Total Quality Management (TQM) is an overall management philosophy that includes a set of principles whose application is increasing. In fact, the business world and public institutions, such as hospitals, universities or city councils, are implementing quality programs. However, despite the wide diffusion of TQM, the success rate of this type of initiative is limited and the results, heterogeneous. Academics and professionals are therefore trying to identify the keys that explain the success or failure of this kind of initiative. Different (...) explanations have been given, but most of the literature agrees that managerial commitment, implication and leadership are indispensable elements in a successful implementation of TQM.Nevertheless, a study on the specialised literature shows a terminological confusion between managerial commitment and managerial leadership. Is it the same to have a committed manager in the implementation process as to have a leader of the implementation process? The author of this paper defends the thesis that "commitment" and "leadership" are not synonymous, and states that only managerial leadership is able to promote and sustain profound organisational changes. (shrink)

This paper defends views like rule consequentialism by distinguishing between two sorts of ideal world objections. It aims to show that one of those sorts of objections is question-begging. Its success would open up a path forward for such views.

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long-term project titled “Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád.” Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present-day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: “What Machiavelli's Prince is (...) to would-be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms,” which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are “open and subject to further development,” Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply “creative imagination” to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. “The crisis for democracy today,” Perl argues, “is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose.” Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self-government. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue S2, Page 65-67, September 2023.

Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. By Arthur Green xi + 226 pp. $35 cloth. Mystic Tales From the Zohar. Translated and edited by Aryeh Wineman 161 pp. $12.95 paper. Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary. By Janet Gyatso xxiii + 360 pp. $39.50 cloth.

This paper shows how to formulate moral error theories given a contextualist semantics like the one that Angelika Kratzer pioneered, answering the concerns that Christine Tiefensee developed.

The classic “retorsion” argument that any claim that all thought is relative is a self-refuting dialectical contradiction not only decisively refutes relativism but also demonstrates the presence of absolute truth in all thinking as its implicit enabling condition. In Augustine’s version, this takes the form of showing that truth itself, which Augustine identifies as God, is the “light of minds,” found within the soul by thought’s self-reflexive discovery of the ever-present condition for its own acts of judgment. In recent philosophy (...) this argument is taken up in the transcendental Thomism of Pierre Scheuer, S.J., and, with important clarifying distinctions, in the objective idealism of Vittorio Hösle. Thomas Nagel uses the same argument to reach what amounts to the same conclusion, though he does not call this conclusion ‘God.’ This concurrence indicates that there is no third alternative between complete nihilism and divinity as conceived by Augustine, Scheuer, and Hösle. (shrink)

En este estudio se presentan las líneas directrices de una investigación que se propone analizar el sentido y el significado que se otorga a los conceptos de “bien común” e “interés general” en la retórica de los poderes públicos de nuestro tiempo. A continuación, trata de dar respuesta al interrogante de si ambos conceptos son perfectamente intercambiables en el debate público o, por el contrario, estamos ante conceptos que proceden de presupuestos antagónicos.

In a monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism, the journal's editor decontextualizes and then recontextualizes the medieval iconographic trope of Ecclesia and Synagoga in an effort to make plausible a news story about Pope Francis that received little coverage in the press. During 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate, Francis paid a surprise visit to a new statue in the United States, “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, as a (...) sign of his endorsement of its radical reconsideration of a trope long associated with anti-Jewish sentiment in the Catholic Church. This article, which begins with a detailed analysis of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's essay on the Nostra Aetate treatise De Iudaeis, deals primarily with twelfth- and thirteenth-century uses of the iconography. Special attention is paid to the Anagogical Window of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and to the Ecclesia, Synagoga, and King Solomon statues on the south facade of Strasbourg Cathedral, in both of which is found previously overlooked evidence of philo-Semitic, rather than anti-Semitic, thinking on the part of the designers. The article concludes that contextualist scholars of medieval art have found what they expected to find and ignored contrary indications. (shrink)

