Corporate governance is increasingly becoming an issue of global concern, not least because we are more and more living in a corporate world that transcends international boundaries. The main purpose and motivation of this study is to determine how the international community should motivate businesses in fostering exemplary corporate governance, therefore eliminating obstacles to ethically exemplary behavior. The empirical approach utilized here has been applied to 161 businesses, both listed and over-the-counter (OTC) companies, with the results indicating that ethical considerations, (...) corporate governance and organizational performance are inextricably linked and, to an extent, demonstrably proportional. This study also indicates a major finding that family management is a significant mediating variable of the ethical considerations of corporate governance and organizational performance. Finally, this study has developed an operational model of ethical considerations of corporate governance as a consultancy aid for businesses that wish to implement and/or boost their performance in respect to corporate governance. (shrink)

This chapter introduces a distinctive approach for scientific metaphysics. Instead of drawing metaphysical conclusions by interpreting the most basic theories of science, this approach draws metaphysical conclusions by analyzing how multifaceted practices of science work. Broadening attention opens the door to drawing metaphysical conclusions from a wide range of sciences. This chapter analyzes conceptual practice in genetics to argue that the reality investigated by biologists lacks an overall structure. It expands this conclusion to motivate the no general structure thesis, which (...) states that the world lacks a general, overall structure that spans scales. It concludes that the no general structure thesis counts as metaphysics because it says something very important and general about the world. This thesis informs science as well as philosophy of science, and it provides a useful perspective for societies that look upon science to help solve complex problems in our changing world. (shrink)

Susan Mills and John Beatty proposed a propensity interpretation of fitness (1979) to show that Darwinian explanations are not circular, but they did not address the critics' chief complaint that the principle of the survival of the fittest is either tautological or untestable. I show that the propensity interpretation cannot rescue the principle from the critics' charges. The critics, however, incorrectly assume that there is nothing more to Darwin's theory than the survival of the fittest. While Darwinians all scoff at (...) this assumption, they do not agree about what role, if any, this principle plays in Darwin's theory of natural selection. I argue that the principle has no place in Darwin's theory. His theory does include the idea that some organisms are fitter than others. But greater reproductive success is simply inferred from higher fitness. There is no reason to embody this inference in the form of a special principle of the survival of the fittest. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology typically pose questions about individuation by asking “what is an individual?” For example, we ask, “what is an individual species”, “what is an individual organism”, and “what is an individual gene?” In the first part of this chapter, I present my account of the gene concept and how it is used in investigative practices in order to motivate a more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking “what is a gene?”, I ask: “how do biologists individuate genes?”, “for what (...) purposes?”, and “do their practices of individuating genes serve these purposes?" In the second part of this chapter, I propose that we use this approach when analyzing concepts of organisms and biological individuals. Following philosophical pragmatism, I argue that we should abstain from attempts to situate individuation of Darwinian individuals or of holobionts in a philosophy of nature. Instead, we should analyze practices of individuating organisms in terms of three-place relations between the world, ideas, and human purposes and actions. I conclude with three lessons: an ontological, an epistemological, and a meta-philosophical lesson, which I suggest, apply to philosophy of science generally and to philosophy and metaphysics at large. (shrink)

This book consists of a focused and systematic analysis of Freud’s implicit argument for unconscious mental states. The author employs the unique approach of applying contemporary philosophical methods, especially Kripke-Putnam essentialism, in analyzing Freud’s argument. The book elaborates how Freud transformed the intentionality theory of his Cartesian teacher Franz Brentano into what is essentially a sophisticated modern view of the mind. Indeed, Freud redirected Brentano's analysis of consciousness as intentionality into a view of consciousness-independent intentionalism about the mental that in (...) effect set the agenda for latter-twentieth-century philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Classical and quantal physics are fundamentally different in the way that each deals with complexity. We examine both the algorithmic and the computational aspects of this difference. Any comprehensive deterministic theory must contain a certain ineffectiveness in producing long-term predictions of the future, whereas a probabilistic theory is not so handicapped. The relevance of these considerations to chaos is discussed.

This chapter is written for an audience that is not intimately familiar with the philosophy of animal consumption. It provides an overview of the harms that animals, the environment, and humans endure as a result of industrial animal agriculture, and it concludes with a defense of ostroveganism and a tentative defense of cultured meat.

