Drawing on virtue ethics and stakeholder theory, the article investigates the unfolding of business ethics in the wine industry, with a focus on family businesses. Attention is specifically paid to the interplay of internal (i.e., employees-centeredness and organizational inclusiveness) and external (i.e., people-centeredness and territorial development) ethical orientations. A unique sample of 164 Italian wine businesses was built to get evidence of how the nexus of internal and external ethical orientations is handled, emphasizing the distinctive traits of family businesses. We (...) found that employee-centeredness nurtured organizational inclusiveness and fostered people-centeredness. Interestingly, the family businesses’ concern for territorial development curbed the positive implications of employee-centeredness on people-centeredness. The study results extend scholarly knowledge, shedding light on a ‘grey’ side of family businesses’ ethics. (shrink)

We present an elementary system of axioms for the geometry of Minkowski spacetime. It strikes a balance between a simple and streamlined set of axioms and the attempt to give a direct formalization in first-order logic of the standard account of Minkowski spacetime in Maudlin and Malament. It is intended for future use in the formalization of physical theories in Minkowski spacetime. The choice of primitives is in the spirit of Tarski : a predicate of betwenness and a four place (...) predicate to compare the square of the relativistic intervals. Minkowski spacetime is described as a four dimensional ‘vector space’ that can be decomposed everywhere into a spacelike hyperplane—which obeys the Euclidean axioms in Tarski and Givant, 175–214 1999)—and an orthogonal timelike line. The length of other ‘vectors’ are calculated according to Pythagoras’ theorem. We conclude with a Representation Theorem relating models \ of our system \ that satisfy second order continuity to the mathematical structure \, called ‘Minkowski spacetime’ in physics textbooks. (shrink)

Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in detail how we can recover three-dimensional entities out of the wavefunction. In particular, the essay advocates for a novel version of WFR in terms of a functional reductionist approach in the style of David Lewis. This account entails reduction of the upper entities to the bottom (...) ones, when the latter behave appropriately. As applied to WFR, it shows how the wavefunction can turn out to be identical to three-dimensional objects, provided certain conditions. The first major goal of the paper is thus to put forward an improved and more rigorous version of WFR, which dissolves several extant issues about the theory, and can serve as a starting point for future literature on the topic. Moreover, the second major goal of the article is to take WFR as a case study to demonstrate the pros of functional reductionism, especially in the form defended here, thereby helping to bring this view back in the philosophy of science debate. The positive upshots of this paper suggest a possible application of functional reductionism also to other contexts. (shrink)

Cheerfulness or serenity is one of the most important themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Throughout his writings, from first to last, he can be found wrestling with conceptions of cheerfulness and promoting a cheerful mode of philosophizing. Despite the importance and recurrence of the theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche’s entire œuvre, there have been relatively few studies specifically devoted to it. An important debate on cheerfulness has recently taken place in the literature on Nietzsche between Robert Pippin and Lanier Anderson and (...) Rachel Cristy. Both sides of the debate have explored Nietzsche’s practice of cheerfulness in direct relation to Montaigne. According to Pippin, Nietzsche never succeeds in writing with the kind of cheerfulness of Montaigne. In contrast, Anderson and Cristy have contended that both Nietzsche and Montaigne conceive of cheerfulness as a complex, non-naïve spiritual state or attitude that is to be cultivated through the practice of philosophy as a way of life. According to Anderson and Cristy, this is a deep form of love of life that both Nietzsche and Montaigne practice and perhaps achieve at least in part by and through writing. In this essay, we aim to contribute to this debate by offering a threefold argument. First, we argue that Nietzsche conceives of cheerfulness not only as a psychological ideal, as a desirable state or attitude of the spirit, but also as an aesthetic ideal, as a desirable quality or style of thinking and writing. Second, we argue that, in addition to Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson is an equally important but neglected influence on Nietzsche’s conception and practice of cheerfulness. Third, by reconstructing Nietzsche’s self-presentation as a cheerful thinker and writer in the 1886 prefaces and in Ecce homo, we conclude that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of his most significant texts. (shrink)

