This survey report is a follow-up to the survey done by the Center for Business Ethics in 1984/85 which was published in the Journal for Business Ethics under the title of 'Are Corporations Institutionalizing Ethics?' (Volume 5, 1986, pp. 85-91). This 1989/90 survey was again sent to Fortune 1000 industrial and service companies to find out what they have done to build ethical values into their organizations. It reveals some interesting comparisons with the 1984/85 survey with regard to expanding efforts, (...) objectives, progress, and methods of implementation, along with some new information on their perception of public pressure for ethics programs and the need for ethics education. The survey shows where some progress in building ethics into corporations seems to be occurring and where much more work needs to be done. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Experience in Locke and Hume JOHN W. YOLTON THE EMPIRICISTPROGRAM has been designed to show that all conscious experience "comes from" unconscious encounters with the environment, and that all intellectual contents (concepts, ideas) derive from some conscious experiential component. Some empiricists, but not all, have also argued that experience reports about the world. A strict empiricism would have to reject this latter claim, as Hume (...) did, although even to consider the possibility of knowledge being related to an external world is to operate on a reflective level, to seek to make sense of experience. The distinction between an account of the nature of experience--its structure, relations, and contents-and explanations of experience--its causal antecedents, its reference--is an important one. The phrase "the concept of experience" refers to the use made of some account of experience. The concept of experience need not be restricted to the experiential contents. Thus, Locke sought to show how experience is of the world, Hume tried to show how experience restricts our valid conceptual contents to certain sorts of ideas, eliminating others. Any account of experience will already be a conceptualization of experience: it must be made from the reflective level. But the account need be no more than a careful record of how the organism comes to the conscious level. Of course, such an account cannot be a straightforward description, since we cannot directly observe all of the processes operating in the production of awareness. The psychology of awareness is forced to extrapolate and conjecture. Nevertheless, we can still distinguish the psychological or descriptive account of experience from the metaphysical use made of that account. It is my purpose here to explore the accounts given and the uses made of experience by two representative empiricists, that is, by philosophers whom we look upon as advancing the empiricist metaphysic of experience. Locke's Derivation o[ Ideas From Experience Locke claimed that all mental contents come from two sources, sensory experience of the world and introspective awareness of our mental processes. The program of Book II of his Essay was to exemplify, by reference to a [53] 54 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY number of different ideas and concepts, this derivation of our mental contents. The counter claim for Locke was innatism, the view held by many of his contemporaries and refuted in the first book of his Essay. In order to appreciate what Locke's alternative to innatism was, we must try to discover what the program of derivation of ideas amounts to in his epistemology and what precisely he understood by the term "experience." We must first note that he offers the program of derivation in conjunction with a complex theory of mental operations. H. H. Price has remarked that it is "historically false that the empiricist thought the human mind passive. It would be more just to criticize them for making it more active than it can possibly be.''1 Mental processes play a most active and decisive role in the genesis of all ideas in Locke's account. In the case of simple ideas of sense even, the mind must be attentive to what the senses report, else that report will go unrecorded, or be recorded only at the neural level (II, I, #6, #8, and II, IX, #3). Locke frequently draws the distinction between mental contents or processes and physical processes. In the "Epistle to the Reader," where he defines "idea," he is careful to distinguish idea from the sound we "use as a sign of it." In I, I, #2 he draws a distinction between the "physical consideration of the mind" and the non-physical consideration, although he does not have a name for the latter. He also speaks there of "sensations by our organs" and "ideas in our understanding." Locke disclaimed any intention of going into the physical account of sensation. He simply accepted the current corpuscular theory. But although he is not always as precise as we would be about the physical and physiological levels of encounter, in distinction from the mental levels, he does hold to this division. II, I, #3, for instance, speaks of the senses conveying "into the mind" several "distinct perceptions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 665-683 [Access article in PDF] Locke's Man John W. Yolton Much attention has been paid to Locke's discussion of personal identity, his concept of person, the distinction between man and person. In fact, in that discussion there are four terms or concepts: man, self, person, and agent. Around those terms a number of themes, aspects of Locke's thought, are clustered, (...) some more directly related to those terms, others more tangential but still important for our understanding of the thought of Locke. If possible, some sorting out of those four terms could be helpful in reaching an appreciation of the nature and function of man in Locke's account. If we can determine who the agent of action is, find the locus of agency in acting, the source of the power, that nature may be explicated. There are some similarities between the body-mind relation and the man-person relation, similarities which may raise some question of materialism. I think we can say that Locke's man is not born a person, that the man can become a person, develop into one. The boy, the child, grows into a man through education, acquiring the necessary attributes of virtue and rationality. There is a rough analog between the education of a child and the emergence of personhood from a man. Also in Locke's discussion of man there is a firm suggestion of an underlying constitution from which the properties come as their causal source, an intriguing parallel between the constitution of man and the corpuscular structure of body.I propose in this paper to explore these various topics, trusting that the nature of man, of a human being in Locke's account, may become a little bit more clear. Person has perhaps received too much attention; it is man's turn now. 1. Action and Agency Man is a biological organism. "Same man" designates "a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting particles of Matter [biological matter], in succession vitally united to the same organized Body." 1 We might say [End Page 665] man consists of two materialities, corporeal particles and a biological body, but Locke says elsewhere that by the term "man" we mean "a corporeal, rational Creature." 2 The term "rational" clearly adds a non-corporeal property to the corporeal, biological body. Since Locke characterized "person" as having reason, "rational" added to "man" indicates that man and person are not separated or distinct; same reference for "I" but different contributions to the combination of man and person. Person adds something important to man: rationality is added to corporeality. The properties of a person--intelligence, rationality, consciousness--are not identified with or reduced to neurobiological properties nor to material particles.Several questions can be raised: how do man and person work together, how does agency pertain to the man-person, what is the locus of agency? To say, "I did it," e.g., repayment of a debt, is to say I performed that action in a certain way, with arm or hands or by instructing my banker, etc. Actions require a body, a physical body. As actor, I am both a person and a man. Thus, I am the agent of my actions. We need to ask whether the agency pertains to the unit of man and person, or are there aspects of agency ascribed to the man, others ascribed to the person? Agency involves power, on Locke's account. If we consult the main chapter of the Essay where Locke discusses agency and action (2.21), we find that the majority of actions locate the power of acting and deciding with the man. One section at least locates that power with the person: Liberty belongs "to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do." 3 Several sections give the mind some power relevant to acting. Other passages just refer to "the agent." Frequently references to man and agent occur in the same passage.Essay 2.21.8 credits the man with the power to think and to... (shrink)

