Managers face increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous situations that are more and more challenging to navigate. Ethical decision-making has become particularly complicated considering that codes, frameworks and protocols have proven deficient in resolving moral dilemmas. Managers’ unpreparedness to handle such challenges reflects the ineffectiveness of business ethics education, calling for new approaches towards training managers. This article makes a case for transforming business ethics education by taking it back to its roots. This implies the re-incorporation of its foundational discipline: (...) philosophy. Philosophy offers a rigorous approach for decision-making, which helps managers face the unknown. It helps them analyse situations from different perspectives, reconsider how things are done and examine the underlying premises of their thinking. It can strengthen one of the most central managerial competencies: the ability to reason, especially ethically. As the foundational discipline of business, ethics and their intersect, philosophy is uniquely positioned to elevate business ethics education for managers at all levels. It can help current and future managers to reflect more deeply and critically on the ethical issues they face. (shrink)

The current condition of philosophy as a discipline is quite problematic, in particular if we consider its relationship to other human sciences and to other disciplines in general. The philosophical debate appears fragmented, and philosophy itself has lost any specific role in the present scientific landscape. This situation determines a sort of “identity crisis”, whose main consequence is the coexistence of antinomical views about philosophy in the contemporary scientific and public discourse. Starting from this context, the paper aims at providing (...) a description of philosophy as “theory of mediation”. This description does not want to be ‘original’, but rather tries to emphasize an element that is always been rooted in the very essence of philosophy, but that has also often been neglected. Philosophy has always pointed out the necessity to think the in-between of things, their relation and the passage from one to another, rather than just offering a taxonomy or a factual description of the world. In order to prove this point, the paper offers an analysis of some classical texts, in particular of some fragments by Heraclitus and of a passage taken from Hegel’s early writings. A view that rethinks philosophy as “mediology” allows a rehabilitation of philosophy as a specific discipline and as a systematic enterprise, at the same time providing a new framework for the understanding of the relationship between philosophy and other sciences. (shrink)