This paper examines the perceptions of Russian executives toward the relationship between legal and ethical conduct. The focus is on questions of tax evasion attitudes and corporate illegal behavior. Forty Russian managers and entrepreneurs from a variety of organizations were interviewed. Their actions are aimed at gaining corporate income and profit from operations through hiding corporate activity from state and local authorities in a context where these authorities levy excessive taxes and other types of payment from businesses. Tax evasion methods (...) are presented and analyzed along with other varieties of illegal corporate behavior. The research results show that executives believe business could not perform in a completely legal way under Russia’s existing conditions. Illegal performance is thus viewed as legitimate and ethical. (shrink)

This article explores Gerardus van der Leeuw’s view of phenomenology of religion. The phenomenological method he defended is basically a hermeneutical approach in which an observer relates personally and even existentially to the “phenomena” (s)he studies in order to determine their essence (Wesensschau). In his anthropology (that reflects on the basic structure of human beings) a similar way of relating to the world is discussed: the “primitive mentality” that is characterized by the “need to participate” (besoin de participation). Both phenomenology (...) and mentalité primitive imply a critique of modern scholarship. This fundamental criticism of the prevailing (historical) approach in the humanities including religious studies explains the growing distance between van der Leeuw and the majority of scholars of religion in the decades after his death in 1950. (shrink)

Constructions of Intersubjectivity shows that the meaning of grammatical constructions often has more to do with the human cognitive capacity for taking other peoples' points of view than with describing the world. Treating pragmatics, semantics, and syntax in parallel and integrating insights from linguistics, psychology, and animal communication, Arie Verhagen develops a new understanding of linguistic communication. In doing so he shows the continuity between language and animal communication and reveals the nature of human linguistic specialization. Professor Verhagen uses (...) Dutch and English data from a wide variety of sources and considers the contributions of grammar to the coherence of discourse. He argues that important problems in semantics and syntax may be resolved if language is understood as an instrument for exerting influence and coordinating different perspectives. The grammatical phenomena he discusses include negative expressions, the let alone construction, complementation constructions, and discourse connectives.This powerfully argued and original explanation of the nature and operation of communication will interest a wide range of scholars and advanced students in linguistics, cognitive science, and human evolution. (shrink)

In the words of the author,` this book represents an attempt to raise anew the banner of human values sanctified in the Book of Books and it is a call to rally ...

The contributions in this volume treat aspects and manifestations of this cultural symbiosis, and they throw new light on authors and texts both more and less ...

Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

The Vatican recently published directives regarding “beginning of life” issues that explain the Catholic Church's position regarding new technologies in this area. We think that it is important to develop a response that presents the traditional Orthodox Jewish position on these same issues in order to present an alternative, parallel system. There are many points of commonality between the Vatican document and traditional Jewish thought as well as several important issues where there is a divergence of opinion. The latter include (...) the status of the zygote as produced during in vitro fertilization, the acceptable of procreation in a method other than through the conjugal act, and the permissibility of deriving benefit from the products of an illicit act. These points of agreement and disagreement are discussed in detail in this article. (shrink)

The article revisits the large n problem as it relates to the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox to compare the frequentist, Bayesian, and likelihoodist approaches to inference and evidence. It is argued that what is fallacious is to interpret a rejection of as providing the same evidence for a particular alternative, irrespective of n; this is an example of the fallacy of rejection. Moreover, the Bayesian and likelihoodist approaches are shown to be susceptible to the fallacy of acceptance. The key difference is that (...) in frequentist testing the severity evaluation circumvents both fallacies but no such principled remedy exists for the other approaches. (shrink)

