country. The motion calls for the Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of the decriminalisation of abortion within the first 12 weeks of gestation. Methodologically, (...) the analysis combines a literature review with participant observation and corpus linguistics analysis. ADPF 442 is considered a key event in the use of judicialisation to voice demands for women’s rights in current-day Brazil, and this work examines the testimonies as representative of the discourse and strategies at play in the broader field of abortion and its major actors, both for and against its decriminalisation. (shrink)

A marxist view on the priority of the function of the stimulation of creativity as compared to the other functions of art 59 2.3.1. ...

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

The concept of truth arguably plays a central role in many areas of philosophical theorizing. Yet, what seems to be one of the most fundamental principles governing that concept, i.e. the equivalence between P and , is inconsistent in full classical logic, as shown by the semantic paradoxes. I propose a new solution to those paradoxes, based on a principled revision of classical logic. Technically, the key idea consists in the rejection of the unrestricted validity of the structural principle of (...) contraction. I first motivate philosophically this idea with the metaphysical picture of the states-of-affairs expressed by paradoxical sentences as being distinctively . I then proceed to demonstrate that the theory of truth resulting from this metaphysical picture is, in many philosophically interesting respects, surprisingly stronger than most other theories of truth endorsing the equivalence between P and (for example, the theory vindicates the validity of the traditional laws of excluded middle and of non-contradiction, and also vindicates the traditional constraint of truth preservation on logical consequence). I conclude by proving a cutelimination theorem that shows the consistency of the theory. (shrink)

Cause and effect relationships play a central role in how we perceive and make sense of the world around us, how we act upon it, and ultimately, how we understand ourselves. Almost two decades ago, computer scientist Judea Pearl made a breakthrough in understanding causality by discovering and systematically studying the “Ladder of Causation” [Pearl and Mackenzie 2018], a framework that highlights the distinct roles of seeing, doing, and imagining. In honor of this landmark discovery, we name this the Pearl (...) Causal Hierarchy (PCH). In this chapter, we develop a novel and comprehensive treatment of the PCH through two complementary lenses, one logical-probabilistic and another inferential-graphical. Following Pearl’s own presentation of the hierarchy, we begin by showing how the PCH organically emerges from a well-specified collection of causal mechanisms (a structural causal model, or SCM). We then turn to the logical lens. Our first result, the Causal Hierarchy Theorem (CHT), demonstrates that the three layers of the hierarchy almost always separate in a measure theoretic sense. Roughly speaking, the CHT says that data at one layer virtually always underdetermines information at higher layers. Since in most practical settings the scientist does not have access to the precise form of the underlying causal mechanisms – only to data generated by them with respect to some of PCH’s layers – this motivates us to study inferences within the PCH through the graphical lens. Specifically, we explore a set of methods known as causal inference that enable inferences bridging PCH’s layers given a partial specification of the SCM. For instance, one may want to infer what would happen had an intervention been performed in the environment (second-layer statement) when only passive observations (first-layer data) are available. We introduce a family of graphical models that allows the scientist to represent such a partial specification of the SCM in a cognitively meaningful and parsimonious way. Finally, we investigate an inferential system known as docalculus, showing how it can be sufficient, and in many cases necessary, to allow inferences across PCH’s layers. We believe that connecting with the essential dimensions of human experience as delineated by the PCH is a critical step towards creating the next generation of AI systems that will be safe, robust, human-compatible, and aligned with the social good. (shrink)

The dissemination and reception of Bernard Bolzano's ideas were not only mediated by his personal circumstances and context but also by the vicissitudes of his work. This paper traces the fate of his works from his death in 1848 to the publication of the first volume of his Gesamtausgabe in 1969, and it does so with the help of one of the last published volumes of this edition, namely the Bolzano‐Gesamtbibliographie 1804–1999. As the paper shows, this book is more than (...) a mere list of publications and constitutes a highly valuable resource for anyone interested in Bolzano studies, the use of which is explained in detail. (shrink)

Elias Baumgarten taught philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1972 to 2018. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in California, and went to schools in Boston and Chicago. He was one of the first recipients of the campus’s “Distinguished Teaching Award.” He taught a wide variety of courses including Medical Ethics, Ethics of War and Peace, Ethics of Nationalism, and Darwinism and Philosophy. Most of his publications are in ethics, including “Zionism, Nationalism, and Morality” and “Curiosity as a (...) Moral Virtue.” Dr. Baumgarten also served for over 30 years on hospital ethics committees at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. A child of immigrants, Prof. Baumgarten was passionate, both as teacher and citizen, in celebrating multicultural diversity both on our campus and in our country. He sees travel as a form of education and traveled to over 70 countries. (shrink)

In 1817, in the preface to his Rein analytischer Beweis, Bernard Bolzano revealed that he had decided to postpone the publication of any subsequent instalment of his Beyträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik because of the few and ‘superficial’ reviews of its first instalment, published in 1810. Bolzano’s transcriptions of the only two known reviews of this book are conserved at the Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví / Muzea literatury, in Prague, together with another manuscript on his Beyträge, the (...) provenance of which was unknown to Bolzano’s scholars until recently. In this paper it is shown that this latter manuscript is a draft of an announcement that was published at the time and that was indeed written at least to some extent by Bolzano himself. This hitherto unknown announcement of Bolzano’s Beyträge not only solves the mystery surrounding that manuscript, but also helps to date the publication of this book more precisely and provides an unusual insight into what we must take Bolzano himself to have considered most noteworthy about his work, namely his study on logic. The paper includes a transcription of the manuscript and an English translation of the announcement. (shrink)

In Crull it is argued that, in order to confront outstanding problems in cosmology and quantum gravity, interpretational aspects of quantum theory can by bypassed because decoherence is able to resolve them. As a result, Crull concludes that our focus on conceptual and interpretational issues, while dealing with such matters in Okon and Sudarsky, is avoidable and even pernicious. Here we will defend our position by showing in detail why decoherence does not help in the resolution of foundational questions in (...) quantum mechanics, such as the measurement problem or the emergence of classicality. (shrink)

The Consistent Histories (CH) formalism aims at a quantum mechanical framework which could be applied even to the universe as a whole. CH stresses the importance of histories for quantum mechanics, as opposed to measurements, and maintains that a satisfactory formulation of quantum mechanics allows one to assign probabilities to alternative histories of a quantum system. It further proposes that each realm, that is, each set of histories to which probabilities can be assigned, provides a valid quantum-mechanical account, but that (...) different realms can be mutually incompatible. Finally, some of its proponents offer an “evolutionary” explanation of our existence in the universe and of our preference for quasiclassical descriptions of nature. The present work questions the validity of claims offered by CH proponents asserting that it solves many interpretational problems in quantum mechanics. In particular, we point out that the interpretation of the framework leaves vague two crucial points, namely, whether realms are fixed or chosen and the link between measurements and histories. Our claim is that by doing so, CH overlooks the main interpretational problems of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, we challenge the evolutionary explanation offered and we critically examine the proposed notion of a realm-dependent reality. (shrink)