We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a (...) ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive. Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together. (shrink)

A piliscsabai Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem oktatója, Hankovszky Tamás (két kivételtől eltekintve) az utóbbi évtizedben megjelent publikációiból állította össze tanulmánykötetét. A filozófiai, teológiai és irodalmi ihletésű írásokat mindenekelőtt "az Istennel való találkozás" keresztény hite fűzi egybe, és persze a filozófiatörténész szerző preferenciái (Pilinszky, Camus, Mauriacimon Weil, Dosztojevszkij). "Minden találkozás olyan partnereket követel, akik szabadon megnyílnak egymásnak, de nem oldódnak fel egymásban, akik a másik közelségére vágynak, mégis megőrzik a köztük lévő távolságot, mert a dialógust keresik, és a dialógus lételeme a (...) különbözőség. Ám az ember csak azért különbözik a másik embertől és Istentől, hogy kapcsolatba léphessenek" - olvasható az ismertetőben. Mivel Hankovszky professzor a találkozásban és a párbeszédben látja az élet értelmét és végső célját, a kötet kívül áll azon a misztikát is felölelő monista hagyományon, amely az Istennel való minél teljesebb egyesülésre, Isten és ember egységére törekszik, és a vele való párbeszédet, a kölcsönös megszólítást pusztán a cél felé vezető út első lépésének tekinti. Azonban éppen azért áll kívül ezen az ősi és tiszteletreméltó hagyományon, hogy dialógust folytasson vele, és így teljesebben érthesse meg Isten és ember viszonyát, valamint megtalálja benne a földi lét, a művészet és a kultúra igazi helyét. A szakkönyvtárak anyagába ajánlható kötetet rövidítés- és irodalomjegyzék, valamint az esszék és tanulmányok első megjelenési helyeinek listája teszi teljessé. (shrink)

Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories. This was a in thought and in fact, recurring motive of European thought from the earliest self-aware beginnings, and Tamas knows that history well, as his critical respect (...) demonstrates. Ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers appear in this book, set forth in their own words; and likewise we see that Tamas has built upon the historians and commentators, upon the pioneering historical investigation of the categories by Trendelenburg a century ago and by Bochenski in our days. Tamas has two principal goals here: to investigate the logic, which is to say the structure and the relations, of the philosophical categories; and to set forth the logic of thought which may then be based upon the critically established system of categories obtained by that investigation. Ancillary but of striking value is his style of historical relevance which enables the reader to engage in a discussion that is both analytically sharp and developmentally insightful. Furthermore, Tamas draws upon his contem porary colleagues with similar critical respect: Lukasiewicz, Quine, Patzig, Menne, Tavanets and others. (shrink)

To establish Optimality Theory as a framework in anthropology, or as a general model of higher human cognition, researchers have to demonstrate OT is convincing in a number of ways. This commentary summarizes some of them including factorial typologies, exact formulation of candidate sets and constraints, and computational plausibility.

In his famous clarification Kant claimed that philosophy of Fichte is „nothing more or less than mere logic". In contrast with this interpretation Fichte from the beginning agreed with Kant and Reinhold on the fact that philosophy and logic are different from each other moreover the classical principles of logic can not be the principles of philosophy as well. However according to Fichte Reinhold did not succeed in explaining the relationship between philosophy and logic sufficiently. Hence Fichte proceeding from the (...) detailed critique of Reinhold laid in Review of Aenesidemus gives a new concept for the principles of both logic and philosophy. Accordingly in Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge he building upon this idea chooses such principle of the logic that possesses material validity and special content to be the absolutely primordial axiom of the science of knowledge. As we have seen the differences from the logic conception of Kant and Reinhold we can conceive better the meaning of the sentence from Fichte: “Everything to which the proposition ‘A = A’ is applicable, has reality, insofar as that proposition is applicable to it.” – This is one of the sentences dragged away from the context could provoked Kant’s ire reasonably.In seiner berühmten Erklärung äußerte Kant, die Wissenschaftslehre sei „nichts mehr oder weniger als bloße Logik“. Dieser Meinung widerspricht Fichtes Selbstinterpretation, weil er von Anfang an mit Kant und Reinhold darin einig war, dass sich Philosophie und Logik voneinander unterscheiden, und die klassischen Prinzipien der Logik nicht als Grundsätze der Philosophie gelten können. Nach seiner Auffassung gelingt es allerdings Reinhold nicht, das Verhältnis von Logik und Philosophie befriedigend zu klären. Ausgehend von einer gründlichen Kritik an Reinhold in der Rezension des Aenesidemus führt Fichte eine neue Konzeption vom Verhältnis der Grundsätze der Logik und der Philosophie ein. In der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre wählt er einen mit realer Gültigkeit und besonderem Inhalt ausgestatteten Grundsatz der Logik zum absolut ersten Grundsatz der Wissenschaftslehre. Betrachtet man die Veränderungen der Kantschen und Reinholdschen Logikauffassung, wird es verständlicher, wenn Fichte schreibt: „Alles, worauf der Satz A = A anwendbar ist, hat, inwiefern derselbe darauf anwendbar ist, Realität“–einer von vielen Sätzen, die aus dem Kontext herausgenommen mit Fug und Recht Kants Missfallen ausgelöst haben könnten. (shrink)

