Essential Microeconomics is designed to help students deepen their understanding of the core theory of microeconomics. Unlike other texts, this book focuses on the most important ideas and does not attempt to be encyclopedic. Two-thirds of the textbook focuses on price theory. As well as taking a new look at standard equilibrium theory, there is extensive examination of equilibrium under uncertainty, the capital asset pricing model, and arbitrage pricing theory. Choice over time is given extensive coverage and includes a basic (...) introduction to control theory. The final third of the book, on game theory, provides a comprehensive introduction to models with asymmetric information. Topics such as auctions, signaling and mechanism design are made accessible to students who have a basic rather than a deep understanding of mathematics. Examples and diagrams are used to illustrate issues as well as formal derivations. (shrink)

Economists have always recognised that human endeavours are constrained by our limited and uncertain knowledge, but only recently has an accepted theory of uncertainty and information evolved. This theory has turned out to have surprisingly practical applications: for example in analysing stock market returns, in evaluating accident prevention measures, and in assessing patent and copyright laws. This book presents these intellectual advances in readable form for the first time. It unifies many important but partial results into a satisfying single picture, (...) making it clear how the economics of uncertainty and information generalises and extends standard economic analysis. Part One of the volume covers the economics of uncertainty: how each person adapts to a given fixed state of knowledge by making an optimal choice among the immediate 'terminal' actions available. These choices in turn determine the overall market equilibrium reflecting the social distribution of risk bearing. In Part Two, covering the economics of information, the state of knowledge is no longer held fixed. Instead, individuals can to a greater or lesser extent overcome their ignorance by 'informational' actions. The text also addresses at appropriate points many specific topics such as insurance, the Capital Asset Pricing model, auctions, deterrence of entry, and research and invention. (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. (...) A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

We wish to give a precise formulation of the intuitive concept: The degree to which the known facts support a given hypothesis.

This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Includes chapters on scientific language, mathematics, probability, credibility and induction, scientific explanations, life, and science and values.

A distinctive feature of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work after 1930 was his turn to a conception of philosophy as a form of social inquiry, John G. Gunnell argues, and Thomas Kuhn's approach to the philosophy of science exemplified this conception. In this book, Gunnell shows how these philosophers address foundational issues in the social and human sciences, particularly the vision of social inquiry as an interpretive endeavor and the distinctive cognitive and practical relationship between social inquiry and its subject matter. (...) Gunnell speaks directly to philosophers and practitioners of the social and human sciences. He tackles the demarcation between natural and social science; the nature of social phenomena; the concept and method of interpretation; the relationship between language and thought; the problem of knowledge of other minds; and the character of descriptive and normative judgments about practices that are the object of inquiry. Though Wittgenstein and Kuhn are often criticized as initiating a modern descent into relativism, this book shows that the true effect of their work was to undermine the basic assumptions of contemporary social and human science practice. It also problematized the authority of philosophy and other forms of social inquiry to specify the criteria for judging such matters as truth and justice. When Wittgenstein stated that "philosophy leaves everything as it is," he did not mean that philosophy would be left as it was or that philosophy would have no impact on what it studied, but rather that the activity of inquiry did not, simply by virtue of its performance, transform the object of inquiry. (shrink)

Over the past two decades an increasing number of research papers have signalled growing interest in more responsible, sustainable and ethical modes of management education. This systematic literature review of peer-reviewed publications on, and allied to, the concept of responsible management learning and education confirms that scholarly interest in the topic has accelerated over the last decade. Rather than assuming that RMLE is one thing, however, this review proposes that the literature on responsible management education and learning can be divided (...) into four distinct categories: Teaching Responsible Management; Organizing for Responsible Education; Responsible Individual Learning, and; Responsible Organizational Learning. Although the literature on RMLE has grown, work on how managers learn responsible management in organizational or workplace settings, particularly without the intervention of external educational providers, is minimal. The Special Issue of the Journal of Business Ethics is the first to address this significant lacuna. The vast majority of published peer-reviewed research is related to organizational provider-centric organizing for responsible management education. Each category is explored and the implications of organizing the literature this way for the field of RMLE are discussed. Finally, an agenda for future research and theory development on RMLE is proposed. (shrink)

MIT Press, 1999 Review by Paul Bohan Broderick, Ph.D. on May 26th 2002 Volume: 6, Number: 21.

