In this paper the importance of public affairs management in multinational corporations in India will be examined. After briefly discussing the state of the art in international business and society literature, a conceptual framework for public affairs management in multinational corporations will be developed. This framework serves as the theoretical basis for an empirical study among German multinational corporations in India. In the main part of this paper the results of this study will be presented and discussed. The paper ends (...) with a critical assessment and some major implications for future studies. (shrink)

Questions concerning the epistemological status of computer science are, in this paper, answered from the point of view of the formal verification framework. State space reduction techniques adopted to simplify computational models in model checking are analysed in terms of Aristotelian abstractions and Galilean idealizations characterizing the inquiry of empirical systems. Methodological considerations drawn here are employed to argue in favour of the scientific understanding of computer science as a discipline. Specifically, reduced models gained by Dataion are acknowledged as Aristotelian (...) abstractions that include only data which are sufficient to examine the interested executions. The present study highlights how the need to maximize incompatible properties is at the basis of both Abstraction Refinement, the process of generating a cascade of computational models to achieve a balance between simplicity and informativeness, and the Multiple Model Idealization approach in biology. Finally, fairness constraints, imposed to computational models to allow fair behaviours only, are defined as ceteris paribus conditions under which temporal formulas, formalizing software requirements, acquire the status of law-like statements about the software systems executions. (shrink)

We define and investigate Heyting-valued interpretations for Constructive Zermelo–Frankel set theory . These interpretations provide models for CZF that are analogous to Boolean-valued models for ZF and to Heyting-valued models for IZF. Heyting-valued interpretations are defined here using set-generated frames and formal topologies. As applications of Heyting-valued interpretations, we present a relative consistency result and an independence proof.

El artículo analiza el tratamiento hegeliano del concepto de voluntad general de Rousseau en la Fenomenología del espíritu. Se teje una trama conceptual que enfatiza en: (i) la necesariedad del concepto de voluntad general de Rousseau en el entramado conceptual hegeliano; (ii) las implicancias de este concepto en la estructura política y social, en términos de una ausencia de instituciones de representación política en una sociedad ética; (iii) las consecuencias violentas y nihilistas de la extrapolación práctica de la voluntad general (...) como axioma teórico. (shrink)

As universities are increasingly called by their national governments for a more entrepreneurial management of public research results, they started to develop internal structures and policies to take a proactive role in the commercialisation of university research. For the first time, this paper presents a detailed chronicle of how country-level reforms on Intellectual Property Rights were translated into organisation-level mechanisms to regulate university-patenting activity. The analysis is based on the complete list of patent policies issued between 1993 and 2009 by (...) the population of Italian universities. Our evidence suggests that universities first dealt with legislative changes on IPRs by enacting isomorphic behaviours, then by creating a community of practices, and finally by leveraging on such community to influence government reforms on IP-related matters. We discuss our results in the light of institutional theory and public policy. (shrink)

A situated agent is one which operates within an environment. In most cases, the environment in which the agent exists will be more complex than the agent itself. This means that an agent, human or artificial, which wishes to carry out non-trivial operations in its environment must use techniques which allow an unbounded world to be represented within a cognitively bounded agent. We present a brief description of some important theories within the fields of epistemology and metaphysics. We then discuss (...) ways in which philosophical problems of scepticism are related to the problems faced by knowledge representation. We suggest that some of the methods that philosophers have developed to address the problems of epistemology may be relevant to the problems of representing knowledge within artificial agents. (shrink)

Introduction to " Gnosticism ": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds is the first textbook on Gnosticism, guiding students through the most significant of the Nag Hammadi texts, grouping them by theme and genre, and revealing to the uninitiated their most inscrutable mysteries.

Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking with Early Childhood Education Practices highlights the relationships between reconceptualist theory and classroom practice, and makes those theories relateable through the lens of practitioners' experiences. Each chapter in this edited collection considers a contemporary issue and explores its potential to be meaningful in the lives of young children. The book pairs reconceptualist academics and practitioners to discuss how theories can be relevant in everyday educational contexts, working with children who are from a wide range of cultural, ethnic, (...) gender, language and social orientations. (shrink)

In the present article, I discuss Husserl’s analysis of the genesis of action in the Husserliana edition Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. My aim is to clarify how a “voluntary action” has its...

