Using classical American pragmatism, the authors provide a philosophical framework for rethinking the nature of the corporation--how it is embedded in its natural, technological, cultural, and international environments, emphasizing throughout its pervasive relational and moral dimensions. They explore the relationship of this framework to other contemporary business ethics perspectives, as well as its implications for moral leadership in business and business education.

C. I. Lewis was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. In this book, Sandra B. Rosenthal explores Lewis’s philosophical vision, and links his thought to the traditions of classical American pragmatism. Tracing Lewis’s influences, she explains the central concepts informing his thinking and how he developed a unique and practical vision of the human experience. She shows how Lewis contributed to the enrichment and expansion of pragmatism, opening new paths of constructive dialogue with other traditions. (...) This book will become a standard reference for readers who want to know more about one of American philosophy’s most distinguished minds. (shrink)

Unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis.

In the last few years, some attempts have been made to overcome the disparity between environmental ethics and business ethics. However, as the situation now stands the various positions in business ethics have not incorporated any well-developed theoretical foundation for environmental issues, and conversely, environmental ethics is failing to capture an audience that could profit greatly from utilizing its theoretical insights and research. In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for business ethics and environmental ethics that (...) can further the dialogue that has recently begun, perhaps bringing it to a deeper theoretical level. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Selfhood and community Value The normative‐empirical split Environmental ethics.

INTRODUCTION In the philosophic world today, and especially within the context of the emerging American scene, pragmatism and phenomenology can each ...

This work runs counter to the traditional interpretations of Peirce's philosophy by eliciting an inherent strand of pragmatic pluralism that is embedded in the very core of his thought and that weaves his various doctrines into a systematic ...

Before developing a pragmatically based account of this interrelationship, the ensuing discussion will very briefly explore the positions of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty to elicit certain relevant features. As a sketchy caricature, and with all the dangers sketchy caricatures involve, it can be said that Rawls' position exemplifies the individual as the source of important community arrangements, MacIntyre's the individual as the product of community arrangements, and Rorty's the freeing of the issue from ontological entanglements and presumptions.

The uprootedness of experience from its ontological embeddedness in a natural world is at the core of much contemporary philosophy which, like pragmatism, aims to reject foundationalism in all its forms. All hold positions that, in varying ways, there is a bedrock basis on which to build an edifice of knowledge, something objective that justifies rational arguments concerning what is the single best position for making available or picturing the structure of reality as it exists independently of our various contextually (...) set inquiries. There can be no non-perspectival framework within which differences—social, moral, scientific, etc.—can be evaluated and resolved. These positions may, like pragmatism, focus on the .. (shrink)

Peirce stresses that the pragmatist qua pragmatist must embrace realism as opposed to nominalism. He offers as well “proofs” of realism which are open to various criticisms. Within the framework of his pragmatic vision, the experiential sense of realism is inseparable from the functioning of habit in the flow of time. What is being verified by experimental testing is, ultimately, not a particular scientific law, nor scientific laws in general, but rather the common sense expectation of predictive reliability rooted in (...) the primitive epistemic “feel” of real potentiality, a belief which is dubitable in principle, and which is, in fact, often doubted at the abstract, reflective levels of science, logic, and philosophy, but which, at the level of rudimentary perceptual experience is fundamental to our very sense of our world, and is well verified by the continual availability of our perceptual world. The concrete functioning of habit provides, epistemically, the conceptual counterpart of the real lawfulness held to exist in the world, and provides, ontologically, an example of this real lawfulness. Peirce’s dispositional theory of meaning leads to a metaphysics of realism as opposed to a nominalism, a realism not of eternal essences but a “process realism” in which there are real modes of behavior which govern what occurs. (shrink)

Mead's pragmatic focus on habit as the foundation of meaning is usually viewed in sharp contrast with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological examination of meaning within experience. This paper attempts to show the way in which the explicit focus of each philosopher's position is latent within that of the other. For Mead and Merleau-Ponty alike, the content of human awareness at all levels is inseparably linked with the structure of human behavior. And, for both, such a structure is permeated throughout by the ``living (...) meaning'' of anticipatory habit or vital intentionality. (shrink)

Introduction CLASSICAL American pragmatism represents a historical period in American philosophy, spanning a particular time frame and including the ...

Mead's pragmatic focus on habit as the foundation of meaning is usually viewed in sharp contrast with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological examination of meaning within experience. This paper attempts to show the way in which the explicit focus of each philosopher's position is latent within that of the other. For Mead and Merleau-Ponty alike, the content of human awareness at all levels is inseparably linked with the structure of human behavior. And, for both, such a structure is permeated throughout by the "living (...) meaning" of anticipatory habit or vital intentionality. (shrink)

To understand the significance of Peirce’s self-proclaimed idealism within the context of his metaphysical system, it must be viewed not only in terms of the modifications he makes, but also–perhaps more so–in terms of the alternatives against which they are pitted, for frequently it is his understanding of the shortcomings of these other positions which leads him to find idealism so enticing. Indeed, Peirce’s most clear-cut assertions of idealism arise from a rejection of two other positions which he falsely thinks (...) to exhaust the possibilities, for the alternatives from which he begins are rooted in a tradition of substance and kinds of “stuff,” while his search for an answer stems from an emerging framework of process and function. While Peirce is not an idealist, his flirtation with idealism was a vital force in shaping the character of his philosophy as it moved on to novel terrain. Yet, if he is seen as wedded too closely to idealism, this novel terrain is lost from view. Thus, his self-proclaimed idealism yields both a tool for bringing to light important distinctions and an obstacle which stands in the way of understanding his ultimate commitment to a novel pragmatic synthesis which undercuts the numerous and often contradictory traditional labels by which he attempts to articulate his emerging position. (shrink)

In both the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, the rejection of the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction leads to a rejection of the alternatives of realism or idealism as well. In their respective denials of such an existential or ontological gap between appearance or phenomena and the ontologically real, they each establish a fundamental intentional unity between man and world which cannot be understood within the framework of realism or of idealism and which reveals deeply rooted (...) affinities between the two positions. (shrink)

Pragmatism is a philosophy still in the making, one that has taken (and will take) novel twists and turns as the general spirit of its paradigmatic novelty moves forward. However, when creative appropriation of pragmatic themes begins to destroy this philosophic spirit and paradigmatic vision, such novelty is no longer a further development of pragmatism but, rather, a move to a different position, one that must be clearly distinguished from the pragmatic movement in American philosophy.