After Aquinas, Anselm is the most significant medieval thinker. Utterly convinced of the truth of the Christian religion, he was none the less determined to try to make sense of his Christian faith, and the result is a rigorous engagement with problems of logic which remain relevant for philosophers and theologians even today. This translation provides the first opportunity to read all of Anselm's most important works in one volume.

In the Proslogion, St. Anselm presents a philosophical argument for the existence of God. Anselm's proof, known since the time of Kant as the ontological argument for the existence of God, has played an important role in the history of philosophy and has been incorporated in various forms into the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and others. Included in this edition of the Proslogion are Gaunilo's "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" and St. Anselm's "The Author's (...) Reply to Gaunilo." All three works are in the original Latin with English translation on facing pages. Professor Charlesworth's introduction provides a helpful discussion of the context of the Proslogion in the theological tradition and in Anselm's own thought and writing. (shrink)

An annotated translation, by a distinguished translator and scholar of medieval philosophy, of the complete treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, with selected letters and prayers. A bibliography and index will be included.

Among critics of corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is growing concern that CSR is largely ineffective as a corrective to the shortcomings of capitalism, namely, the negative effects of business on society and the undersupply of public goods. At the same time, researchers suggest that despite the shortcomings of CSR, it is possible to make it more effective in a stepwise manner. To explain the frequent failures of current CSR practices and to explore the possibilities of remedying them, I examine (...) the close relationship between CSR, the persistent expansion of capitalism, and the pressure that capitalism puts on companies to legitimize their business operations. My analysis shows that the failure of CSR to serve as a corrective to the problematic effects of capitalism is, in fact, an inevitable consequence of the problematic dynamics of the capitalist system. On this basis, I suggest that capitalism limits the possibilities of making CSR more effective, argue for change on the systemic level of capitalism, and explore the ways in which CSR research can contribute to this political endeavor. (shrink)

Contemporary society operates beyond safe boundaries of the Earth system. Returning to a safe operating space for humanity within Earth system boundaries is a question of justice. The relevance of the economy—and thus of business—for bringing society back to a safe and just operating space highlights the importance of business ethics research for understanding the role of business in Earth system justice. In this commentary, we explore the relevance of business ethics research for understanding the crucial role of business in (...) the dynamics of the Earth system. We do so by integrating the perspectives of business ethics and system-oriented sustainability science on the basis of the theory of metabolic rift, which explains how the dynamics of capitalism result in the destruction of the natural environment. On this basis, we argue that a mutually reinforcing relationship between perpetual economic growth and profit seeking behaviour of business, which we call the _loop of unsustainability_, continually deepens the metabolic rift and keeps business from effectively contributing to Earth system justice. This perspective allows us to formulate firm-level and system-level preconditions for attaining Earth system justice, and to sketch a research agenda that links business ethics scholarship with questions of Earth system justice. (shrink)

The motivation of the study is to gauge the effects of access to finance, technical know-how, and financial literacy on women’s empowerment through establishing women’s entrepreneurial development. A sample of 950 women-owned SMEs was considered, and structured questionnaires were sent from getting target responses. After careful assessment through the data cleansing procedure, it was found that only 795 responses are suitable for further investigation, implying the sample response rate for the study is 74.71%. The study implemented structural equation modeling and (...) multivariate regression analysis for gauging the causal association that is direct and indirect effects of target variables. According to findings, a positive statistically significant linkage was revealed with women’s entrepreneurship sustainability and women empowerment. Furthermore, the mediating effects were also established for women’s empowerment. According to the study findings, it is suggested that for women entrepreneurship sustainability, effective policies surrounding financing accessibility, technical knowledge expansion, and financial understating have to be promulgated in the economy, which allows bringing women empowerment at large. (shrink)

Anselm Müller; VIII*—Mental Teleology, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 161–184, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

I am very happy indeed to contribute to this series of lectures, especially because I owe most of my training in philosophy to Elizabeth Anscombe, whose work has given the series its name. I am deeply indebted to the marvellous generosity of her teaching, to the example she set me of an unrelentingly thorough and serious thinker, to the unobtrusive way she introduced me to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Through Elizabeth Anscombe I also made the acquaintance of my friend Philippa Foot, (...) whose work in moral philosophy has, over decades and more than anyone else's, influenced my own. I hope it will be possible to recognize in what I am going to say here not indeed the excellence but at least traces of the beneficial influence of both these philosophers. (shrink)

Thomas Williams' edition offers an Introduction well suited for use in an introductory philosophy course, as well as his own preeminent translation of the text.

This is the first serious intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957-1972) and author of _The Society of the Spectacle_, perhaps the seminal book of May 1968 in France. Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of _History and Class Consciousness _(1923). Neither hagiographical nor (...) sectarian, _Guy Debord_ places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists. (shrink)

Research on Grand Challenges often neglects capitalism as a major source of many social and ecological problems, and/or as a barrier to their solution. To find sustainable solutions through our research, we need to make explicit and problematize this systems-level cause of Grand Challenges instead of only looking for solutions at the organizational level.

