This paper reports on an investigation of issues surrounding the use of ethical codes/codes of conduct in Irish based companies. Using a comprehensive questionnaire survey, the paper examines the incidence, content and enforcement of codes of conduct among a sample of the top 1000 companies based in Ireland. The main findings indicate that the overall usage of codes of conduct amongst indigenous Irish companies has increased significantly from 1995 to 2000. However, in line with prior research, these codes focus primarily (...) on issues surrounding company and employee protection as opposed to society protection. Almost half of all codes are written by company personnel or provided by head office. Revisions of codes are common but formal ongoing methods of instructing new staff about codes are not prevalent. Less than one-third of companies with codes have formal channels for reporting violations but a high percentage have formal disciplinary procedures in place for breaches of codes. (shrink)

This essay considers a number of proposals for liberal political democracy in East Asian societies, and some of the critical responses such proposals have attracted from political philosophers and from East Asian intellectuals and leaders. These proposals may well be ill-suited to the distinctive traditional values of societies claiming a Confucian inheritance. Offered here instead is a pragmatist- and Confucian-inspired vision of participatory democracy in civic life that is possibly better able to address the problem of conserving and continuing these (...) traditional values through times of economic and social change. (shrink)

The notion that if democracy is to flourish in East Asia it must be realized in ways that are compatible with East Asian’s Confucian norms or values is a staple conviction of Confucian scholarship. I suggest two reasons why it is unlikely and even undesirable for such a Confucianized democracy to emerge. First, 19th- and 20th-century modernization swept away or weakened the institutions which had transmitted Confucian practices in the past, undermining claims that there is an enduring Confucian communitarian or (...) cultural heritage today that democratic institutions have to adapt themselves to—or that a Confucian cultural spirit can be revived. Second, 20th-century East Asian statist regimes rationalized Confucianism for national ideologies meant to bind their citizens’ loyalties to developmentalist goals. Memories of this now delegitimized, statist Confucianism have contributed to the further marginalization of Confucian norms, and to their dissociation from democratic values, in today’s pluralistic democracies in East Asia. This essay argues that a Confucian conviction politics developed within the frame of East Asia’s actually existing liberal democracies provides a better course for advocates of Confucianism in democratic politics. (shrink)

This paper brings a fresh, epistemic perspective to bear on prominent Confucian philosophers’ arguments for a hybrid Deweyan-Confucian democracy, or for an illiberal democracy with “Confucian characteristics.” Reconstructing principles for epistemic elitism and paternalism from the pre-Qin 秦 Confucian thought that inspires these advocates for Confucian democracy, it finds two major problems with their proposals. For those who abandon or modify this epistemic elitism and paternalism in accordance with , the result is a philosophical syncretism that is either unconvincingly Confucian (...) or unconvincingly Deweyan. For those who retain it in accordance with , the result is a democratic proposal that will lack legitimacy in increasingly pluralistic East Asian societies. In the end, there is a need for thinking that appropriately synthesizes Eastern and Western philosophies in a politically changing East Asia, but it would benefit from being less “Confucian.”. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of wartime Confucianism in any language, providing new insights into key developments in Confucian thought and ideology in East Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. In standard scholarship on the ideologies driving nation-building and imperialism during the era of Japanese expansionism that began in 1931, Confucianism is rarely referenced and relegated to the background. This volume brings together the work of scholars who argue for a revision of this standard view. It includes studies of (...) Japanese, Chinese, colonial Manchurian and Korean intellectuals and reformers who contributed to expansionist, collaborationist or nationalist ideology-building during the war. Contrary to the assumption that Confucianism was an anachronism rendered irrelevant by the Westernising political reforms and revolutions of the early twentieth century, the chapters in this book show that Confucianism remained a potent, and also contested cultural resource for promoting national cohesion, war mobilisation and expansionism in East Asia between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the end of World War II in 1945. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Asian studies, nationalism studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies and philosophy. In particular, it is essential reading for those interested in nationalism and modern Confucian thought in East Asia. (shrink)

This essay explores Emerson’s reflections on self-reliance with particular reference to Emerson’s understanding of the concept of self-reliance, his view of ‘conformity’ as the major obstacle to self-reliance, and the moral significance of his thought. The essay is based on the premise that Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance, self-reference and self-responsibility has a relevance and an application to our contemporary lives which are often conducted through subtle shades of compliance and acquiescence to popular opinion and prevailing fashions of thought and behaviour.