Can an identity be the proper subject of an explanation? A popular stance, albeit not one often argued for, gives a negative answer to this question. Building from a contentious passage from Jaegwon Kim in this direction, we reconstruct an argument to the conclusion that identities, to the extent in which they are necessary, cannot be explained. The notion of contrastive explanation, characterized as difference-seeking, will be crucial for this argument; however, we will eventually find the argument to be unsatisfactory. (...) On the contrary, the discussion provides enough resource to sketch a very simple framework for a non-causal contrastive explanation of identities. Many instances will be provided, with different varieties of explanans, ultimately suggesting that certain entailment or biconditional principles involving identities (first and foremost, so-called two-level identity criteria) may indeed be taken to have an inherent explanatory value. (shrink)

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over (...) the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 101-115, September 2011.

This study described and analysed the circumstances surrounding a fatal car accident involving personnel of a multinational corporation in a developing country. For some companies, road accidents are the leading cause of work-related fatalities in developing countries. This reality highlights the ethical dilemmas encountered in a global workplace. Questions as to how a company addresses safety concerns outside the standard work environment, the ethics of operating in a risky environment and the requirements for international consistency in compensation standards for loss (...) of life were addressed. The authors argued that multinational companies should localize health and safety practices to address the important asymmetries between different regions of the world regarding social, cultural and infrastructural issues. Furthermore, the authors analysed the leadership role that should be played by multinational companies to help and support national governments to reduce traffic fatalities in developing countries. From this perspective, the article represents a contribution for the body of knowledge dealing with the business–society relations. The authors used an action research approach to address these issues, both in response to the particular incident and to contribute to the body of research in this field. (shrink)

In his Bibliographia politica Naudé reviews in about one hundred pages authors and works that have dealt with politics, from the Antiquity to the first decades of the Seventeenth Century. In few enlightened pages on the ordinary and extraordinary administration of the State, Naudé elaborates his own idea of Reason of State, including the use of an extraordinary administration in the name of the public benefit. We can find a continuity between his Bibliographia politica and his Considérations politiques sur les (...) coups d’Estat. In both his political works Naudé gives to the category of wisdom, derived from Aristotle, a new practical and political value, which goes back to authors such as Machiavelli or Cardano, Lipsius or Charron. Naudé’s political wisdom uses dissimulation and any form of justice, also against common law, to act in extraordinary administration of the State or to carry out “coups d’État.”. (shrink)

Paradox of Hedonism Varieties of hedonism have been criticized from ancient to modern times. Along the way, philosophers have also considered the paradox of hedonism. The paradox is a common objection to hedonism, even if they often do not give that specific name to the objection. According to the paradox of hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure … Continue reading Paradox of Hedonism →.

L'image de l'écriture est singulièrement fréquente dans des explications cognitivistes du fonctionnement de l'esprit, non seulement comme métaphore mais également comme paradigme conceptuel: la machine de Turing, en particulier, montre un isomorphisme structural complet avec l'utilisation de l'écriture alphabétique. La machine de Turing effectue exactement les mêmes opérations effectuées par un homme écrivant avec le stylo et le papier et cela dépend de deux raisons: 1. il a été conçu dans l'image et la similarité de la pratique concrète humaine de (...) l'écriture ; 2. c'est le produit typique de la rationalité occidentale, dont le développement n'a été rendu possible que par les caractères spécifiques du traitement alphabétique de l'information. Ces aspects sont utiles pour comprendre la raison pour laquelle l'esprit a commencé à être dépeint comme machine d'écriture au moment même où l'alphabet a commencé à se diffuser: une recherche généalogique montrera comment, dans des traités de mnémotechniques et dans la métaphysique de Platon et d'Aristote, nous pouvons trouver la toute première base de chaque modèle logicosymbolique de l'esprit. (shrink)

El concepto de virtud de Alasdair MacIntyre ha recibido, por parte de la crítica, un tratamiento no sistemático y poco profundo. En concreto, la virtud de la prudencia ha recibido escasa atención. La prudencia es una virtud muy importante en el pensamiento de MacIntyre, aunque el autor no la haya analizado de manera unitaria y sistemática. Sus principales propuestas sobre el ser humano y la investigación moral no pueden ser comprendidas sin la virtud de la prudencia. El objetivo de este (...) artículo es ofrecer una exposición y un análisis de dicha virtud en el pensamiento de MacIntyre. (shrink)

Leggett formulated an inequality that seems to generalize the Bell theorem to non-local hidden variable theories. Leggett inequality is violated by quantum mechanics, as was confirmed by experiment. However, a careful analysis reveals that the theory applies to a class of local theory. Contrary to what happens in the derivation of Bell inequality, it is not necessary to make the hypothesis of outcome independence to derive the Leggett inequality.

Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017, 222 pp. Julie Cheminaud, Les évadés de la médecine. Physiologie de l’art dans la France de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, Vrin, Paris 2018, 294 pp. Carla Carmona, Jerrold Levinson, Aesthetics, Literature, and Life: Essays in Honor of Jean-Pierre Cometti, Mimesis International, Milan 2019, 220 pp. Report on “Jean Baudrillard, l’intelligence du temps qui vient”, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Cerisy, France, 9-16 August 2019.

This book is an attempt to save "the sexual" from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers (...) back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce's movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency. (shrink)

We investigate a new paradigm in the context of learning in the limit, namely, learning correction grammars for classes of computably enumerable (c.e.) languages. Knowing a language may feature a representation of it in terms of two grammars. The second grammar is used to make corrections to the first grammar. Such a pair of grammars can be seen as a single description of (or grammar for) the language. We call such grammars correction grammars. Correction grammars capture the observable fact that (...) people do correct their linguistic utterances during their usual linguistic activities. We show that learning correction grammars for classes of c.e. languages in the TxtEx-model (i.e., converging to a single correct correction grammar in the limit) is sometimes more powerful than learning ordinary grammars even in the TxtBe-model (where the learner is allowed to converge to infinitely many syntactically distinct but correct conjectures in the limit). For each n ≥ 0, there is a similar learning advantage, again in learning correction grammars for classes of c.e. languages, but where we compare learning correction grammars that make n + 1 corrections to those that make n corrections. The concept of a correction grammar can be extended into the constructive transfinite, using the idea of counting-down from notations for transfinite constructive ordinals. This transfinite extension can also be conceptualized as being about learning Ershov-descriptions for c.e. languages. For u a notation in Kleene's general system $(O,\, < _o )$ of ordinal notations for constructive ordinals, we introduce the concept of an u-correction grammar, where u is used to bound the number of corrections that the grammar is allowed to make. We prove a general hierarchy result: if u and v are notations for constructive ordinals such that $u\, < _o \,v$ , then there are classes of c.e. languages that can be TxtEx-learned by conjecturing v-correction grammars but not by conjecturing u-correction grammars. Surprisingly, we show that— above "ω-many" corrections—it is not possible to strengthen the hierarchy: TxtEx-learning u-correction grammars of classes of c.e. languages, where u is a notation in O for any ordinal, can be simulated by TxtBe-learning ω-correction grammars, where ω is any notation for the smallest infinite ordinal ω. (shrink)

En 2004, la famille de Jules Vuillemin lègue aux Archives Henri-Poincaré (Université de Lorraine) un fonds constitué par les ouvrages, les tirés à part et les manuscrits du célèbre philosophe français, décédé aux Fourgs (Doubs) le 16 janvier 2001. Dans le cadre de la conservation et de la valorisation de ce fonds très riche, les Archives Henri-Poincaré organisent chaque année, au mois de décembre, une journée d’études autour d’un texte ou d’un aspect de la pensée de Jules Vuillemin, afin de (...) d... (shrink)

We formulate a restriction of Hindman’s Finite Sums Theorem in which monochromaticity is required only for sums corresponding to rooted finite paths in the full binary tree. We show that the resulting principle is equivalent to \-induction over \. The proof uses the equivalence of this Hindman-type theorem with the Pigeonhole Principle for trees \ with an extra condition on the solution tree.