Under conditions of growing interconnectedness of the global economy, more and more stakeholders are exposed to risks and costs resulting from business activities that are neither regulated nor compensated for by means of national governance. The changing distribution of risks poses a threat to the legitimacy of business firms that normally derive their legitimacy from operating in compliance with the legal rules of democratic nation states. However, during the process of globalization, the regulatory power of nation states has been weakened (...) and many production processes have been shifted to states with weak regulatory frameworks where businesses operate outside the reach of the democratic nation state. As a result, business firms have to address the various legitimacy challenges of their operations directly and cannot rely upon the legitimacy of their regulatory environment. These developments challenge the dominant approach to corporate governance that regards shareholders as the only stakeholder group in need of special protection due to risks not covered by contracts and legal regulations. On the basis of these considerations, we argue for a democratization of corporate governance structures in order to compensate for the governance deficits in their regulatory environment and to cope with the changing allocation of risks and costs. By way of democratic involvement of various stakeholders, business firms may be able to mitigate the redistribution of individual risk and address the resulting legitimacy deficits even when operating under conditions of regulatory gaps and governance failure. (shrink)

Mit diesem Buch geht die analytische Handlungstheorie neue Wege. Statt den von Davidson vorgezeichneten Mustern zu folgen, knüpft der Autor an die aristotelische Unterscheidung von poiesis und praxis an, um die komplexen teleologischen Strukturen menschlichen Handelns zu untersuchen. Als überraschend ergiebiger Leitfaden erweist sich dabei der Begriff der Erziehung. Eine Fülle detaillierter Analysen zeitigt nicht nur anthropologisch und moralphilosophisch bedeutsame Resultate, sondern auch zeitkritische Folgerungen. 'Wie im Bereich der Erziehung, so gewöhnen wir uns auch sonst daran, die Wirklichkeit unseres Handelns (...) mit Kategorien des Hervorbringens zu überziehen und auch da nach Produkten zu suchen, wo es eigentlich um die Qualität des Lebens geht. Angesichts solcher Verirrungen fundamentale Strukturen und Ansprüche praktischer Vernunft erneut zu bedenken, ist heute vielleicht die vornehmste Aufgabe der Handlungsphilosophie.'. (shrink)

Williams's translations are scrupulously faithful and accurate without being slavishly literal, and yet are lively and graceful.--Paul Vincent Spade, Indiana University.

This article tries to resume Karl Marx’ concept of “commodity fetishism”, not just as a phenomenon of conscience, but as being the real heart of capitalist society based on abstract labor and value, money and commodity. This concept is often misunderstood, as well as the concept of “narcissism”. Following Freud and Christopher Lasch, the article underlines the sociological side of narcissism and how this pathology is the psychological counterpart to commodity fetishism, forming thus the typical subjectivity of consumerism.

Metaphorologie ist eine Methode der Textanalyse und Textbehandlung, die im Wesentlichen von Hans Blumenberg angeregt und praktiziert wurde, aber keine nennenswerte Wirkung hatte. Sie besitzt eine größere Reichweite und deutet tiefere Konsequenzen an, als bisher erkannt und umgesetzt worden ist. Das liegt an technischen Aspekten, die es weiter zu entwickeln gilt. Metapher, Mythos und Halbzeug sind Blumenbergs Kernbegriffe, an denen die Weiterführung einer analytischen Ausarbeitung ansetzen kann und hier in einer Folge selbständig lesbarer Kapitel ausgeführt werden. Sie führen von den (...) ersten Ansätzen in der Philosophie Blumenbergs und ihrer technischen Ergänzung auf die exemplarischen Problemfelder von Lebenswelt, Politik und Ästhetik. Die Anordnung in Dreiergruppen entspricht den Ausgangsbegriffen des Titels. Sie differenziert nach historischen, politischen, ästhetischen Hinsichten, bevor diese in zwei Skizzen die Perspektive des Gesamtprojekts Metaphorologie eröffnen und in wissenschaftshistorischer und methodischer Hinsicht entwerfen. (shrink)

The article starts with a review about the current public debate on the crisis of family. In the author‘s perspektive this debate is motivated less by the hard facts about the situation of family in the current western societies - although there are many changes - but rather it indicates a changing correlation between a »private« and a »public« concept of family. Up to the 1970ties family was understood as an area of privacy, but the frameset of this area was (...) defined by the public sphere only - mainly by the state and the church. Their representatives assigned a certain form of private life to individual people. But the advantages of emanzipation caused especially young women to decline this structure. They want to design their own conception of family, based on the compatibility of job and motherhood. This formation is described as »crisis of family« by the detractors of modernity. In contrast, it is the author‘s position to take this developments as a chance - especially in a protestant perspective. At the end, the article stetches the basic framework of such a concept of family. (shrink)