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways (...) to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses’ wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence (...) about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses’ wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. (shrink)

A common view is that self-identity is essential to objects if anything is. Itself a substantive metaphysical view, this is a position of some import in wider debates, particularly in connection with such problems as physicalism and personal identity. In this article I challenge the view. I distinguish between two accounts of essence, the modal and the definitional, and argue that self-identity is essential to objects on the former but not on the latter. After laying out my case, I deal (...) with a number of objections. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyze the constitution of a new collective subject thanks to wearable computers. Wearable computers are emerging technologies which are supposed to become pervasively used in the near future. They are devices designed to be on us every single moment of our life and to capture every experience we have. Therefore, we need to be prepared to such intrusive devices and to analyze potential effect they will have on us and our society. Thanks to (...) a phenomenological and postphenomenological analysis, we will show how these technologies are able to generate a new collective subject with its different collective needs and appetites by merging the living body of many subjects into one. The world becomes dwelled by these new collective subjects, and we will feed their own peculiar needs. (shrink)

This work aims to understand how a subject can be sentimentally and intimately self-realized by having a relationship with other people through computer technologies. We will analyze the relations binding together the subjects when their “presence” and “interactions” are digitally mediated thanks to a phenomenological analysis. In the first part, we will highlight the differences of using digital devices instead of having face-to-face meetings, especially in virtual worlds. In the second part, we will focus on how other digital devices differently (...) mediate the relation between the subjects, and so we will show how some technologies like teledildo provide elements close to the ones we find in a face-to-face meeting while other technologies like virtual realities do not. (shrink)

We present a generalisation of the type-theoretic interpretation of constructive set theory into Martin-Löf type theory. The original interpretation treated logic in Martin-Löf type theory via the propositions-as-types interpretation. The generalisation involves replacing Martin-Löf type theory with a new type theory in which logic is treated as primitive. The primitive treatment of logic in type theories allows us to study reinterpretations of logic, such as the double-negation translation.

In comparison to other epistemic sources testimony is the only one dealing with the social aspects of gaining and justifying knowledge. One main problem of the current discussion about knowledge by testimony is the concept of testimony itself. It is quite unclear what the correct notion of testimony is supposed to be. In this essay I present a proposal to define the concept of testimony in making a distinction between the conditions which hold in the speaker's context and the ones (...) necessary and sufficient for the hearer. Furthermore, I will briefly defend the thesis that there is not one general concept of testimony, but that there are different ones connected via a kind of specialisation relation. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz's (Vienna 1899 — New York 1959) research into the philosophy of music certainly cannot be regarded as the most notable aspect of this writer, born and educated in Vienna, later a naturalized American citizen. Nor can it legitimately be maintained that Schutz's writings on the subject form a systematic corpus in his work. Schutz was above all a social scientist, strongly attracted, as were many writers of the first half of this century, to the project of aphilosophical foundation (...) within his field of expertise. In this project, where phenomenology is encountered, the question ofintersubjectivity together with that ofcommunication among individuals, plays a crucial role. It is, therefore, undoubtedly correct to consider Schutz's theoretical interests in music within this framework; thus music tends to assume a paradigmatic value, in the sense that the musical piece in its concrete temporal development, in the presence of performers and listeners, demonstrates in a truly exemplary manner, how the process of social relationship actually functions.Although mindful of this frame of reference, nontheless we feel it can be asserted that the works of Schutz which we are about to examine are in themselves interesting stimuli, independently of any organic connection with the author's general project. These stimuli have furthermore proveked a theoretical debate that is still going on in the USA. (shrink)

In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter can be known by (...) human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter. (shrink)

Husserl’s official account of essence is modal. It is also, I submit, incompatible with the role that essence is supposed to play, especially relative to necessity, in his overall philosophy. In the Husserlian framework, essence should rather be treated as a non-modal notion. The point, while not generally acknowledged, has been made before (by Kevin Mulligan for one); yet the arguments given for it, though perhaps sound, are not Husserlian. In this paper I present a thoroughly Husserlian argument for that (...) claim, as well as a Husserlian essentialist account of necessity. I also discuss the role of grounding within the account. (shrink)