Artificial Culture" is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human (...) ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve. Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies. "--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Wish-fulfilment as a singular means of satisfying ineluctable desire is a pivotal concept in classical psychoanalysis. Freud argued that it was the thread that united dreams, daydreams, phantasy, omnipotent thinking, neurotic and some psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, art, myth, and religious illusions. The concept's theoretical exploration has been largely neglected within psychoanalysis since, but contemporary philosophers have recognised it as providing an explanatory model for much of the kind of irrational behaviour so problematic for psychiatry, social psychology (...) and the philosophy of mind. Although critically neglected in contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic thought, the concept remains clinically fundamental, under different labels: it encompasses the processes of omnipotent phantasy, symbolic or substitutive satisfaction, actualisation in transference and acting out, symptom formation and defenses such as projective identification. Wish-fulfilment can be shown to be a specifically psychoanalytic compartment of a common-sense psychological theory of action that illuminates not just clinical material but also the paradoxes of irrationality – such as weakness of will and self-deception – that preoccupy philosophers. The first half of this book develops a comprehensive and novel theory of wish-fulfilment, explores its radical implications for the structure of mind, and locates it against the backdrop of both contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thought. In the second half, the book applies the theory to illuminate important features of self-deception and delusion, religion, insanity defences, creative writing and the exclusion of mind and intention in the biological drift of modern psychiatry. The book will be essential to philosophers of mind, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, social theorists, and students in these disciplines; as well as readers interested in understanding how the mind works in mental illness, self-deception, religion, and creative writing. (shrink)

It is common wisdom in intellectual history that eighteenth-century science of man evolved under the aegis of Newton. It is also frequently suggested that David Hume, one of the most influential practitioners of this kind of inquiry, aspired to be the Newton of the moral sciences. Usually this goes hand in hand with a more or less explicit reading of Hume’s theory of human nature as written in an idiom of particulate inert matter and active forces acting on it, i.e. (...) essentially that of Newton’s Principia. Hume’s outlook on the mental world is thus frequently described in terms of conceptual atoms whose association is compared to interparticulate attractions analogous with Newtonian forces in general, and gravity in particular. In the present paper I argue that Hume’s theory can indeed be understood in Newton’s wake, but not in the context of the Principa’s reception but that of the Opticks, which exerted a more significant influence on natural inquiry in eighteenth-century Scotland. I intend to show that Hume speaks a language and represents an outlook on human matters convergent with “philosophical chemistry” in Scotland at that time, and particularly to his later friend and physician William Cullen. (shrink)

It is essential for social robots to fit in the human society. In order to facilitate this process we propose to use the family dog’s social behaviour shown towards humans as an inspiration. In this study we explored dogs’ low level social monitoring in dog-human interactions and extracted individually consistent and context dependent behaviours in simple everyday social scenarios. We found that proximity seeking and tail wagging were most individually distinctive in dogs, while activity, orientation towards the owner, and exploration (...) were dependent on the context and/or the activity of the owner. The functional analogues of these dog behaviours can be implemented in social robots of different embodiments in order to make them acceptable and more believable for humans. Keywords: dog-owner interaction; social robotics; low-level social monitoring; greeting behaviour; individually distinctive behaviours. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

