Delaware’s famous corporate law and its highly respected specialized Court of Chancery attract entrepreneurs from all over the world, who choose the small state as their locus of incorporation and litigation forum, and global investors who choose Delaware law as the law governing their corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions. Other jurisdictions vie with Delaware in regard to these choices. This interjurisdictional competition makes Delaware a significant global norm exporter in the field of corporate law because jurisdictions emulate some of (...) its corporate law. Israel leads the global pack. For two decades, it has been approximating its corporate law to Delaware’s and emulating its principal institutions, including by establishing a specialized Chancery-like court whose judges seek guidance in Delaware’s case law in deciding open corporate law questions. This Article employs qualitative methods—interviews with M&A practitioners from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We use the interviews to assess whether the project of approximating Delaware corporate law has succeeded in shifting incorporation decision preferences away from Delaware to Israel and watering down the natural reluctance of global investors to accepting an unfamiliar corporate law when engaging in cross-border corporate M&A transactions involving an Israeli party. Our findings indicate that the approximation project has countervailing effects, opinions about its success being polarized and nuanced; that approximation increases the familiarity of domestic practitioners with the foreign law being emulated, making the emulated law easier to implement; and that approximation creates more room for other aspects of interjurisdictional competition to influence private choices. (shrink)

This superb collection of papers focuses on a fundamental question in logic and computation: What is a logical system? With contributions from leading researchers--including Ian Hacking, Robert Kowalski, Jim Lambek, Neil Tennent, Arnon Avron, L. Farinas del Cerro, Kosta Dosen, and Solomon Feferman--the book presents a wide range of views on how to answer such a question, reflecting current, mainstream approaches to logic and its applications. Written to appeal to a diverse audience of readers, What is a Logical System? (...) will excite discussion among students, teachers, and researchers in mathematics, logic, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics. (shrink)

This book is the first philosophy of religion anthology to offer a broad survey of classical and contemporary, Western and non-Western readings. This book includes the standard topics for traditional philosophy of religion courses, as well as ample material for courses incorporating a more global approach. The text also provides abundant pedagogical support for both instructors and stiudents new to the study of non-Western philosophies of religion. It includes such features as an introductory chapter on world religions, introductions to each (...) reading, study questions, glossary, pronunciation guide, and suggested readings. --. (shrink)

_The_ _Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine _is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, race and gender, the metaphysics of Chinese medicine, and narrative medicine. Each of (...) the 48 chapters is written especially for this volume and with a student audience in mind. For pedagogy and clarity, each chapter contains an extended example illustrating the ideas discussed. This text is intended for use as a reference for students in courses in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science, and pairs well with _The_ _Routledge Companion to Bioethics_ for use in medical humanities and social science courses. (shrink)

Extensive case studies, questionnaires, and problem-solving exercises make this an essential guide for business people.

We develop a logical modelling approach to describe evolvable computational systems. In this account, evolvable systems are built hierarchically from components where each component may have an associated supervisory process. The supervisor's purpose is to monitor and possibly change its associated component. Evolutionary change may be determined purely internally from observations made by the supervisor or may be in response to external change. Supervisory processes may be present at any level in the component hierarchy allowing us to use evolutionary behaviour (...) as an integral part of system design. We model such systems in a revision-based first-order logical framework in which supervisors are modelled as theories which are at a logical meta-level to the theories of their components. This enables evolutionary change of the component to be induced by revision-based changes of the supervisor at the meta-level. In this way, the intervention required in evolutionary change is modelled purely logically. The hierarchical component-based structure is fairly intricate so we present the basic ideas firstly in a simple setting, the well-known blocks world, before introducing tree-based structures to represent component hierarchies. We also introduce some techniques for establishing the behaviour of evolvable systems specified in this logical framework. The ideas and concepts are driven by example throughout. We conclude with a more substantial example, that of a simple model of an evolvable system of automated bank teller machines. (shrink)

This article examines the discourse competence of high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders to participate in narrative introduction sequences with family members. The analysis illuminates the children’s own efforts to launch narratives, as well as their ability to build upon the contributions of others. Ethnographic, discourse analytic methodology is integrated with the theory of discourse organization and the weak central coherence account of autism. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as fictional narratives are examined. The children were especially (...) competent in the use of stable introductory practices when launching fictional narratives, pre-organized by the media of expression. Their challenge was not in the introduction, but in the narrative co-telling, which often was not globally organized over an extended course of propositions. The heterogeneity of the ASD children’s discourse competence and its implications for discourse analysis are discussed. (shrink)

Draws together important selections from classical and contemporary theories and debates about emotion from a variety of subject areas.

Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science sets out, programmatically, a new naturalistic view of science as a process of building consensus practices. Detailed historical case studies—centrally, the Darwinian revolutio—are intended to support this view. I argue that Kitcher's expositions in fact support a more conservative view, that I dub ‘Legend Naturalism’. Using four historical examples which increasingly challenge Kitcher's discussions, I show that neither Legend Naturalism, nor the less conservative programmatic view, gives an adequate account of scientific progress. I argue (...) for a naturalism that is more informed by psychology and a normative account that is both more social and less realist than the views articulated in The Advancement of Science. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This chapter introduces many of the themes that are developed in more detail in later contributions: the notion that deception and self-deception are essential to self-maintenance; the suspicion that philosophers place too high a price on the truth, and naively fail to recognize the importance of false beliefs and even lies for human flourishing; the complex nature of both deception and self-deception, and their importance to communication; the observation that lies and self-deceptions are crucial to social interaction; the difficulties of (...) defining lie and deception; and the suggestion that it may be the motives behind a deception and not the deception itself that people find morally blameworthy. Nevertheless, it stresses that the truth is to be prized, and deceptions are to be viewed as a kind of necessary evil. (shrink)

The terms of the upper and lower central series of a nilpotent computable group have computably enumerable Turing degree. We show that the Turing degrees of these terms are independent even when restricted to groups which admit computable orders.

About ten years ago, I participated in a consensus process on migraine nomenclature. Participants used a modified Delphi technique to explore their views about what migraine is. Candidate concepts included an illness, disease, syndrome, condition, disorder, or susceptibility. Initially, there was a wide range of views about which concept best fits our concept of migraine. Migraine—in common with many psychiatric disorders—is poorly understood by neuroscience. On scientific grounds, participants thought that "susceptibility" and "syndrome" describes our current knowledge well. However, participants (...) were concerned that terms like "susceptibility" and "syndrome" could lead to migraine not... (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

This is a book on business ethics for managers. It is structured around three themes: 1) the idea that how we perceive and think about organizations we work for is a major factor in the framing and atmosphere of those organizations; 2) the idea of the corporation as a community rather than the formalistic, legal and mystical characterizations that currently abound in management books; 3) the various business virtues and vices and their role in the daily practice of business.

The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy is an accessible but sophisticated introduction to the most important figures in Continental philosophy in the last 200 years. Presents a definitive introduction to the core figures and topics of continental philosophy. Contains newly commissioned essays, all of which are written by internationally distinguished scholars. Provides a solid foundation for further study. Subjects include Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx and Marxism, Nietzsche, Husserl and Phenomenology, Heidegger, Sartre, critical theory, Habermas, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, postmodernism, and French (...) feminism. (shrink)

What is compassion? I suggest that it is, as Adam Smith and David Hume once argued, a moral sentiment that is subject to a great many constraints and variations but is nonetheless “natural.” I also consider Nietzsche's rather vehement attack on Mitleid and current social psychological literature on empathy.