Some people claim that evolution is "just a theory". Do you know what a scientific theory really is? Just a theory is an overview of the modern concepts of science. A clear understanding of the nature of science will enable you to distinguish science from pseudoscience (which illegitimately wraps itself in the mantle of science), and real social issues in science from the caricatures portrayed in postmodernist critiques. Prof. Ben-Ari's style is light (even humorous) and easy to read, bringing the (...) latest concepts of science to the general reader. Of particular interest is his analysis of the terminology of science (fact, law, proof, theory) in relation to the colloquial meaning of these terms. Between chapters are biographical vignettes of scientists — both familiar and unfamiliar — showing their common commitment to the enterprise of science, together with a diversity of backgrounds and personalities. This accessible, informative, and comprehensive work will give lay readers a good grasp of real science. (shrink)

IntroductionIn addition to being a source of valuable nutrients, meat consumption has several negative consequences; for the environment, for animal welfare, and for human health. To persuade people to lower their meat consumption, it is assumed that the personal relevance of the topic of lowering meat consumption is important as it determines how people perceive the quality of the arguments.MethodIn an experimental exploratory field study, participants recruited from the general Italian population were randomized to one of the four conditions with (...) a text with pictures on the environmental, animal welfare, or health consequences of meat consumption, or a text on mustard. The dependent variables were self-reported consumption of red meat and processed meat after 2 weeks. Personal relevance was assessed in the pre-test with self-reported meat consumption and intention.ResultsThe interaction between pre-test meat consumption and condition was significant: In participants who scored high on pre-test meat consumption, the self-reported red meat consumption after 2 weeks in the health argument condition was significantly lower compared to the control condition and the environmental argument condition. The effects of pre-test intention as a moderator were less certain.DiscussionThe persuasive effects of the different arguments made a difference only in people who ate a relatively high level of meat in pre-test, and the type of arguments made a difference. Although the present outcomes are caused by the specific formulations of the arguments in this study, the results do show that it is relevant to choose the arguments carefully to ensure effectiveness. (shrink)

Reflections on Seyla Benhabib’s a. Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

This work sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of current legal paradigms in explaining the phenomena of fragmentation through conceptions of modern law. It also addresses the possibility of legal and ethical alternativesand political counterstrategies.

In this introductory essay to a special issue “Arendt in the Present” we ponder the strange contemporaneity of Arendt’s work, her striking ability to speak to current concerns and experiences, despite her own insistence of remaining engaged with the events of her time. We argue that the “third wave” of Arendt scholarship, building on new theoretical insights and careful archival research has opened many new perspectives to her thought. Arendt scholarship has overcome the tendency to assign her a label, while (...) also avoiding the canonization of “Saint Arendt”. There is no party line, no “Arendtism”, to tow. What makes Arendt’s thought so versatile is indeed the fact that it does not call for application but a thoughtful attending to the “sense of the real” and serious facing of our newest political experiences. (shrink)

I show how a de se belief ascription such as "Privatus believes that he himself is rich" may be dealt with by means of a scope distinction over and above that one separating de dicto and de re ascriptions. The idea is, roughly, that 'Privatus...himself' forms in this statement a unity, a single "spread" sign that is at the same time in a de re and de dicto position. If so, H-N. Castañeda's contention that the "quasi-indicator" 'he himself' ('she herself', (...) 'it itself') belongs to a "unique, irreducible logical category" of singular terms is, at best, misleading. Further, my account is superior to the well-known theories of R. Chisholm and D. Lewis, according to which de se ascriptions state that the believer "directly attributes properties to himself or herself". 1. Introduction 2. Chisholm and Lewis on de se belief ascriptions 3. Fregean and Sellarsian theories of belief ascriptions 4. Geach on the reflexive pronoun 5. Admiring and self-admiring 6. A solution to the problem de se belief ascriptions 7. Belief de se 8. Conclusion. (shrink)

