“We need to start by recognising that the company is a contributor to the moral order of society.” Only then can we really and accurately identify the role of business in today's society. The author of this important study is Principal Lecturer in the Business Studies Department, Manchester Metropolitan University.

The significance of German Romantic and Hegelian philosophy for educational practice is not attended to as much as it deserves to be, both as a matter of historical interest and of current importance. In particular, its role in shaping the thought of John Dewey, whose educational philosophy is of seminal importance for discussions on education for citizenship, is of considerable interest, as recent work by Jim Garrison (2006) and James Good (2006; 2007) has shown. This article focuses on the Hegelian (...) concepts of Bildung and Sittlichkeit in order to consider how they may illuminate the purpose and practice of education for citizenship through a conceptualisation of the relationship of individual to society, and, specifically, through the idea of cultural induction. The discussion takes as its principal reference point the Scottish policy context. (shrink)

In spite of the important discoveries made by Adam Smith and later by the economists of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek remained intellectually challenged by the miracle of the price mechanism. As it turned out there was still some pioneering to do in describing the price mechanism. This became clear when Hayek identified the dispersal of information relevant to exchange transactions as the central issue of economic study. In the context of his distinction between competition as a state of things (...) and as a process the price mechanism manifests itself as a powerful integrator of information which is at first sight hopelessly dispersed in modern society. In 1945 he pointed out another intellectual challenge which the miracle of the price mechanism poses: How could such a marvelous functionality come into existence? “I am convinced that if it [the price mechanism] were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind”. It is precisely because the free determination of prices is obviously not an invention, and because actors on the market in general do not realize that their decisions are at once also signals for the information-processing system that the market is, that in general this market order is not highly estimated. The market order is nevertheless the best illustration of the dual principle that the most beautiful forms of complex functionality are not deliberately created and are not deliberately maintained. (shrink)

Responses are strengthened by consequences having to do with the survival of individuals and species. With respect to the provenance of behavior, we know more about ontogenic than phylogenic contingencies. The contingencies responsible for unlearned behavior acted long ago. This remoteness affects our scientific methods, both experimental and conceptual. Until we have identified he variables responsible for an event, we tend to invent causes. Explanatory entities such as “instincts,” “drives,” and “traits” still survive. Unable to show how organisms can behave (...) effectively under complex circumstances, we endow them with special abilities permitting them to do so.Behavior exhibited by most members of a species is often accepted as inherited if all members were not likely to have been exposed to relevant ontogenic contingencies. When contingencies are not obvious, it is perhaps unwise to call any behavior either inherited or acquired, as the examples of churring in honey guides and following in imprinted ducklings show. Nor can the relative importance of phylogenic and ontogenic contingencies be argued from instances in which unlearned or learned behavior intrudes or dominates. Intrusions occur in both directions.Behavior influenced by its consequences seems directed toward the future, but only past effects are relevant. The mere fact that behavior is adaptive does not indicate whether phylogenic or ontogenic processes have been responsible for it. Examples include the several possible provenances of imitation, aggression, and communication. The generality of such concepts limits their usefulness. A more specific analysis is needed if we are to deal effectively with the two kinds of contingencies and their products. (shrink)

Cultural pluralism is both a fact and a norm. It is a fact that our world, and indeed our society, are marked by a large diversity of cultures delineated in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, ideology, and other partly interpenetrating variables. This fact raises the normative question of whether, or to what extent, such diversities should be recognized or even encouraged in policies concerning government, law, education, employment, the family, immigration, and other important areas of social concern.

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in (...) political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklarmigrare flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism. (shrink)

I offer an examination of trust relations in scientific inquiry as they seem to contrast with a lack of trust in an example of knowledge imposed from above by an unaccountable institutional power structure. On this basis I argue for a re-reading of John Hardwig's account of the place of trust in knowledge, and suggest that it translates less well than social epistemologists and others have assumed into a model for democratic epistemic practice.