To write a history “from antiquity to the present” of classical art or literature (or, worst of all, classicism) is the ultimate nightmare aspiration for a scholar whose colleagues are attentive methodologists. The product, when there is one (which I add because the aspiration can yield paralysis), is always in part an apologetic treatise on historical method. Professor Vout—of Christ's College, Cambridge—apologizes with the first word of her subtitle, A, which stresses that many differing histories may be as valid as (...) her own. The next two words, Life History, imply that her study is unauthorized, conjectural, a bit personal or informal, and reliant to an extent on unconfirmable stories. Her book, she tells readers, is of necessity an arrangement of “fragments” and “a mapping not of facts, but of ways in which Greek and Roman artifacts experience history.” She sets down, moreover, as a rule that “classical” is not “a self-standing category: it is always relational” (which historians of the novel have been telling us for many decades about “realism”).We might expect the result of Vout's axioms to be evenhanded diffidence when treating definitions of the classical, and indeed she entertains even the idea of Jeff Koons—maker of Balloon Venus (Orange) and Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)—as a classical sculptor. There is, however, one approach that she dismisses out of hand: the obsession of classical humanism with authenticity and its renascence. She objects especially to research into the original conditions of objects and to the application of increasingly intrusive methods of restoring them. As she writes, “ ‘Real knowledge’ comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. ‘Real knowledge’ comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them.”What Vout, as a critic of humanism, means by dirt is patina—the residue, interesting and sometimes beautiful in itself, of the use and misuse of objects. Dirt is a word that would occur to a humanist art historian when examining the patina of a Greek or Roman object. Vout's use of the word is a parodic expression of reverse snobbery. When studying changes, whether mistakes or enhancements, in a Greek or Roman document, a humanist literary historian would speak of corruption and edit the corrupt text by means of processes that humanist editors invented and perfected. Despite the humanists’ devotion to the recovery of classical learning, however, once a Renaissance edition of a manuscript was in print, the original, however rare, was often destroyed or lost. In effect, the work was reborn, better than new. Rebirth is not the same as preservation: though both are perhaps conservative (or better, in Ulysses's words, “rere regardant”), a renascence or a resurrection is cataclysmic.The humanist approach to the past can appear unlovable and is certainly arrogant, but it can also inspire awe and gratitude. The work of Michelangelo depended on it, and so (more to the point) did Martin Luther's. Vout's attitude toward dirt (patina, corruption, misprision, insertions, recontextualizations, bowdlerizations, misappropriations, translocations) resembles that of Catholic theologians to the depositum fidei. Restoring the original conditions of the Christian church involved methods of research learned from Renaissance humanists and the removal, often destructive, of the “deposit” or residue or patina that adhered to, distorted, discolored, and obscured the conditions of the “primitive church.” A Roman Catholic may well dislike the processes that Luther set in motion, but imagine a scholarly history of Christianity that mentioned Protestantism only to regret its existence.Still, Vout's reasoning, it seems to me, is more sophisticated in its defense of dirt and in its criticism of restoration than any offered against the Protestants’ reasoning during the Counter-Reformation. Consider, for instance, this inspiring passage: “When the curators at the Munich Glyptothek removed Thorwaldsen's restorations from the Aegina pediments, they did not so much take them back to a pristine state as out of the feedback loop, rendering them damaged goods. It was not a restriction of avenues or a change of direction that was being enacted here, but a refusal to speak the language, or rather an insistence that the only language worth speaking was an academic [humanist, restorationist] one.... In 2011, the Glyptothek marked the two hundredth year of the pediments’ discovery by putting new versions of Thorvaldsen's restored figures on display. They had relearned the lingo. For art to be ‘classical,’ it has to know its place in the discourse.” May lingo and feedback loop have successful careers in the lexicon of classical scholarship. “Far from producing a nostalgic narrative,” as Vout informs us, “the lessons learned from looking back ensure that we keep traveling.”. (shrink)

In this brief introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” the journal’s editor asks why Rorty was dependent on Thomas Kuhn, rather than Paul Feyerabend or the then-rising stars of “science studies” (such as Bruno Latour), for science-centered arguments to support his own philosophical neopragmatism. The editor cites a letter from Rorty sent to him in the early 1990s, suggesting that the differences between Feyerabend and himself were temperamental more than philosophical. Rorty enjoyed (...) referring to himself and others like him as “we atheists,” by which he seems to have meant “those of us repelled by extravagant or overheated claims and absolutes.” His tendency was thus to pull back in what might seem to be bored alarm from treatments of science as superior, perilous, or in any essential way different from other forms of intellectual discourse. Rorty’s understanding of these approaches to science as temperamentally religious appears lately to have been vindicated by the emergence of the primeval goddess “Gaia” in the rhetoric of science studies. (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, responds to a piece by Dionigi Albera that, in turn, responds to Jeffrey Perl’s introduction, published in May 2017, to CK’s multipart symposium on xenophilia. Albera argues that the ambivalence that Perl observes in many instances of xenophilia needs genealogical explanation, and Albera turns for this purpose to analysis of the relationship between Aphrodite and Ares in Greco-Roman mythology. In the present piece, Perl extends that exploration in analysis of a series of (...) images in which the gods of love and war, along with their illegimate children Eros and Phobos, are given comical and often vulgar treatment by artists ranging from Botticelli and Mantegna, in the fifteenth century; to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, in the sixteenth; to Rubens, Jan Bruegel the Elder, and Poussin, in the seventeenth; to Lagrenée, in the eighteenth; to David and Guillemot, in the nineteenth; to Jeff Koons in our own day. Perl and Albera agree with these artists that the antithetical pair, Aphrodite and Ares, have a fully logical, if furtive relationship in mythology, iconography, and psychology. The idealization to which the comic images respond—that when warriors make love, there is no warfare—is laughed, again and again, out of court. But Perl’s concern, unlike Albera’s, is that this cynicism on the part of artists and advanced intellectuals means that, despite their ostensible preference for peace over conflict, they will always find cause to undermine every effort to make way for peace. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: God beyond being Creation as theophany Goodness, beauty, and love Evil Hierarchy Knowledge Symbolism Christological consummation.