For Jerry Fodor, Hume’sTreatise of Human Natureis “the foundational document of cognitive science” whose significance transcends mere historical interest: it is a source of theoretical inspiration in cognitive psychology. Here I am going to argue that those reading Hume along Fodor’s lines rely on a problematic, albeit inspiring, construction of Hume’s science of mind. My strategy in this paper is to contrast Fodor’s understanding of the Humean mind (consonant with the widely received view of Hume in both cognitive science and (...) much of Hume scholarship) with an alternative understanding that I propose. I thereby intend to show that the received view of Hume’s science of mind can be fruitfully revised while critically engaging with Fodor’s contemporary appropriation. Consequently, I use this occasion to put forward a rather unorthodox interpretation of Hume’s theory in dialogue with Fodor as my guide. (shrink)

The aim of this study is an analysis of the possible adaptive consequences of delivery of low birth weight infants. We attempt to reveal the cost and benefit components of bearing small children, estimate the chance of the infants’ survival, and calculate the mothers’ reproductive success. According to life-history theory, under certain circumstances mothers can enhance their lifetime fitness by lowering the rate of investment in an infant and/or enhancing the rate of subsequent births. We assume that living in a (...) risky environment and giving birth to a small infant may involve a shift from qualitative to quantitative production of offspring. Given high infant mortality rates, parents will have a reproductive interest in producing a relatively large number of children with a smaller amount of prenatal investment. This hypothesis was tested among 650 Gypsy and 717 non-Gypsy Hungarian mothers. Our study has revealed that 23.8% of the Gypsy mothers had low birth weight (<2,500 g) children, whose mortality rate is very high. These mothers also had more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than those with normal weight children. As a possible response to these reproductive failures, they shortened birth spacing, gaining 2–4 years across their reproductive lifespan for having additional children. Because of the relatively short interbirth intervals, by the end of their fertility period, Gypsy mothers with one or two low birth weight infants have significantly more children than their ethnic Hungarian counterparts. They appear to compensate for handicaps associated with low birth weights by having a larger number of closely spaced children following the birth of one or more infants with a reduced probability of survival. The possible alternative explanations are discussed, and the long-term reproductive benefits are estimated for both ethnic groups. (shrink)

This article argues that early modern philosophy should be seen as an integrated enterprise of moral and natural philosophy. Consequently, early modern moral and natural philosophy should be taught as intellectual enterprises that developed hand in hand. Further, the article argues that the unity of these two fields can be best introduced through methodological ideas. It illustrates these theses through a case study on Scottish Newtonianism, starting with visions concerning the unity of philosophy and then turning to a discussion of (...) how methodological ideas figure in those visions. Finally, the article argues that methodological considerations can serve as good starting points to introduce and discuss central topics and canonical figures of the early modern period. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Marx project : a brief overview -- Origins of totalitarianism : ideology and terror -- The tradition -- First pillar : "labor is the creator of man" : on labor, necessity, and loneliness -- Third pillar : the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach -- Second pillar : violence is the midwife of history -- Die Aufhebung : as the state withers a new politics arises and philosophy fades away.

Unethical behavior in organizations has garnered more and more attention in the last decades but most of the scholarly work has used a static approach relying on methodological individualism and a mechanistic worldview when studying this topic. The process of moral disengagement and organizational culture have been linked to the prevalence of unethical behavior earlier, but this paper uses a complexity-informed systems perspective to explore the dynamic relationship of these concepts and aims to improve our understanding of the often unnoticeable, (...) step-by-step process through which organizational cultures can become conducive to unethical behavior. Organizations are conceptualized as complex adaptive systems in which transformative and stabilizing processes based on feedback loops take place continuously. It is discussed how these processes can lead to a phase transition driving organizations towards a state where unethical behavior is the general norm. The process is illustrated through real-life examples. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology comprises a wide area of theories and researches. One area focuses on the universal and comprehensive mechanisms of selection which can be utilized to interpret cultural phenomena. Memetic selection, epidemiology of representations, naturalistic approach to culture, and evolutionary epistemology use various principles and methods to explain the origin and spread of the cultural traits. Csaba Pléh, one of the representatives of Darwinian approach to social sciences, has made an effort to integrate these theoretical frameworks. He emphasizes the continuity (...) among biological evolution, hominid development, and cultural differentiation and change. Indeed, understanding mental, behavioral, and material commonalities shared across individuals or groups of individuals requires a multi-level explanation at different types and levels of evolutionary processes that are based on the same organizational principles but also imply quite distinctive procedures for acquiring, interpreting and using information derived from the social world. (shrink)

(1996). The emergence of the global culture and the global moral system: The global bio‐social system as the reference system of the human rights. World Futures: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 47-51.