SummaryI offer reflections on the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the light of the many challenges of globalization. I briefly characterize globalization as the new context of contemporary theology in the first part, and go on in the second part to defend its relevance as a radical and total critique of life today in its nihilistic pursuit of creaturely arrogance, greed, and pleasure, and argue for the particular urgency of promoting the love and solidarity of Others beyond the (...) conventional boundaries of identity in a world increasingly suffering from unreconciled pluralism of all sorts, ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic. In the third, longest part I offer a new perspective on the soterioriological significance of „good works“ on the basis of a new relationship between creator and creature, a concrete anthropology of action as mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, and the irreducible involvement of the free and responsible subject in the very believing relationship to God. I try to reinstate „good works“ as the human way, as a free and responsible being, of „participating“ in God’s own redemptive work, not as „cooperating with“ divine grace or as „contributing to“ God’s redeeming work, or as „causing“ one’s own redemption. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Technology and Our Relationship with GodAnselm Ramelow O.P.God's Original Plan and the FallTechnology may appear to be a very secular thing, but to assume that technology can be understood without God would be a mistake. Technology is deeply involved in our relationship with God. This involvement is, moreover, profoundly ambivalent.1To begin with the positive side of this ambivalence: the growing awareness of the dangers of technology should not lead (...) Christians to think that technology is necessarily a bad thing. It is, in fact, not even merely a "necessary evil." Rather, we can find in the use of technology an unfolding of our God-given rational nature. If we believe that God "made us in his image and likeness," then this quite directly implies two things: (1) God is a maker (he made us), and (2) since he made us in his image and likeness, we are makers as well. The making of technology thus reflects our dignity as made in the image and likeness of God.2 Accordingly, the Church has been more positive towards the development of technology than one might expect, and some of our technologies (e.g., agricultural, architectural, and time-keeping technologies) have their roots in medieval monasteries.3 [End Page 159]We should therefore expect that Adam and Eve, had they not fallen, nevertheless would have become makers of technology in some form or other. They would have exhibited inventiveness and tool use, though perhaps not a tool use focused on warding off evil (which did not exist in Eden), but concerned with promoting positive forms life, such as tools of art and communication. Art and communication technologies are, like all tools, means to an end; but these in particular contain their ends in themselves. In Aristotelian terms, their making (poiesis) concerns a praxis (such as "making conversation"). That is why we sometimes forget to list such technologies among our typical examples of technologies. We forget, for example, that, among the technologies of communication, language as a physical tool (sounds or written marks) is an obvious example. And it is a prelapsarian feature: the book of Genesis has Adam naming things before the Fall. In doing so, Adam echoes God's own creative "technique" of speaking or calling things into being.4 Even in its oral form, language is a matter of human making and a technology of communication. In paradise, communication would not have been merely instrumental, not merely a means, but an intrinsic good, embodying knowledge and intersubjective communion.Other forms of prelapsarian technology, however, are a matter of speculation. And whether or not one agrees with Jacques Ellul's thesis that there was no such prelapsarian technology,5 the ambivalence of technology is clear from the very beginning as well. This is at least what we see in the book of Genesis. For, as a matter of biblical record, it was Cain and his descendants who founded cities and developed technology (e.g., Tubal-Cain as the "forger of all instruments of bronze and iron" in Gen 4:22). And the history [End Page 160] of these urban civilizations does not display the best part of human behavior. But if, as we have said, technology is not necessarily a bad thing, then this must be a corruption of technology. What might this corruption consist in?I want to suggest that it consists precisely in the corruption of our relationship with God, from which technology can never abstract and in which it is, for better or for worse, embedded. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as technology progresses, this relationship becomes more and more explicit, and it does so in a paradoxical way: initially, it is an attempt to put humanity in charge and control, to replace our need for reliance on God by allowing us to play God ourselves. But in our current situation, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the roles appear reversed: rather than putting humanity in charge, technology in turn is increasingly in control—to the point of becoming itself a god or idol that rules human life. As a result, we only end up having replaced one God with another... (shrink)

ExcerptThe world has to wait. Martin Heidegger1 Thus we philosophize for the time being. Hans Blumenberg2“The war is over, we should go back to philosophy” was the sentiment expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in one of the first issues of his and Jean-Paul Sartre's new journal Les Temps modernes in Paris, May 1945. Having escaped from a work camp, Hans Blumenberg could hardly have taken any notice of this thought, but he was certainly and decisively in agreement with Merleau-Ponty.3 Since then (...) we have become accustomed to Adorno's verdict that after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer…. (shrink)

The history of prudence is often depicted as a history of loss. According to one version, the scientification of moral knowledge in medieval philosophy calls into question the role of prudence in moral action. And while Thomas Aquinas still tries to integrate prudence into a scientific framework of moral knowledge, the Salmantine theologian Francisco de Vitoria eventually abandons this approach and excludes prudence from moral knowledge altogether. I would like to argue, however, that Vitoria plays a different role in this (...) development: He does not exclude prudence from scientific moral knowledge but gives an integrated account that Aquinas lacks. But this integration comes at a price because he is eventually unable to explain how prudence allows an agent to deal with the problem of contingency in action. (shrink)