There are two main groups of essays in this volume. The first centres on Locke's theories of religion and their relation to contemporary scientific thought and the work of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. The second group explores the relation between biology and physiology, and the science of man.

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is John Locke's most important work, and through this selective commentary, first published in 1970, Professor Yolton concentrates our attention on the more interesting and controversial of the doctrines in it. His method of interpretation is to ask very specific questions of the text in order to test the propriety of the philosophical labels traditionally applied to Locke, an approach which he believes yields surprising results. He looks afresh at the various discussions of essence, (...) perception, scientific method, ethics and meaning, and argues that throughout his epistemology Locke is more concerned with problems of description and analysis than with those of justification. This historical perspective is extended by the discussion of issues in the Essay, which retain an independent and philosophical interest. (shrink)

It is important for our purposes to notice that in this first reduction of Theætetus' definition of knowledge as perception, Plato has introduced the distinction between sense object and physical object, for he has specifically said, "when the same wind is blowing, one of us feels chilly, the other does not." In using this example. Plato has, as Cornford observes, raised the question of how the several sense objects are related to the single physical object. This question is one of (...) the two major questions with which this paper will deal, since it is, as I have remarked, the more important question concerning the ontological status of sense-data. Cornford feels that Protagoras probably held that the physical object is both hot and cold, different observers perceiving different aspects of the same object. That is, Cornford suggests that Protagoras' own answer to this question of the relation between sense-data and physical objects is one of complete identification in every case. We will see that this theory is similar in many ways to the one worked out by Plato in the Theætetus, but the distinction between the physical object and the sense object, between the wind which feels hot and cold to different people, makes certain characteristic differences between Plato's and Protagoras' theory. Before going on to examine these differences, it is necessary to follow the further development of Plato's general theory of perception. (shrink)

In 1984, John W. Yolton published Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. His most recent book builds on that seminal work and greatly extends its relevance to issues in current philosophical debate. Perception and Reality examines the theories of perception implicit in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers which centered on the question: How is knowledge of the body possible? That question raises issues of mind-body relation, the way that mentality links with physicality, and the nature of the (...) known world. In contrast to commonsense realism, which suggests that the world is as it appears to be, a more complex theory developed throughout this period. Yolton traces its evolution from Descartes to Kant, via Arnauld, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Yolton explains that the new theory postulated two interactive relations between perceivers and the physical world, one physical and causal, the other cognitive. An understanding of this double relation is important for an accurate construction of the history of philosophy. It is also important for contemporary thought because it suggests a way to account for representation (cognitivity) and realism at the same time. (shrink)

John Yolton seeks to allow readers of Locke to have accessible in one volume sections from a wide range of Locke's books, structured so that some of the interconnections of his thought can be seen and traced. Although Locke did not write from a system of philosophy, he did have in mind an overall division of human knowledge. The readings begin with Locke's essay on Hermeneutics and the portions of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding on how to read a (...) text. The reset of the selections are organized around Locke's division of human knowledge into natural science, ethics, and the theory of signs. Yolton's introduction and commentary explicate Locke's doctrines and provide the reader with the general background knowledge of other seventeenth-century writers and their works necessary to an understanding of Locke and his time. (shrink)

Yolton insists that Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding marks the beginning of the great empirical tradition in British philosophy.

This book tells for the first time the long and complex story of the involvement of Locke's suggestion that God could add to matter the power of thought in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the growth of French materialism. There is a discussion of the 'affaire de Prades', in which Locke's name was linked with a censored thesis at the Faculty of Theology in Paris. The similarities and differences between English "thinking matter" and the French "matiere pensante" of the (...) philosophes are also discussed. (shrink)