The concept of “auditor independence”—that the provider of assurance on financial information should be free of conflicting interests—is deeply embedded in the world’s capital markets. This paper examines stresses on the global model of Big Audit that call into question both the basis and the ongoing usefulness of auditor independence: The threats to the stability of the model, based on the dominance of the Big Four international accounting networks in providing audit services to the world’s large public companies. The balance (...) between benefits and detriments of the independence requirements, and standards that are difficult to articulate and enforce. The implications for the continued value of independent assurance emerging from the evolution in Big Data tools and analytics, including the structural constraints of regulation. A broad re-examination is called for, in aide of the design of a sustainable public-company assurance model that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Corporations have multiple stakeholder groups. One stakeholder group consists of undergraduate business students, who collectively constitute the future leadership of corporations. Given the so-called ethical and legal lapses that have occurred in the early 2000s in such companies as Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and Tyco, it is increasingly important to know the ethical perspectives of future business leaders so that their future behavior can be anticipated. This article reports on a survey of nearly 3,000 undergraduate business students from 58 universities (...) and colleges in 32 states regarding certain general ethics-related attitudes and the degree of ethicality these students possess. Survey findings are relatively consistent with those generally reported in the literature—female survey participants are slightly but significantly more ethically inclined than male survey participants, and survey participants who report being very religious are slightly but significantly more ethically inclined than survey participants who are less religious. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)

To borrow a by now worn out example from Bergmann, take a pair of colored spots in a visual field. Call them and. Suppose that is green while is red. According to Bergmann, we are presented with no less than ten entities in this perceptual occurrence, four of which are existents and six of which are subsistents. The existents break down into two kinds, i.e., simple properties and simple particulars. Green and red make up the properties, while the two things (...) that have these same qualities comprise the bare individuals. The subsistents include: two instances of the "relation" of exemplification, two instances of the "property" of universality, and two instances of the "property" of individuality. The quotes around 'property' and 'relation' indicate that the entities referred to in each case are not ordinary properties or relations. More positively, though perhaps roughly, universality and individuality are formal as opposed to material properties, while exemplification is a formal as opposed to a material relation. Notice just in passing that Bergmann's assay of this perceptual situation accords some kind of ontological status to at least some aspects of the world's form. Taking Wittgenstein's celebrated metaphor "Im Sachverhalt hangen die Gegenstande ineinander, wie die Glieder einer Kette" to mean that the world's form has no ontological status of any sort, Bergmann outspokenly puts himself in opposition to the author of Tractatus. (shrink)

Ce texte se veut une analyse critique de l'approche de Thomason quant à la logique déontique. Alors que l'auteur défend que celle-ci doit être formalisée dans le cadre des logiques temporelles, nous soutenons que la temporalité est implicite à l'obligation, et de fait que la logique déontique n'a pas a être traitée dans la cadre d'une logique temporelle. Nous présenterons d'abord la position de Thomason. Il sera question des exemples dont l'auteur se sert pour justifier son point de vue philosophique (...) et du modèle sémantique qu'il propose pour rendre compte de l'obligation. Il sera ensuite sujet d'une critique des exemples de l'auteur et de son modèle sémantique. (shrink)

While Erich Przywara’s philosophical theology, or theological philosophy, and especially his Analogia Entis has been the subject of some research, less is known about the broader cultural and political framework of his thought in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic and in the 1930s during the NS period. Here Przywara is presented in context of his unique religious, political and social milieu. His writings on social, religious and political issues, including his account of the analogia entis concept, are brought into (...) relationship with his context and some of his contemporaries. Przywara’s reflections on the Reich are analyzed and his engagement with the popular Volk concept is also addressed in connection with his anti-Semitism. (shrink)

BRICS has philosophical significance. It creates new pressure on cross-cultural skill. This is analysed here as requiring transduction: a variety of defeasible practical reasoning. This replaces a simplistic model of the relation between knowledge and action with a more realistic and contemporary model. The transduction format has utility in cross-cultural training.

Distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and true belief that is knowledge implies scepticism as regards facts. That is because it falsely reduces knowledge to mere true belief To remove the scepticism, it might be held that sense and referent are the same in both. But this over-correction makes the opposite mistake of reducing mere true belief to knowledge. It also implies either assimilating false belief to true belief or saying, counterintuitively, that the sense of (...) a belief varies with the truth-value of the belief The way out is to take the middle path of distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and identifying sense and referent in true belief that is knowledge. (shrink)

The latest volume in an internationally recognized annual lecture series (since 1978) devoted to increased awareness and understanding of the complex issues surrounding our basic value systems. Comprises seven lectures on: the Constitution; randomization in individual and social decisions; Greek ethics and moral theory; reform and revolt in current S. Africa; bureaucratic, technological imperatives and medicine; prisons; and travel (a piece by the Soviet born poet Joseph Brodsky). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The Philosophy of Nature does not begin, as we expect, with nature. Instead, Hegel describes the practical and theoretical approaches we make to nature as philosophers; that is, in thought and, metaphorically, with our teeth. This ledge on the climb into nature is often overlooked as we rush from the logic into space and time. There may be two reasons for this. The first is a natural expectation that a philosophy of nature begin by describing natural phenomena, not our approaches (...) to them. The second is that the terms ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’, familiar from the Logic and Philosophy of Spirit, may seem at first glance to be out of place here. Whatever the reason, these paragraphs have not been discussed at any length in the secondary literature. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 28 features lectures given by Bill Viola, Judy Illes, Brian Skyrms, Susan Wolf, David Miller, Annabel Patterson, and Howard Gardner.

In diesem Aufsatz werden die Veröffentlichungen des Jesuiten Erich Przywara und der sehr einflussreichen jesuitischen Zeitschrift Stimmen der Zeit aus den frühen 193oern Jahren und besonders aus dem Jahr 1933 analysiert. In diesem Zusammenhang antworte ich auch meinen Kritikern. Außerdem werden die Hintergründe und Quellen der spezifischen Form des Antisemitismus dargestellt, die in den Stimmen der Zeit vertreten wurde. Deutsche Jesuiten propagierten 1933 durchaus radikale Positionen in der Zeitschrift. In dem katholischen Blatt liest man u. a., dass die Juden dem (...) deutschen Volk mehr Schaden als Nutzen brächten. Es wurde damals auch die nordische Rasse als für Herrschaft besonders geeignet bezeichnet. Im letzten Teil dieses Aufsatzes werden Przywaras spätere Briefe an Carl Schmitt, den gläubigen antisemitischen deutschen Katholiken, analysiert. Sie zeigen, dass Przywara von dessen antidemokratischer politischer Theorie der 1930er Jahre zutiefst beeindruckt war und die Ideen des Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches sogar noch in der Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg verbreiten wollte. (shrink)

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.

Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796 Journal Volume Volume 20 Journal Issue Volume 20, Number 1. (shrink)