The development of a biological notion of “population” over the first century of the theory of evolution has been commented upon by a number of historians and philosophers of biology. Somewhat less commonly discussed, however, is the parallel development of the statistical concept of a population over precisely the same period, in some cases driven by the same historical actors (such as Francis Galton and R. A. Fisher). We explore here these parallel developments, first from the perspective of a reconstruction (...) of the historical development of each concept, then with the aid of a digital analysis of a corpus of literature drawn from the journals Biometrika and Journal of Genetics, between 1900 and 1960. These twin analyses show both points of interesting overlap between these two historical trends as well as points of important divergence. The biological and statistical notions of “population” seem to be relatively clearly distinguishable over these six decades, in spite of the fact that a number of authors contributed clearly to both traditions. The complex interplay of continuity and discontinuity across these two notions of “population” makes them a particularly interesting case study of scientific conceptual change. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

A survey of the similarities and differences between BFO and DOLCE, and of the mutual interactions between Nicola Guarino and Barry Smith.

Digital technologies are pervasively used, and they are becoming part of our everyday actions by being designed to be connected to every aspect of our private life like emotions. However, it is not very clear how they are going to change who we are through their tight intertwinement. Especially in relation to emotions, it is not clear at all what happens when they become digitalized and visualized through these digital devices. Usually, the research focusses on the effect on the privacy (...) of the intrusion of digital devices in our lives as if this process of digitalization leaves the meanings human beings give to their emotions untouched. This article does not focus on the privacy related to the personal information captured by the devices, but it aims to open an analysis of the effects of this digitalization on the emotions in order to highlight the fact the introduction of these digital technologies change what emotions are. (shrink)

This symposium contributes to the broader discussion about humanism in management and organizational well-being. Dignity plays a crucial role as both a fundamental value and as an end state in the process of humanizing organizational cultures, workplaces and relationships. However, despite its significance, it has yet to be addressed properly in the growing discourse on humanistic capitalism and management, and indeed in business ethics as a whole. This symposium seeks to inform and inspire emerging research and approaches towards human dignity (...) through the lens of artistic expression and explores how arts may promote human dignity in organizational life. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse teledildonics from a phenomenological perspective in order to show the possible effects they will have on ourselves and on our society. The new way of using digital technologies is to merge digital activities with our everyday praxes, and there are already devices which enable subjects to be digitally connected in every moment of their lives. Even the most intimate ones are becoming mediated by devices such as teledildonics which digitally provide a tactual (...) stimulation allowing users to have sexual intercourse through them. The efforts made in order to provide such an intertwinement of our everyday lives and digital technologies are evident, but the effects produced by them are not clear at all. This paper will analyse these technologies from a phenomenological perspective in order to understand their effects on the constitution of the subjects and on our society at the intimate level. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in both business and society that MNCs have an enormous potential for contributing to the betterment of the world, A paper from the Tomorrow's Leaders Group of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development). In fact, a discussion has evolved around the role of "Business as an Agent of World Benefit."¹ At the same time, there is also growing willingness among business leaders to spend time, expertise, and resources to help solve some of the most pressing (...) problems in the world, such as global warming, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and other pandemic diseases. One example of business leaders engagement in citizenship activities is PricewaterhouseCoopers' leadership development program called "Project Ulysses" which we present and discuss in this article. Using a narrative approach we ask: "What can business leaders learn from selected Ulysses narratives for acting as agents of world benefit and with respect to engaging responsibly in the fight against some of the most pressing social problems at the local level?" Our contribution is organized as follows. We begin the article with a brief discussion on the role of business leaden in the fight against world's social problems and address some areas of concern as to whether or not business leaders should play a role in fighting these global issues. We then introduce "Project Ulysses" which takes place in cross-sector partnership in developing countries. Following an overview of the research methodology we present four Ulysses narratives which tell us about learnings in the light of fundamental human problems, such as poverty and misery. Each story is analyzed with regard to the above question. We conclude the article by summarizing key lessons learned and some recommendations for business leaders as agents of world benefit. (shrink)

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the importance of aesthetics. Eating is often dismissed as a necessary aspect of survival, and our personal enjoyment of food is considered a quirk. Nicola Perullo sees food as the only portion of the world we take in on a (...) daily basis, constituting our first and most significant encounter with the earth. Perullo has long observed people's food practices and has listened to their food experiences. He draws on years of research to explain the complex meanings behind our food choices and the thinking that accompanies our gustatory actions. He also considers our indifference toward food as a force influencing us as much as engagement. For Perullo, taste is value and wisdom. It cannot be reduced to mere chemical or cultural factors but embodies the quality and quantity of our earthly experience. (shrink)