While for many years Locke was viewed almost universally as the prophet of liberalism, today a successive reading of C.B. Macpherson's Possessive Individualism, John Dunn's The Political Thought of John Locke and Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics and Locke's �Two Treatises of Government�, might produce a schizophrenic vision of Locke as simultaneously an accumulative bourgeois villain, an irrelevant Calvinist moralist and a radical egalitarian revolutionary hero. This essay addresses an issue examined to a greater or lesser extent by these and other (...) interpreters: John Locke's thoughts on the conduct of everyday political life. Consideration of this topic can serve to moderate one's impression of Locke, just as currently Ashcraft holds Locke to be less radical and Dunn finds Locke less irrelevant than they did before. The essay seeks to identify the group of persons Locke presumed would govern in a well-ordered nation, to examine the qualities required of these governors in order for them to perform their calling, and to illuminate Locke's personal efforts to promote these qualities in the governors of the next generation. In particular, I will examine the concept of trust, which John Dunn in recent years has found to be of continuing political relevance. In the first section, I will review the use of the word �trust� in Locke's Second Treatise to display the fact that trustworthiness in governors is constituted by possession of the qualities of virtue and prudence in the second section, I will argue that Locke's educational writings ought to be viewed as attempts to encourage the formation of the qualities necessary for good governors. In the following two sections, I will examine the meaning Locke ascribes to both �prudence� and �virtue� in his various political, philosophical, and educational writings. Finally, I will endeavour to show that an understanding of these qualities, along with the importance of status and breeding, are instrumental to an understanding of Locke's conception of the conduct of everday political life. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas was one of the most significant Christian thinkers of the middle ages and ranks among the greatest philosophers and theologians of all time. In the mid-thirteenth century, as a teacher at the University of Paris, Aquinas presided over public university-wide debates on questions that could be put forward by anyone about anything. The Quodlibetal Questions are Aquinas's edited records of these debates. Unlike his other disputed questions, which are limited to a few specific topics such as evil or (...) divine power, Aquinas's Quodlibetal Questions contain his treatment of hundreds of questions on a wide range of topics—from ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion to dogmatic theology, sacramental theology, moral theology, eschatology, and much more. And, unlike his other disputed questions, none of the questions treated in his Quodlibetal Questions were of Aquinas's own choosing—they were all posed for him to answer by those who attended the public debates. As such, this volume provides a window onto the concerns of students, teachers, and other interested parties in and around the university at that time. For the same reason it contains some of Aquinas's fullest, and in certain cases his only, treatments of philosophical and theological questions that have maintained their interest throughout the centuries. (shrink)

The Role of Motivation in Complex Problem SolvingPrevious research on Complex Problem Solving (CPS) has primarily focused on cognitive factors as outlined below. The current paper discusses the role of motivation during CPS and argues that motivation, emotion, and cognition interact and cannot be studied in an isolated manner. Motivation is the process that determines the energization and direction of behavior (Heckhausen, 1991).Three motivation theories and their relation to CPS are examined: McClelland’s achievement motivation, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and Dörner’s (...) needs as outlined in PSI-theory. We chose these three theories for several reasons. First, space forces us to be selective. Second, the three theories are among the most prominent motivational theories. Finally, they are need theories postulating several motivations and not just one. A thinking-aloud protocol is provided to illustrate the role of motivational and cognitive dynamics in CPS. Problems are part of all the domains of human life. The field of CPS investigates problems that are complex, dynamic, and non-transparent (Dörner, 1996). Complex problems consist of many interactively interrelated variables. Dynamic ones change and develop further over time, regardless of whether the involved people take action. And non-transparent problems have many aspects of the problem situation that are unclear or unknown to the involved people. CPS researchers focus exactly on such kinds of problems. Under a narro... (shrink)

The Swedish philosopher Hägerström, who was professor in Uppsala during the first quarter of the present century, devoted much attention to the philosophical and psychological analysis of moral and legal phenomena. Hägersträm is a difficult writer. He had steeped himself in the works of German philosophers and philosophical jurists, and his professional prose-style both in German and in Swedish had been infected by them so that it resembles glue thickened with sawdust. But he enjoys a very high reputation in his (...) own and adjacent countries, and it seems to me that this is well deserved. I think, therefore, that it may be interesting and useful to try to provide English philosophers with an outline in my own words of Hägerström's doctrines, as I understand them, about the topic named in the title of this paper. (shrink)

An appropriate combination of Quine’s ontology and Frege’s semantics is useful to emphasize the empirical entities “ethnic group” and “nation” expressed through an axiomatic system. If “cultural diversity” is taken as a primitive because it is good ethically and it is beautiful esthetically, then “internationalist nationalism” is the correct order of human society from a political point of view.

Editorial ROBIN LE POIDEVIN, Religious Studies , FirstView Article(s).