This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

Duncan Foley’s Unholy Trinity: Labor, capital, and land in the new economy is the sixth in the series of Graz Schumpeter Lectures published by Routledge, all relatively slim volumes elucidating themes arguably related to Schumpeter, if just peripherally, and that usually summarize major arguments of the authors (previous authors were Stanley Metcalfe, Brian Loasby, Nathan Rosenberg, Ian Steedman, and Erich Streissler). In this one, which deals with questions of induced technological change in several sections, Foley attempts to provide (...) an integration of ideas that have evolved through his varied career, from high general equilibrium theorist (Foley, 1967), through deep student of Marxian economics (Foley, 1986), to complexity theorist (Foley, 1994; for more detailed discussion of his personal and intellectual path see Colander et al, 2004, Chapter 7). A central argument is that the classical political economists, not just Marx but also Adam Smith and Malthus with Ricardo (largely lumped together in his analysis), developed ideas that are well suited to representation and understanding using the methods of modern complexity economics, themes of dynamic out-of-equilibrium selforganization in systems with boundedly rational agents, in contrast to the requirements for full Walrasian general equilibrium that he studied early in his career. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite sustained attention to ethical leadership in organizations, scholarship remains largely descriptive. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the consequences of ethical leadership on leader promotability. From a sample of ninety-six managers from two independent organizations, we found that ethical leaders were increasingly likely to be rated by their superior as exhibiting potential to reach senior leadership positions. However, leaders who displayed increased ethical leadership were no more likely to be viewed as promotable in the near-term compared to (...) those who displayed less ethical leadership. Our findings also show ethical culture and pressure to achieve results are important contextual factors that moderate the relationships between ethical leadership and leader promotability to senior leadership roles. (shrink)

Bisimulations, behavioral equivalence and logical equivalence are investigated for stochastic image-coalgebras that interpret coalgebraic logic which is defined in terms of predicate liftings. We investigate the conditions for the functor under which these notions of equivalence are related by discussing congruences for the underlying stochastic relation. It is demonstrated that logics as diverse as continuous time stochastic logic and general modal logics can be usefully approached through coalgebraic methods.

One persistent challenge in scientific practice is that the structure of the world can be unstable: changes in the broader context can alter which model of a phenomenon is preferred, all without any overt signal. Scientific discovery becomes much harder when we have a moving target, and the resulting incorrect understandings of relationships in the world can have significant real-world and practical consequences. In this paper, we argue that it is common (in certain sciences) to have changes of context that (...) lead to changes in the relationships under study, but that standard normative accounts of scientific inquiry have assumed away this problem. At the same time, we show that inference and discovery methods can “protect” themselves in various ways against this possibility by using methods with the novel methodological virtue of “diligence.” Unfortunately, this desirable virtue provably is incompatible with other desirable methodological virtues that are central to reliable inquiry. No scientific method can provide every virtue that we might want. (shrink)

Rede und Gegenrede, pro und contra - jeweils von derselben Person zu einem bestimmten Thema? Wer kennt das nicht von sich selbst? Auch beim Philologen und Philosophen Friedrich Nietzsche finden sich solche Stellen in seinem Werk. Systematisch aufbereitet durch den Autor, umfasst das Buch 287 Schlagwörter und 5527 Zitate, geordnet nach pro und contra und ein Fundstellenverzeichnis. Das Buch will sein: Ein Zugang und Schlüssel zu Nietzsches Schriften Ein Nietzsche-Nachschlagewerk Ein Nietzsche-Brevier Eine Aufforderung an den Leser, von der Oberfläche der (...) Zitate in die Tiefen der Gedankengänge Nietzsches vorzudringen Ein Rüstzeug zum Selbst-Überdenken der Probleme Ein Buch von Studiendirektor i.R. Erich Frey-Teschen (1922 - 2016), posthum herausgegeben von Roman Seidl. (shrink)