According to Fichte’s early science of knowledge, man is a free and independent being who becomes somebody not through the power of nature, by developing his innate skills and abilities, or through external influence, but by his own power. Since the essence of human beings is I-hood, the individual, having defeated the not-I or nature living in him, has to strive towards the absolute I, which is nothing else but the being created by himself. This process is Bildung, the details (...) of which are elaborated in Fichte’s philosophy of education, whereby he opposes his point of view to Rousseau. Although Fichte emphasizes the activity of the student, he sees the assistance of an educator as indispensable. The role of the educator can be apprehended from the foundations of the science of knowledge. Thus, in order to be able to posit ourselves as free beings we require another being who summons us. ‘The summons to engage in free self-activity is what we call upbringing.’. (shrink)

The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements in Working Memory and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: the probe was identical to the original sentence in the story, the focused (...) word was replaced by a semantically related word and the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems. (shrink)

This study aims to clarify the relationship between nature and God in Pascalian thought. This relationship is based on the concept of unity. In a letter of 1648, Pascal wrote that God is present in nature through the ontological and formal unity of things which represents perfect divine unity. A few years later, through his mathematical research, Pascal discovered the principle of double infinity which he considered to be the essential attribute of nature. The unity of nature is defined as (...) the omnipresence of double infinity in nature. However, these two interpretations of unity are mutually exclusive because double infinity destroys all ontological and formal unity in things. The question is how Pascal maintains the relationship between nature and God if the principle of double infinity destroys formal unity in nature. The paper argues that the presence of the double infinite in nature does not destroy the relationship of resemblance and representation between nature and God but makes it more complex. The double infinite does not represent God in nature directly but is inscribed in things as the image of the hidden God. (shrink)

The theory of consciousness proposed by O'Brien & Opie is open to the Sorites paradox, for it defines a consciousness system internally in terms of computationally relevant units which add up to consciousness only if sufficient in number. The Sorites effect applies on the assumed level of features.

The paper contrasts Robert Brandom’s account of rationality with that of Daniel Dennett. It argues that neither of them is tenable, and sketches an alternative outlook that avoids the problems. In spite of their fundamental differences, both Brandom and Dennett employ a robust, i.e. explanatory and predictive notion of rationality, and for different reasons they both fail to offer a plausible theory supporting it. The lesson offered here is that rationality should not be treated alongside other norms prescribing behaviour, as (...) it cannot be accounted for in the same terms. Instead of ascribing rationality a robust role in a philosophical understanding of behaviour, it should be assigned a more modest one: its function should be located not in the context of explaining and predicting behaviour, but in the context of narratives folk psychological interpretation offers. (shrink)

What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, (...) we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike. (shrink)

An evolutionary theory of socialization suggests that children from father-absent families will mature earlier, and form less-stable pair bonds, compared with those from father-present families. Using a sample of about 1,000 persons the recent study focuses on elements of father-absent children’s behavior that could be better explained by a Darwinian approach than by rival social science theories. As a result of their enhanced interest in male competition, father-absent boys were found to engage in rule-breaking behavior more intensively than father-present boys. (...) Compared with father-present children, adolescents from widowed households (both boys and girls) showed a higher intensity of various kinds of noncompliant behavior, which can be linked to their earlier maturation. School attendance, age at marriage, and marital success proved to be influenced by the children’s early family experiences, governed by adapted evolutionary strategies. Father-absent daughters conceived more children than those whose fathers were present during their childhood. As evolutionary theory predicts, reproductive behavior of individuals from divorced households differed from that of individuals who grew up in widowed households. Finally, the strong correlation found between spontaneous abortion/stillbirths and family arrangement indicates that father absence has certain direct impacts on the neurohormonal processes of child development. (shrink)

The input data to grammar learning algorithms often consist of overt forms that do not contain full structural descriptions. This lack of information may contribute to the failure of learning. Past work on Optimality Theory introduced Robust Interpretive Parsing (RIP) as a partial solution to this problem. We generalize RIP and suggest replacing the winner candidate with a weighted mean violation of the potential winner candidates. A Boltzmann distribution is introduced on the winner set, and the distribution’s parameter $T$ is (...) gradually decreased. Finally, we show that GRIP, the Generalized Robust Interpretive Parsing Algorithm significantly improves the learning success rate in a model with standard constraints for metrical stress assignment. (shrink)