Based on detailed descriptions of human–machine ensembles, this article explores how humans and machines work together to see specific things and unsee others, and how they come to co-configure one another. For seeing is not an automated function; whether one is a human or a machine, vision is gradually enskilled and mutually co-constituted. The analysis intersects three different ways of human–machine seeing to shed further light on the workings of each one: an airport, where facial recognition algorithms collaborate with border (...) guards to grant passage to particular travellers and not to others; a luggage-scanning system, where potential security threats are assessed by a complex of X-rays and human intro-spection; and a hospital operating room, where human–machinic surgical robots find their way and operate on the insides of human bodies, touching only by seeing. In these examples, human and machine ways of seeing merge together, seeing in particular apparatuses of material, political, organisational, economic and fleshy components. The article analyses the practical work of human–machinic collaboration and explores how the different material and social constituents, not necessarily always working from the same agenda, come to configure what can be seen and sensed and what cannot. (shrink)

Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through non-ethical reasoning” [2009, 1]). (...) This paper shows that error theorists can resist this charge if they adopt a particular understanding of the presuppositions of moral discourse. (shrink)

In the last homily he gave before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described modern life as ruled by a “dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely” of satisfying “the desires of one’s own ego.” An eminent scholar familiar with the centuries-old debates over relativism, Ratzinger chose to oversimplify or even caricature a philosophical approach of great sophistication and antiquity. His homily depicts the relativist as someone blown about “by every (...) wind of doctrine,” whereas the relativist sticks firmly to one argument—that human knowledge is not absolute. Gathering prominent intellectuals from disciplines most relevant to the controversy—ethics, theology, political theory, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, epistemology, philosophy of science, and classics—this special double issue of _Common Knowledge_ contests Ratzinger’s denunciation of relativism. One essay relates the arguments of Ratzinger to those of two other German scholars—the conservative political theorist Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde and the liberal philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas—since all three men assume that social order depends on the existence of doctrinal authority. The contributors here argue for an intellectual and social life free of the desire for an “infantilizing” authority. One proposes that the Christian god is a relativist who prefers limitation and ambiguity; another, initially in agreement with Ratzinger about the danger relativism poses to faith and morals, then argues that this danger is what makes relativism valuable. The issue closes with the first English translation of an extract from a book on Catholic-Jewish relations by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, one of the Catholic Church’s most progressive figures. _Contributors_. David Bloor, Daniel Boyarin, Mary Baine Campbell, Lorraine Daston, Arnold I. Davidson, John Forrester, Kenneth J. Gergen, Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Julia Kristeva, Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, Christopher Norris, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Richard Shusterman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jeffrey Stout, Gianni Vattimo. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis, that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take (...) precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions. (shrink)

This essay, which is the editor's introduction to part 1 of a multipart symposium on quietism, also constitutes his call for symposium papers. The symposium is meant be comprehensive. It is described as political and broadly cultural as well as religious, and in religious terms is said to cover not only the Catholic and Protestant quietisms (most properly so called) of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also the proto-quietisms of the medieval Western church and reputedly quietist aspects of (...) the Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, early Hasidic, Shi'ite, Jain and other Indic, Taoist, and Zen religious traditions. This introduction emphasizes the secular approaches, mostly antipolitical or postphilosophical, that wear the adjective “quietist” metaphorically, including the postmodern currents that Martha Nussbaum has named “hip quietism” and the “minimalist” philosophical version developed by Wittgenstein and some of his successors, notably Richard Rorty. This introduction concludes with attention to Rorty's late essay “Naturalism and Quietism,” then with a dedication of the entire symposium to Rorty's memory. (shrink)

Compilation of articles originally published in Common knowledge.