This book is an exploration of the relationship between philosophy and political inquiry. John G. Gunnell is seeking to explain certain dimensions of how philosophy has influenced political science and political theory but also how these latter fields have understood and deployed philosophy. When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual authority what they extract is often selective and in the service of some prior agenda. The philosophers whose work he discusses have all (...) in various degrees been objects of the conversation of political theory, but close acquaintance with that work is often limited and derivative. Gunnell's goal is to initiate a more genuine "conversation" with certain philosophers and political theorists. (shrink)

The problem of the direction of electromagnetic time, i.e., the complete dominance of retarded electromagnetic radiation over advanced radiation in the universe, is considered in the context of a generalized form of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in an open expanding universe with a singularity atT=0. It is shown that the application of a four-vector reflection boundary condition at the singularity leads to the observed dominance of retarded radiation; it also clarifies the role of advanced and retarded waves in the emission (...) of very weakly absorbed radiation such as neutrinos. (shrink)

All organizations have gray areas where the border between right and wrong behavior is blurred, but where a major part of organizational decision-making takes place. While gray areas can be sources of problems for organizations, they also have benefits. The author proposes that gray areas are functional in organizations. Gray areas become problematic when the process for dealing with them is flawed, when gatekeeper managers see themselves as more ethical than their peers, and when leaders, by their own inattention, inaction, (...) and poor modeling, minimize the importance of building a moral community by delegating gray area issues to second-tier administrators. Gray areas provide wiggle room in coping with ethical dilemmas in organizations. (shrink)

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby playing (...) a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms? (shrink)

This rich collection will introduce students of philosophy and politics to the contemporary critical literature on the classical social contract political thinkers Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . A dozen essays and book excerpts have been selected to guide students through the texts and to introduce them to current scholarly controversies surrounding the contractarian political theories of these three thinkers.

There has been substantial growth of interest in sustainability in business, management and organisational studies in recent years. This article applies Oswick’s :15–25, 2009) method of bibliometric research to ascertain how this growth has been reflected in scholarly publishing, particularly as it relates to business and management education over the 20 years 1994–2013. The research has found that sustainability as a general topic in business and management studies, as evidenced by scholarly publishing, has accelerated rapidly both in terms of items (...) published and cited. In the mid-2000s, the emphasis of books published in this area began to change from one which advocated ‘sustainable development’ to one which viewed sustainability as a management practice which could help businesses and society simultaneously. The literature on sustainability within the field of management and business education has been smaller, but has enjoyed a similar growth rate which accelerated sharply in the most recent 5 years of the dataset. Most of the scholarly, peer-reviewed articles analysed tend to advocate the inclusion of sustainability on business school curricula, or to demonstrate the various ways in which faculty have integrated sustainability-related principles in their teaching. A smaller amount of research has been undertaken on the learning experiences of the ‘recipients’ of these approaches. There is evidence of an extensive variety of approaches used by educators, but the most significant research need which presented is for more empirically driven studies on how and why business and management students engage with the principles of sustainability. (shrink)

Western Philosophy: An Anthology provides the most comprehensive and authoritative survey of the Western philosophical tradition from ancient Greece to the leading philosophers of today. Features substantial and carefully chosen excerpts from all the greats of philosophy, arranged thematically and chronologically Readings are introduced and linked together by a lucid philosophical commentary which guides the reader through the key arguments Embraces all the major subfields of philosophy: theory of knowledge and metaphysics, philosophy of mind, religion and science, moral philosophy (theoretical (...) and applied), political theory, and aesthetics Updated edition now includes additional contemporary readings in each section Augmented by two completely new sections on logic and language, and philosophy and the meaning of life. (shrink)