A certain argument has been given in the literature to the effect that generalism (the view that all facts about all possible worlds can (in principle) be given in general terms, that is, without resorting to nonqualitative thisnesses) excludes transworld identitism (the view that there are numerical identities through possible worlds). It follows from this argument, among other things, that transworld identitism entails Scotistic haecceitism (acceptance of nonqualitative thisnesses), and that generalists subscribing to de reism (the view that there are (...) true modal statements de re) are committed to counterpartism (the view that sameness through worlds is not numerical identity). The purpose of this paper is to resist the argument in question by constructing generalist transworld identitism, that is, by providing an account involving identities through possible worlds, without resorting to nonqualitative thisnesses. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to give a comprehensive and readable account of the first World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. The Parliament was organised in the context of the Columbian World Exhibition and attracted 150,000 people, according to one of the lenghty reports. Various aspects are addressed: the objectives of the organisers, the character of the various reports of this mega-event, the participation of women, the relationship between the Christian organisers and the representatives of the (...) East, the various – opposing – claims about the superiority of specific forms of religion and culture, the tendency to spiritualize religion, and the role of the emerging field of religious studies versus the ‘interfaith’ character of the Parliament. The participants were convinced of the ultimate meaning of ‘religion’ as a force against indulging in consumerism and materialism. (shrink)

The main aim of the paper is to defend (the possibility of) reductionism in the neuroscience--cognitive science case. This is done in three steps. First an ontological and methodological picture is presented which acknowledges the level structure of reality but claims that because every higher level is evolutionarily preceded by the lower level(s), reductionism is as viable strategy as anything else. Secondly, a direct challenge to the two popular doctrines, namely emergentism and supervenience, is presented, the point being that we (...) don't have clear conception of what "emerging" is or how specifically to explain what something's "depending on" something or "determining" something is (in the case of supervenience). In the third part the so-called modified structuralist framework (from the structuralist philosophy of science) is proposed as an alternative model to the old Nagelian one, a model which can serve reductionistic purposes well because it admits many kinds of reduction, from approximate to very strict ones. (shrink)

This paper aims to give a substantive account of how Feynman used diagrams in the first lectures in which he explained his new approach to quantum electrodynamics. By critically examining unpublished lecture notes, Feynman’s use and interpretation of both "Feynman diagrams" and other visual representations will be illuminated. This paper discusses how the morphology of Feynman’s early diagrams were determined by both highly contextual issues, which molded his images to local needs and particular physical characterizations, and an overarching common diagrammatic (...) style, which facilitated Feynman’s movement between different diagrams despite their divergent forms and significance. (shrink)

Rayleigh and Ramsay discovered the inert gas argon in the atmospheric air in 1895 using a carefully designed sequence of experiments guided by an informal statistical analysis of the resulting data. The primary objective of this article is to revisit this remarkable historical episode in order to make a case that the error‐statistical perspective can be used to bring out and systematize (not to reconstruct) these scientists' resourceful ways and strategies for detecting and eliminating error, as well as dealing with (...) Duhemian ambiguities and underdetermination problems as they arose in the context of their local research settings. *Received December 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Economics, 3016 Pamplin Hall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; e‐mail: aris@vt.edu. (shrink)

Longer-term developments shape the present and endogenous futures of institutions and practices of science and technology in society and their governance. Understanding the patterns allows diagnosis and soft intervention, often linked to scenario exercises. The book collects six articles offering key examples of this perspective, addressing ongoing issues in the governance of science and technology, including nanotechnology and responsible research and innovation. And adds two more articles that address background philosophical issues.

This article calls into question the charge that frequentist testing is susceptible to the base-rate fallacy. It is argued that the apparent similarity between examples like the Harvard Medical School test and frequentist testing is highly misleading. A closer scrutiny reveals that such examples have none of the basic features of a proper frequentist test, such as legitimate data, hypotheses, test statistics, and sampling distributions. Indeed, the relevant error probabilities are replaced with the false positive/negative rates that constitute deductive calculations (...) based on known probabilities among events. As a result, the ampliative dimension of frequentist induction—learning from data about the underlying data-generating mechanism—is missing. *Received August 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Economics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; e-mail: aris@vt.edu. (shrink)