This book has as its stated aim to track the course of the Hegelian concept of “the unhappy consciousness” through the twentieth century French mind, in order to understand more fully and clearly the use made of this theme.

Why and how have supply chain codes of conduct diffused among lead firms around the globe? Prior research has drawn on both institutional and stakeholder theories to explain the adoption of codes, but no study has modeled adoption as a temporally dynamic process of diffusion. We propose that the drivers of adoption shift over time, from exclusively nonmarket to eventually market-based mechanisms as well. In an analysis of an original data set of more than 1,800 firms between the years 2006 (...) and 2015, we find that strong nonmarket labor institutions in a firm’s home country are critical to initiating and sustaining the diffusion process. Market mechanisms, such as investor scrutiny and brand risk, emerge as important later. Contrary to prior research, we did not find a significant effect from nongovernmental organization (NGO) pressure. We conclude that markets for corporate social responsibility can and do arise, but only after they are effectuated by nonmarket institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy ConnollyT. P. WisemanJoy Connolly. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xix + 228 pp. Cloth. $39.95.This book was written for the best of reasons. Joy Connolly explains in her preface that she began to study the republican tradition in 2001, when “the Bush administration’s imprudence, paranoia, and disregard of democratic values stoked in me an anger equalled (...) only by the disgust I felt at my own and my fellow citizens’ inability or unwillingness to stand up to it” (xiv). The failure of the Left caused her “to ask questions that might help us to respond more intelligently and humanly to the situation in which we find ourselves” (xv). In particular, in this book her aim has been to exploit texts from the late Roman republic, to which students of political science have not paid enough attention, and thus recover “the suppressed history of republican political thought” (204). As she says in [End Page 372] conclusion, “I have sought to offer practical tools for civic education by articulating learnable practices of knowing the world that characterize late republican texts” (208, author’s emphasis). How well has this admirable ambition been achieved?According to the introduction, “[t]his book seeks to place Cicero’s Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws; Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha; and Horace’s Satires at the center of the republican tradition” (1); however, the Verrines and De legibus get only a couple of paragraphs each, and only one of the “Caesarian” orations is discussed at all. The actual contents are: chapter 1 on De republica (“Where Politics Begins”), which “presents Cicero as a thinker concerned with a collective of antagonists and competing interests, against conventional portrayals of his ideal republic as a homogeneous, unified, harmonious community” (20); chapter 2 on Sallust (“Justice in the World”), which argues that “Sallust’s withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale” (20); chapter 3 on Horace Satires I (“Non-Sovereign Freedom”), in which the obvious question (asked only at the end), “what might political and social progressives find worthy of consideration in Horace today?”, is answered with “Horatian satire undoes the claim to sovereignty that usually partners claims to moral judgment” (154); chapter 4 on Cicero’s view of oratory (“Dividual Advocacy”), which “reflects on the Roman preoccupation with faces, situations, the mutability of selfhood, and the degree to which the divided self mirrors the division of the polity” (21); and chapter 5 on Pro Marcello (“Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony”), which argues that “[b]y adopting hyperbole as the governing figure of this new style of senatorial speech, Cicero holds out the promise not of a morally legible universe, but of a recognition that every Roman now lives in conditions virtually ‘impossible to believe’, the emergence of one ruler, under whom the chains of traditional obligations do not consistently hold” (183). The short conclusion (“The Republic Remastered”) attacks “the tendency, dominant since the nineteenth-century emergence of sociology and economics, to treat human beings primarily as rational calculators or creatures of practical wisdom” (203) and expresses the hope that “close attention to these texts has the capacity to reshape the way we think about civic wisdom—the way schools teach history, literature, civics, and philosophy—about public discourse, especially public commentary on political oratory, and about the conversations we citizens hold among ourselves” (207).I have deliberately used the author’s own words to indicate what the book attempts to do, because I would find it impossible to summarise its argument any other way. Even with these formulae to help, Connolly’s selective and apparently random approach imposes a heavy burden on the reader to construct a coherent framework for her ideas. I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is a direct result of Connolly’s impressive mastery of the political-sciences literature. It is an excellent thing to be so thoroughly familiar with the works of Hannah Arendt, Simon Critchley, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Dean Hammer, Bonnie Honig, Andreas Kalyvas, George Kareb... (shrink)

The Roman Catholic theological approach to euthanasia is radically prohibitive. The main theological argument for this prohibition is the so-called “stewardship argument”: Christians cannot escape accounting to God for stewardship of the bodies given them on earth. This contribution presents an alternative approach based on European existentialist and philosophical traditions. The suggestion is that exploring the fullness of our relational responsibility is more apt for a pluralist – and even secular – debate on the legitimacy of euthanasia.

The last decade and a half has seen an ardent development of self-organised criticality, a new approach to complex systems, which has become important in many domains of natural as well as social science, such as geology, biology, astronomy, and economics, to mention just a few. This has led many to adopt a generalist stance towards SOC, which is now repeatedly claimed to be a universal theory of complex behaviour. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I provide a (...) brief and non-technical introduction to SOC. Second, I critically discuss the various bold claims that have been made in connection with it. Throughout, I will adopt a rather sober attitude and argue that some people have been too readily carried away by fancy contentions. My overall conclusion will be that none of these bold claims can be maintained. Nevertheless, stripped of exaggerated expectations and daring assertions, many SOC models are interesting vehicles for promising scientific research.Author Keywords: Self-organised criticality; Scaling law; Models; Formal analogy. (shrink)

A Dover reprint of the 1911 English translation. The eight lectures deal with the interaction among the Oriental mysteries and late Roman paganism, with particular reference to the factors within the mysteries which made them attractive in the Empire.--R. T.