Exploratory analysis is an area of increasing interest in the computational linguistics arena. Pragmatically speaking, exploratory analysis may be paraphrased as natural language processing by means of analyzing large corpora of text. Concerning the analysis, appropriate means are statistics, on the one hand, and artificial neural networks, on the other hand. As a challenging application area for exploratory analysis of text corpora we may certainly identify text databases, be it information retrieval or information filtering systems. With this paper we present (...) recent findings of exploratory analysis based on both statistical and neural models applied to legal text corpora. Concerning the artificial neural networks, we rely on a model adhering to the unsupervised learning paradigm. This choice appears naturally when taking into account the specific properties of large text corpora where one is faced with the fact that input-output-mappings as required by supervised learning models cannot be provided beforehand to a satisfying extent. This is due to the fact of the highly changing contents of text archives. In a nutshell, artificial neural networks count for their highly robust behavior regarding the parameters for model optimization. In particular, we found statistical classification techniques much more susceptible to minor parameter variations than unsupervised artificial neural networks. In this paper we describe two different lines of research in exploratory analysis. First, we use the classification methods for concept analysis. The general goal is to uncover different meanings of one and the same natural language concept. A task that, obviously, is of specific importance during the creation of thesauri. As a convenient environment to present the results we selected the legal term of neutrality, which is a perfect representative of a concept having a number of highly divergent meanings. Second, we describe the classification methods in the setting of document classification. The ultimate goal in such an application is to uncover semantic similarities of various text documents in order to increase the efficiency of an information retrieval system. In this sense, document classification has its fixed position in information retrieval research from the very beginning. Nowadays renewed massive interest in document classification may be witnessed due to the appearance of large-scale digital libraries. (shrink)

Individual differences in mental accounting have rarely been studied, and empirical evidence regarding the relation between mental accounting and personality characteristics is scarce. The present paper reports three studies applying a Likert-type scale to assess the extent individuals engage in mental accounting practices. In each study, the five items of the measure loaded on a single dimension and had acceptable reliability, with a Cronbach’s α between.72 and.77. Study 1 (N = 165) regards the mental processing of prior losses in the (...) theater-ticket problem (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). Study 2 (N = 114) is based on prior work on income source effects (Fogel 1997) and analyzes mental accounting of prior gains. In both studies, individual differences in mental accounting moderated the effects of the experimental treatments. In an explorative survey conducted for Study 3 (N = 373), the extent of engaging in mental accounting was found to be positively correlated with being female, with conscientiousness, and financial literacy, and negatively related with education and non-planning impulsivity. Identification of individual differences and their correlates adds to existing evidence for some of the core assumptions of mental accounting theory. A practical implication of the findings is that providers of financial services must take individual differences into account when designing trainings and supportive tools for money management. (shrink)

In as far as every philosophy appears at a certain point in time it later inevitably becomes a historical fact. If its content is then to be recognizable, if it is to be reclaimed as philosophy in the present, then we ourselves must have a philosophical conception of history and, furthermore, a conception of philosophy's own historicity. Only since Kant has modern metaphysics expressly and methodically developed such a conception within its systematic claim to truth. Moreover, for the presentday philosophy (...) and its relationship to a completed metaphysics such a conception is indispensable - under the presupposition that the history of philosophy is to be taken seriously as philosophy. (shrink)

The auditory system is able to recognize auditory objects and is thought to form predictive models of them even though the acoustic information arriving at our ears is often imperfect, intermixed, or distorted. We investigated implicit regularity extraction for acoustically intact versus disrupted six-tone sound patterns via event-related potentials. In an exact-repetition condition, identical patterns were repeated; in two distorted-repetition conditions, one randomly chosen segment in each sound pattern was replaced either by white noise or by a wrong pitch. In (...) a roving-standard paradigm, sound patterns were repeated 1–12 times in a row before a new pattern occurred. The participants were not informed about the roving rule and had to detect rarely occurring loudness changes. Behavioral detectability of pattern changes was assessed in a subsequent behavioral task. Pattern changes elicited mismatch negativity and P3a, and were behaviorally detected above the chance level in all conditions, suggesting that the auditory system extracts regularities despite distortions in the acoustic input. However, MMN and P3a amplitude were decreased by distortions. At the level of MMN, both types of distortions caused similar impairments, suggesting that auditory regularity extraction is largely determined by the stimulus statistics of matching information. At the level of P3a, wrong-pitch distortions caused larger decreases than white-noise distortions. Wrong-pitch distortions likely prevented the engagement of restoration mechanisms and the segregation of disrupted from true pattern segments, causing stronger informational interference with the relevant pattern information. (shrink)

From time to time medical ethicists bemoan the loss of a religious perspective in medical ethics. The discipline had its origins in the thinking of explicitly religious thinkers such as Paul Ramsey and Joseph Fletcher. Furthermore, many of those who contributed to the early development of the discipline had training in theology. One thinks of Daniel Callahan, Richard McCormick, Albert Jonsen, Sam. Banks. As the discipline becomes more and more self-reflective, with attention being paid to methodological and conditional concerns, it (...) is only natural that the roots are due for a reexamination. The time has therefore come for some reassessment. The first steps here are taken in the form of a dialogue between the coauthors to clarify authentic contributions and weed out unauthentic ones. (shrink)