This paper discusses the legitimacy of accountants’ recent involvement in social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting (SEAAR). Support for accountants’ legitimacy is proposed by highlighting some of the technical skills they offer to the SEAAR process as conceived in AA1000. It is argued that the relevance of these skills is strengthened within a conception of SEAAR which principally perceives it as a risk/stakeholder management process focused primarily on the concerns of corporate management as opposed to those of the wider (...) society. However, the paper moves on to maintain that if we wish to promote a conception of SEAAR primarily focused on accountability to stakeholders (denoted as ‘true accountability’) as opposed to risk/stakeholder management, then, particularly in the domain of external social audit, the legitimacy of accountants’ participation may be disputed. The paper therefore concludes by cautioning against facilitating the unquestioned entry of accountants into the realm of SEAAR. (shrink)

Global threats to academic freedom are multiplying not only in an era of authoritarian resurgence, but also – less overtly – in an era of increasingly managerial governance of higher‐education sectors in democratic nations, where protection of institutional revenue streams, and of institutional reputation, may take priority over protection of scholars' and students' academic freedoms. In such circumstances, justifications for rendering aid to at‐risk scholars and students have become obscured. This article argues that the Kantian concept of imperfect duty can (...) be adapted to theorizing collective, institutional obligations to aid those scholars and students, undertaken in light of academic freedom as a constitutive institutional value. (shrink)

Criticisms of the liberal-individualist idea of the “unencumbered self” are not just a staple of communitarian thought. Some modern Confucian thinkers are now seeking to develop an ethically particular understanding of social roles in the family that is sensitive to gender-justice issues, and that provides an alternative to liberal-individualist conceptions of the “unencumbered self” in relation to family roles. The character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House seemingly exemplifies such conceptions of the unencumbered self in her rejection of (...) her housewife role for a more authentic selfhood. Drawing upon the capabilities approach to justice, and positive early Japanese bluestockings’ responses to Ibsen's play, I argue that Nora's character is better understood as exemplifying an ethically compelling disencumbered self in potentially cross-cultural circumstances: a self criticizing and rejecting social roles that are found to be unjust according to universal, as opposed to particularist, “Confucian” ethical standards. (shrink)

The author posits that an exploration of Buberian texts suggests a Nietzschean influence, both in the aphoristic and poetic style of his literature and in his insistence on an embrace of the totality of what it is to be human.

Winner of the 2010 Concordia Philosophy Students' Association Undergraduate Essay Contest.

The book is essentially a philosophical analysis of an emotion that significantly impacts on human experience.

Lately it has become fashionable to speak of a ‘political meritocracy’ in Chinese political culture, which contrasts with the liberal ‘electoral democracy’ of the west. Here, however, I consider th...

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, John Dewey began his struggle to pave a way out of the impasses generated by the contending schools of realism and idealism. In the early twenty-first century, claims have been made that his thought can also help philosophy move beyond the contemporary realism/anti-realism debate. Dewey scholar David Hildebrand asserts that John Dewey's philosophy provides "a defensible alternative to both realism and idealism" and to contemporary realism and anti-realism in the philosophy of history (Hildebrand (...) 2000, p. 2). This is part of Hildebrand's larger project to demonstrate that "classical pragmatism—and any careful derivation of it" should be able to move beyond the .. (shrink)

A collection of philosophical and aesthetic essays, influenced by Bernard Stiegler, which focuses on the techno-cultural artefact in order to critique, engage, or respond to, an aspect of digital culture.

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; that (...) Socratic philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. (shrink)

The birth of psychoanalysis at the close of the nineteenth centurycoincided with a questioning of philosophical traditions and methodsepitomized by Nietzsche’s assault on current thinking. The Enlightenment had seen the questioning of religion as an explanation and a revelation of reality and of human life within that reality; science had been instigated as a more ‘enlightened’ and a more rational provider of truth and knowledge; but the ongoing nature of philosophical thought continued to encounter new challenges and the re-phrasing of (...) old questions. Attempting to combine the exactness of scientific method with the openness of philosophical inquiry, psychoanalysis broached the terrain of the human mind, and attemptedto explore the perennial questions of meaning, truth and life with anunderstanding enhanced by the discoveries of its founder, Sigmund Freud. (shrink)

At the present stage of the development of theological thought of a new sound acquires the marijolic conception of Catholicism. The theologically developed image of Virgin Mary, laid the foundation of marly, formed into a universal concept.