Studies link involuntary outpatient commitment with improved patient outcomes, fueling debate on its ethical justification. This study compares inpatient utilization for committed outpatients in the 1990s with those who were not under outpatient civil commitment orders. Findings reveal committed outpatients had higher utilization of inpatient services and restraint episodes prior to their commitment compared with a control group. Committed outpatients also were more likely to have been on discharge status at the time of admission, have been admitted involuntarily under emergency (...) legal procedures, and have had a greater number of admissions and hospital days prior to their commitment. Following commitment, patients had fewer hospitalizations, shorter lengths of stay, fewer seclusion episodes and hours, and fewer restraint episodes and hours. Findings are discussed within the context of parens patriae and therapeutic jurisprudence, and support medical and public policy justifications for ethical uses of outpatient civil commitment laws for seriously mentally ill patients. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt a un problème avec la philosophie. Si elle en joue et provoque, le trait s’avère constant, tout au long de sa vie, publique comme privée. Jamais elle ne cacha son peu d’appétence pour les « diseur[s] professionnel[s] de vérité »1. Elle poussa même le vice jusqu’à déclarer, en réponse à Günther Gauss qui, lors d’une célèbre entrevue datant de 1964 et tel le frais cabri qui, avec candeur et bonheur, se dirige guilleret, primesautier, vers la surprise party que (...) donne le loup en son... (shrink)

This is the first dedicated commentary to Sextus Empiricus’ treatise _Against the Arithmeticians_, dealing with crucial issues in the history of the sceptical, Platonic and Pythagorean traditions and in the ancient philosophy of mathematics.

If no one is surprised by its presence in the political sphere, lying is rarely a good thing and generally leads to public scandal. However, it is perhaps even more infamous when political actors, especially leaders, claim to formulate truths during their political activity. This is the hypothesis that this article aims to develop by drawing on a conceptual framework inspired by Hannah Arendt. In its first part, we explain how telling the truth and acting politically are two incompatible activities (...) that mutually threaten each other. In the second part, we analyze: first, how truth conditions (pre-politically) politics; then, why there is a specifically political interest in the establishment and preservation of truth; finally, how political institutions can, without risking scandal or damaging the truth, satisfy this interest. -/- Si personne ne s’étonne de sa présence dans la sphère politique, le mensonge est rarement une bonne chose et conduit généralement au scandale public. Toutefois, il est peut-être encore plus infâme que des acteurs, et a fortiori des responsables, politiques prétendent ès qualités formuler des vérités. C’est l’hypothèse que cet article entend développer en puisant dans une conceptualité d’inspiration arendtienne. Nous expliquons dans sa première partie en quoi dire la vérité et agir politiquement s’avèrent deux activités incompatibles qui se menacent mutuellement. Dans la seconde, nous analysons : d’abord, comment la vérité conditionne (prépolitiquement) le politique ; ensuite, pourquoi il existe un intérêt spécifiquement politique à l’établissement et à la sauvegarde de la vérité ; enfin, de quelle manière les institutions politiques peuvent, sans risquer le scandale ou d’abîmer la vérité, satisfaire cet intérêt. (shrink)

This essay seeks to give a contractarian foundation to the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, meant as an extended model of corporate governance of the firm. It focuses on justification according to the contractarian point of view. It begins by providing a definition of CSR as an extended model of corporate governance, based on the fiduciary duties owed to all the firm's stakeholders. Then, by establishing the basic context of incompleteness of contracts and abuse of authority, it analyses how the (...) extended view of corporate governance arises directly from criticism of the contemporary neo-institutional economic theory of the firm. Thereafter, an application of the theory of bargaining games is used to deduce the structure of a multi-stakeholder firm, on the basis of the idea of a constitutional contract, which satisfies basic requirements of impartial justification and accordance with intuitions of social justice. This is a sequential model of constitutional bargaining, whereby a constitution is first chosen, and then a post-constitutional coalition game is played. On the basis of the unique solution given to each step in the bargaining model, the quest for a prescriptive theory of governance and strategic management is accomplished, so that I am able to define an objective-function for the firm consistent with the idea of CSR. Finally, a contractarian potential explanation for the emergence of the multi-fiduciary firm is provided. (shrink)

This volume sets out to give a philosophical "applied" account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, ...