The author discusses the effects of contraception, which have borne out the predictions of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae: the explosion of out-of-wedlock births, lack of respect for women, STD's, HIV/AIDS, etc. The overpopulation claims that fed the acceptance and promotion of contraception have been discredited by demographers; now the social costs of underpopulation are increasingly apparent. Acceptance of contraception has now also led to an embracing of morally objectionable technologies like cloning. This is the latest consequence of the (...) separation of sex and reproduction signaled by the acceptance of contraception. (shrink)

There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of ''perspectivalness.'' In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the creation of consciousness from neural activity. It (...) guides the development of what is termed the ''Central Representation,'' which is supposed to be present in all mammals and extended in humans to support self-consciousness as well as phenomenal consciousness. Experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for the existence of the central representation are presented, which relates the extra component to specific buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, acting as attentional coordinators on the spatial maps making up the central representation. The article closes with a discussion of various open questions. (shrink)

An exploration is given of neural network features now being uncovered in cortical processing which begins to go a little way to help bridge the ''Explanatory Gap'' between phenomenal consciousness and correlated brain activity. A survey of properties suggested as being possessed by phenomenal consciousness leads to a set of criteria to be required of the correlated neural activity. Various neural styles of processing are reviewed and those fitting the criteria are selected for further analysis. One particular processing style, in (...) which semiautonomous and long-lasting cortical activity ''bubbles'' are created by input, is selected as being the most appropriate. Further experimental criteria are used to help narrow the possible neural styles involved. This leads to a class of neural models underpinning phenomenal consciousness and to a related set of testable predictions. (shrink)

The dominant unspoken philosophical basis of medical care in the United States is a form of Cartesian reductionism that views the body as a machine and medical professionals as technicians whose job is to repair that machine. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for an alternative philosophy of medicine based on the concept of healing relationships between clinicians and patients. This is accomplished first by exploring the ethical and philosophical work of Pellegrino and Thomasma and then by connecting (...) Martin Buber's philosophical work on the nature of relationships to an empirically derived model of the medical healing relationship. The Healing Relationship Model was developed by the authors through qualitative analysis of interviews of physicians and patients. Clinician-patient healing relationships are a special form of what Buber calls I-Thou relationships, characterized by dialog and mutuality, but a mutuality limited by the inherent asymmetry of the clinician-patient relationship. The Healing Relationship Model identifies three processes necessary for such relationships to develop and be sustained: Valuing, Appreciating Power and Abiding. We explore in detail how these processes, as well as other components of the model resonate with Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. The resulting combined conceptual model illuminates the wholeness underlying the dual roles of clinicians as healers and providers of technical biomedicine. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that health care should be focused on healing, with I-Thou relationships at its core. (shrink)

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, (...) prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry? (shrink)

Research on ethical leadership generally falls into two categories: one celebrates individual leaders and their ‘authentic’ personalities and virtuous stewardship of organizations; the other decries toxic leaders or individuals in positions of power who exhibit ‘dark’ personality traits or dubious morals. Somewhere between these extremes, leadership is ‘done’ by imperfect human beings who try to avoid violating their own ethical standards while at the same time navigating the realities of social and organizational life. This paper discusses the concept of ‘Moral (...) Recovery’ as an ethical leadership process that begins in moral failure, but enables eventual personal, organizational, and social change. It builds on the concept of ‘Moral Injury’ from the work of the psychiatrist Johnathan Shay and refers to the experiences of armed service personnel traumatized by experiences where either they, or their leaders, violated their own values. ‘Morally injured’ parties recover their sense of wellbeing through engaging with restorative communal actions which address the social causes of unethical practices. The process of Moral Recovery requires restorative communal actions which address the social causes of unethical practices. This paper will outline the concept of ‘Moral Recovery’ as a form of practical ethical leadership and change. It will illustrate its relevance to ethical leadership practice with reference to one high-profile case; Ray Anderson of Interface. As this paper is primarily conceptual, avenues for future research are identified, and implications for teaching practice are discussed. (shrink)