When Cicero uncovered and suppressed the Catilinarian Conspiracy as consul in 63 B.c., supporters hailed him ‘father of his country’ and proposed that he be awarded the oak crown normally given to a soldier who had saved the life of a comrade in battle . Our sources connect these honours with earlier heroes such as Romulus, Camillus and Marius, but the Elder Pliny writes as if Cicero was the first before Caesar and the Emperors to be given the title pater (...) patriae. Pliny's point may revolve around Senatorial initiative, and assuming this to be the case he really should have stressed that Cicero received the informal support of a limited number of Senators only, whereas Caesar and the Emperors were honoured by formal vote of the entire Senate. Perhaps Pliny was fooled by the prominence of those who spoke on Cicero's behalf, such as Cato, Catulus and Gellius Publicola. Opponents, on the other hand, angrily rejected calls that Cicero be recognised as the saviour of the state. In their eyes his execution of the Catilinarians marked him as a cruel tyrant. Metellus Nepos proposed Pompey's recall from the East in order to free Rome from Cicero's tyranny. Aside from echoes of patria potestas, it seems obvious that the Romans were thinking in terms of the conventional Greek antithesis between the good king who is like a father to his people and the selfish tyrant who treats his subjects as slaves. The Younger Pliny employs the same basic ideas in his Panegyricus: the cruel tyrant Domitian suppressed freedom and desired honour as a god ; the gentle Trajan is a citizen and father not a tyrant and master . Tacitus has this basic distinction in mind too. Nevertheless, as is well known, Pliny regularly addresses Trajan not as ‘father’ but as ‘master’ in Book 10 of his Letters. This was plainly an acceptable practice on the social plane, if not quite yet on the political. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius indicated their opposition to dominus as a title for themselves, evidently for its connotations of autocracy and servitude. Domitian, damned as a tyrant, was accused of demanding to be addressed as dominus et deus. The title dominus existed from at least the first century A.d. as a common form of polite address between inferiors and superiors of free birth, not only between masters and slaves. It gradually gained acceptance as an official title of the Emperor through the second century and was advertised widely by the Severi. And yet its tone throughout this period could also be critical when understood in terms of the good king/tyrant antithesis. (shrink)

BackgroundThe theory and practice of ethics consultations (ECs) in health care are still characterized by many controversies, including, for example, the practice of giving recommendations. These controversies are complicated by an astonishing lack of evidence in the whole field. It is not clear how often a recommendation is issued in ethics consultations and when and why this step is taken. Especially in a facilitation model in which giving recommendations is optional, more data would be helpful to evaluate daily practice, ensure (...) that this practice is in line with the overarching goals of this approach and support the development of standards.MethodsWe analyzed all consultations requested from an EC service working under a facilitation approach at a maximum-care university hospital in Germany over a period of more than 10 years. Our aim was to better understand why—and under what circumstances—some consultation requests result in a recommendation, whereas others can be sufficiently addressed solely by facilitated meetings. We especially wanted to know when and why clients felt the need for clear advice from the EC service while in other cases they did not. We compared ethics consultations in terms of the differences between cases with and without recommendations issued by the ethics consultants using χ2 difference tests and Welch’s t-test.ResultsA total of 243 ECs were carried out between September 2008 and December 2019. In approximately half of the cases, a recommendation was given. All recommendations were issued upon the request of clients. When physicians asked for an EC, the consultation was significantly more likely to result in a recommendation than when the EC was requested by any other party. ECs in cases on wards with ethics rounds resulted in comparably fewer recommendations than those in wards without ethics rounds. When interpersonal conflicts were part of the problem or relatives were present in the meeting, clients less frequently asked for a recommendation.ConclusionFrom the client’s point of view, there does not seem to be only one “right” way to provide ethics consultations, but rather several. While facilitated meetings are obviously appreciated by clients, there also seem to be situations in which a recommendation is desired (especially by physicians). Further empirical and theoretical research is needed to validate our single-center results and re-evaluate the role of recommendations in ethics consultations. (shrink)

Der hier vorgelegte Band 5 der Gesammelten Werke Roman Ingardens (1893-1970) trägt dreizehn kleinere Schriften zusammen, die der namhafte polnische Husserl-Schüler zur Phänomenologie seines Lehrers abgefaßt hat. Es handelt sich dabei um Texte, die teils schon zu Ingardens Lebzeiten veröffentlicht worden sind, teils aber dem deutschsprachigen Publikum bisher entweder nur fragmentarisch oder gar nicht bekannt waren. Insgesamt hat in diesen formal wie zeitlich differenzierten Texten Ingardens jahrzehntelange Auseinandersetzung mit der Philosophie Husserls ihre instruktive Dokumentierung gefunden.

Romans 7: 14 if. has traditionally been one of the most frequently discussed passages in the whole of the Pauline Corpus. Nevertheless, this pericope has attracted attention more because it is consistently regarded as a crucial part of Paul's theology, than because of its intrinsic exegetical problems. The main issue is whether the ‘split personality’ and the weakness of will should be regarded as essential to the life of the believing Christian; or, rather, as characteristic for those who are not (...) ‘in Christ’ and therefore beyond the power of his Spirit. For the systematic theologian, the question of whether the first person singular in these verses should be understood in an autobiographical sense is a subordinate one. However this particular question is answered, we are still confronted by the main issue. (shrink)