In many-valued logics with the unit interval as the set of truth values, from the standard negation and the product (or, more generally, from any strict Frank t-norm) all measurable logical functions can be derived, provided that also operations with countable arity are allowed. The question remained open whether there are other t-norms with this property or whether all strict t-norms possess this property. We give a full solution to this problem (in the case of strict t-norms), together with convenient (...) sufficient conditions. We list several families of strict t-norms having this property and provide also counterexamples (the Hamacher product is one of them). Finally, we discuss the consequences of these results for the characterization of tribes based on strict t-norms. (shrink)

This paper sets out to examine the integrity and professional standing of “Bioethics.” It argues that professions have certain responsibilities that start with setting criteria for and credentialing those that have met the criteria and goes on to ultimately have social responsibilities to the community. As it now stands we claim that Bioethics—while it certainly has achieved some progress in the way medicine has developed—has failed to become a profession and has to a large extent failed in its social responsibility. (...) We feel that Bioethics has to define itself, set criteria for membership in the profession, police itself and—above all—meet its social responsibility to become a profession meriting that name. (shrink)

Der Jesuit Erich Przywara (1889-1972) und Gertrud von le Fort (1876-1971) lernten sich Mitte der 1920-er Jahre kennen, zur Zeit der Konversion le Forts zum katholischen Glauben. Seither standen sie in einem durchgehenden, wenn auch losen Briefwechsel, vor allem in den beiden Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Die von Manfred Lochbrunner herausgegebene Korrespondenz ist das berührende Dokument einer freundschaftlichen Beziehung zwischen der angesehenen Dichterin und dem nicht minder bedeutenden Religionsphilosophen und Theologen mit eigenen dichterischen Ambitionen. In einem Einführungsessay werden (...) die wesentlichen Briefinhalte kurz vorgestellt. Anmerkungen kommentieren den Text der Briefe. Abgerundet wird die Edition durch drei biographische Exkurse zu nahestehenden Personen und Anhänge, etwa zu gegenseitigen Widmungen, sowie ein Literaturverzeichnis"-- Back cover. (shrink)

The conversation between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu draws on their extended conversation on efforts to link discordant temporal and spatial encounters with the idea of the university and how, more importantly, to care for the future of its educational responsibilities. While much of the debate on the university is focused on how it is affected by large-scale geopolitical shifts and the rapid expansion of technological resources, Hörl and Lalu bring into view a language of the university that holds (...) to its promise in the sources of a founding supplement that may yet exhibit the potential for guiding the university through turbulent times ahead. This is a call for a retracing of the emergence of the complex hegemony of the master signifier in university discourse, and the potential to supersede it by way of a re-articulation of the desire for a concept of freedom borne out of the emancipation of the 19th-century institution of slavery. (shrink)

The book, with its emphasis on the interaction of microstructures with the entire biosphere, ecosystems etc., and on how micro- and macrocosmos mutually create the conditions for their further evolution, provides a comprehensive framework for a deeper understanding of human creativity in a time of transition.

Various contributors to recent philosophy of mathematics havetaken Richard Dedekind to be the founder of structuralismin mathematics. In this paper I examine whether Dedekind did, in fact, hold structuralist views and, insofar as that is the case, how they relate to the main contemporary variants. In addition, I argue that his writings contain philosophical insights that are worth reexamining and reviving. The discussion focusses on Dedekind''s classic essay Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, supplemented by evidence from Stetigkeit und (...) irrationale Zahlen, his scientific correspondence, and his Nachlaß. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: For the Patient's Good: The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care. By Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma.

Discusses how the conscious self is created by the brain, explains brain structure, and explores the mind-body connection.

In the title essay, Erich Fromm uses the tools of psychoanalysis to examine the development of the dogma of Christ in the context of social history. The remaining essays examine psychological and cultural problems with keen insight and humanistic sympathies.

Guarded fragments of first-order logic were recently introduced by Andreka, van Benthem and Nemeti; they consist of relational first-order formulae whose quantifiers are appropriately relativized by atoms. These fragments are interesting because they extend in a natural way many propositional modal logics, because they have useful model-theoretic properties and especially because they are decidable classes that avoid the usual syntactic restrictions (on the arity of relation symbols, the quantifier pattern or the number of variables) of almost all other known decidable (...) fragments of first-order logic. Here, we investigate the computational complexity of these fragments. We prove that the satisfiability problems for the guarded fragment (GF) and the loosely guarded fragment (LGF) of first-order logic are complete for deterministic double exponential time. For the subfragments that have only a bounded number of variables or only relation symbols of bounded arity, satisfiability is EXPTIME-complete. We further establish a tree model property for both the guarded fragment and the loosely guarded fragment, and give a proof of the finite model property of the guarded fragment. It is also shown that some natural, modest extensions of the guarded fragments are undecidable. (shrink)

Explores the acquisition and use of knowledge for human purposes and the extent of our ability to shape the future through the design, regulation, and restructuring of the lives of human systems at all levels.