Abstract Along with China’s stunning economic growth, marketing has become a multi-billion dollar business, afflicted by a plethora of marketing scandals. However, little attention has been paid, until now, to a more systematic approach to marketing ethics in China. This essay attempts to provide a broad and timely, but far from complete, view on marketing issues in China. It uses four ethical guidelines which capture the fundamental features particularly relevant to marketing activities: practicing honest communication; enhancing human capabilities; fostering creative (...) intercultural diversity; and promoting sustainable growth and eco-efficiency. These guidelines are then elucidated with 12 positive and negative cases of Chinese and non-Chinese companies. By combining guidelines with case studies, it is hoped that ethical challenges for marketing in China will be discerned in a more systematic and comprehensible fashion. The article concludes by indicating several perspectives for further research. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s13520-011-0014-0 Authors Georges Enderle, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA Qibin Niu, School of Business Administration, China University of Petroleum, Changping, Beijing, People’s Republic of China Journal Asian Journal of Business Ethics Online ISSN 2210-6731 Print ISSN 2210-6723. (shrink)

This richly complex book, one of the most challenging and rewarding works of twentie -century literature, is generally considered Gurdjieff's masterpiece.

Pessimisme et Individualisme vaut la lecture parce qu'on y trouve réexposée la thématique classique de son auteur : le corps fournit la grande raison ; tout est affaire de sensibilité ; la métaphysique procède de la physiologie ; l'émotivité nourrit la théorie ; le social vit de la négation des individualités ; la résistance des individualités toujours en péril est nécessaire, pour autant, elle est condamnée à l'échec car le collectif triomphe en permanence : l'héroïsme suppose de ne pas se (...) soumettre, de s'insoumettre, de refuser ; la tâche du philosophe consiste, autant que faire se peut, à rendre la vie possible loin des entreprises grégaires. Michel ONFRAY. (shrink)

I argue that, pace Chomsky (2000, 2003), standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking talk of representations seriously, in particular, to recognizing that the “of x” clause that invariably follows “representation” is a way of specifying that representation’s intentional content. One reason to insist upon intentional content in such cases is that the “x” in “of x” may not exist (as in "of Zeus"). This issue is especially relevant to linguistics since, recapitulating considerations raised by many linguists, I (...) go on to argue that most of the SLEs themselves seldom, if ever exist: it is doubtful there are many, if any, tokens of them in space and time; indeed, their existence is by and large inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. All that linguistic theory requires to be real in this regard are the representations, presumably entokened in people’s brains, understood, however, in terms of their intentional contents. (shrink)

This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his (...) idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. (shrink)

One would have thought that Fodor's justly famous computational views about the mind and his covariation approaches to content owed a lot to the twentieth century that he now reviles. On the other hand, a number of lines he pursues in the target article make one wonder whether he hasn’t perhaps changed his mind about those famous views. Specifically, I argue that his own theory of content is open to the very same objections he raises against ‘sorting’ theories, and that (...) the supposed circularity in implicit definitions of logical particles can easily be avoided by the very functional/computational definitions that he fathered decades ago. Fodor's rejection here of sorting and implicit definition does make one worry that he is now opting for what seems the only atomistic alternative that would seem to be left, the first‐person meaning mysticism of the very Cartesian sort he now claims to favor, but from which I would have thought twentieth century role and discrimination views were a welcome relief. Despite all these worries, however, I concede that one could probably do worse than assume for the nonce that meaning is atomic, or, anyway, unanalyzed, and get on with investigating the mind on that basis—but keeping the options open. (shrink)

C'est dans l'esprit des travaux d'Octave Hamelin que se situent ces Etudes de philosophie grecque: l'activite propre de l'historien de la philosophie s'y manifeste comme une reconstruction des pensees du dedans, a partir d'une minutieuse preparation historique. Ces essais donnent une idee assez precise de l'ampleur des travaux de Georges Rodier dans le domaine de la philosophie grecque: le volume s'ouvre en effet sur une etude approfondie de la figure emblematique qu'est Socrate, envisage ensuite de maniere chronologique certains aspects (...) des pensees d'Antisthene, de Platon, d'Aristote et du systeme stoicien, avant de s'achever sur une etude de la pensee de Plotin, notamment dans la perspective singuliere de son influence dans la genese du systeme leibnizien. C'est ainsi que des questions aussi determinantes que celles de la nature et de l'evolution de la dialectique platonicienne, des preuves de l'immortalite de l'ame dans le Phedon, de la composition de la Physique d'Aristote, de la notion de substance dans la Metaphysique se trouvent ici abordees et jointes a des exposes argumentes de la morale aristotelicienne ou stoicienne. (shrink)

“Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerations of value not essentially involved in (...) the natural sciences. Thus, according to Normativism, whether or not someone thinks that fish sleep, or even can represent fish at all, depends upon making a judgment about the person’s goodness or rationality, of a sort that would not be involved in merely determining whether or not fish in fact sleep. (shrink)

Dans Les Métamorphoses du cercle, ouvrage incontournable de l'histoire des idées, Georges Poulet propose une analyse lumineuse et pénétrante des variations innombrables de la figure du cercle à travers les penseurs et poètes depuis la Renaissance. Le cercle apparaît alors comme une métaphore fondamentale qui de tout temps servit aux hommes à penser le inonde et la vie tout court. Sa simplicité et sa perfection en font la première de ces formes privilégiées qui se retrouvent au fond de toutes (...) les croyances et qui servent de principe de structure à tous les esprits. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Chomsky's Commitment to CRTT Prospects and Problems of CRTT Technical Notions? Does Chomsky Need Intentionality? Chomsky's Dilemma.

According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying error is (...) a failure to appreciate the important shift of the explanatory locus in modern linguistics, from external objects to internal conceptions. I go on to show how (i) pace Devitt, this shift is entirely compatible with there being conventional aspects to language, and also serves to distinguish the ease of natural language from the waggle dance of the bees; and (ii) pace Barber and Smith, it is compatible with an appearance / reality distinction, and with reliance on testimony in epistemology. I conclude with further arguments about why, pace Collins and Matthews, intentionality is a crucial feature of linguistic explanation, even if it is ultimately spelt out largely in terms of computational role. (shrink)

I live — if I choose to see things this way- — among a curious race that sees earth, its chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, ...

This paper is a personal dialogue of maneuvering the landscape of scholarship in the United States as a nurse faculty. The principal thesis of this paper is that a discursive shift from margins to mainstream literature has occurred within nursing discourse during the past 20 years as the result of a growing body of work by nurse philosophers. I utilize my own work in nursing philosophy as an exemplar and provide a narrative situated in a feminist‐critical paradigm. This paper: (1) (...) presents a historical background through a critical‐feminist lens of the discursive shift using my own work and lived experiences as exemplars; (2) examines a contemporary mainstream ‘authoritative’ text as an exemplar of this discursive shift and (3) proposes both potential positive intersections and threats in the future development of nursing philosophy resulting from this discursive shift. (shrink)

David Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_ and _Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_ are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. _Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction_ presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, (...) _Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics_ is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

La notion de personne connaît deux principaux domaines d’application linguistiques : un domaine grammatical, celui de la catégorie grammaticale de la personne (1re, 2e et 3e personnes) et un domaine sémantique, celui du lexique, où le nom personne sert à désigner un individu de l’espèce humaine. Les deux se trouvent reliés par le fait que les deux premières personnes « grammaticales » du singulier je et tu ne peuvent être que des personnes « sémantiques ». Mais de quelles « personnes»s’agit-il? (...) Autrement dit, qui est je? Qui est tu? Qui est il / elle? Le but de notre article est de montrer que la réponse énonciative classique en termes de locuteur et d’interlocuteur (ou d’allocutaire) s’avère insuffisante et que, pour expliquer leur fonctionnement, il faut prendre en compte leur rôle dans l’énoncé, leur caractère de réflexif d’énonciation (token-reflexive) et la subjectivité (pensée de se) inhérente à je. (shrink)

Globalization is a major challenge not only for marketing, but also for marketing ethics. Is it possible to delineate a conceptual framework that helps identify some major issues in this unchartered field? This paper assumes that the development of such a framework needs both serious reflection on the very concept of marketing and a thorough exploration of universal ethical values. Among a number of competing concepts of marketing, those concepts seem preferable which go beyond a merely 'instru mental' or 'value (...) free' understanding of marketing and are open to ethical questions. As for universal ethical values, it is proposed to start from four broad areas marketing is involved in: communication, people, culture and nature; and to explore major global reports and declarations (which reflect a certain global consensus) for ethical guidance. Four guidelines are identified. Furthermore, an attempt is made to combine the insights from the conceptual discussion of marketing with the ethical guidelines in order to develop 'mid-level principles' for international marketing ethics, which are illustrated by a few examples. (shrink)