By taking serious a remark once made by Paul Bernays, namely that an account of the nature of rationality should begin with concept-formation, this article sets out to uncover both the restrictive and the expansive boundaries of rationality. In order to do this some implications of the perennial philosophical problem of the “coherence of irreducibles” will be related to the acknowledgement of primitive terms and of their indefinability. Some critical remarks will be articulated in connection with an over-estimation of rationality (...) – concerning the influence of Kant's view of human understanding as the formal law-giver of nature (the supposedly “rational structure of the world”), and the apparently innocent (subjectivist) habit to refer to experiential entities as 'objects'. The other side of the coin will be highlighted with reference to those kinds of knowledge transcending the limits of concept-formation – culminating in formulating the four most basic idea-statements philosophy can articulate about the universe. What is found “in-between” these (restrictive) and (expansive) boundaries of rationality will then briefly be placed within the contours of a threefold perspective on the self-insufficiency of logicality – as merely one amongst many more dimensions conditioning human life. Although the meaning of the most basic logical principles – such as the logical principles of identity, non-contradiction and sufficient reason – will surface in our analysis, exploring some of the complex issues in this respect, such as the relationship between thought and language, will not be analysed. The important role of solidarity – as the basis of critique – will be explained and related both to the role of immanent criticism in rational conversation and the importance of acknowledging what is designated as the principle of the excluded antinomy (which in an ontic sense underlies the logical principle of non-contradiction). The last section of our discussion will succinctly illuminate the proper place of the inevitable trust we ought to have in rationality – while implicitly warning against the rationalistic over-estimation of it (its degeneration into a rationalist “faith in reason”). Our intention is to enhance an awareness of the reality that rationality is embedded in and borders on givens which are not open to further “rational” exploration – givens that both condition (in a constitutive sense) and transcend the limits of conceptual knowledge. Some of the distinctions and insights operative in our analysis are explained in Strauss 2000 and 2003. Yet, most of the systematic perspectives found in this analysis of rationality are only developed in this article for the first time. Since a different study is required to discuss related problems and results found within cognitive science, it cannot be discussed within one article. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(3) 2003: 247–266. (shrink)

Marxism was indeed vulgarized due to scientism in the 20th century, which even limits the development of Chinese social theories nowadays. This paper put forward the idea that it was serious misunderstanding to interpret Marx as prophet or inventor like empiricists who regard finding out eternal laws as the goal of science. In fact, Marx did not propose any so-called “natural laws of historical development”. He articulated that the only thing worth to do was to take note of what happened (...) before his eyes and to become its mouthpiece. Thus, to understand science in the face of social practice, to analyze everything historically and never to thrust “eternal” laws in any era should be taken as the core of Marx’s new science, which is very important to China today. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Michele Moody-Adams’ critique of the ‘inability thesis’, according to which some cultures make the resources for criticizing injustice ‘unavailable’ to their members. I investigate Moody-Adams’ alternative ‘affected ignorance’ thesis. Using the example of slavery in ancient Greece, I consider two potential candidates for affected ignorance which involve, respectively, ‘unawareness’ and ‘mistaken moral weighing’; in neither, I hold, may one ascribe culpability to those involved.

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the prospects of integrated history and philosophy of science, by examining how philosophical issues raised by “hidden entities”, entities that are not accessible to unmediated observation, can enrich the historical investigation of their careers. Conversely, I suggest that the history of those entities has important lessons to teach to the philosophy of science. Hidden entities have played a crucial role in the development of the natural sciences. Despite their centrality to past scientific practice, however, several (...) of them (e.g., phlogiston, caloric, and the ether) turned out to be fictitious. For this reason, they have figured prominently in recent debates on scientific realism. The issues I explore in this paper are entangled with those debates. I argue that our understanding of hidden entities and their role in experimental practice can be enhanced by adopting an integrated historical-cum-philosophical approach. On the one hand, philosophical reflection on the reality of those entities has a lot to gain by examining historically how they were ntroduced and investigated. On the other hand, the historical reconstruction of the careers of those entities may profit from philosophical reflection on their existence. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the relationship between Karl Popper’s conception of critical rationalism and William Bartley’s conception of pancritical rationalism. Both Popper and Bartley tended to identify rationality with openness to criticism, but they are usually considered to be disagreeing about whether rationality is limited or comprehensive and whether or not it applies to moral attitudes. These traditional interpretations are found wanting, and I make the case that there is—and was—no genuine, substantial conflict between Popper’s critical and Bartley’s pancritical (...) rationalism. The apparent disagreement between Popper and Bartley about critical versus pancritical rationalism is nothing but a tangle of several factors, including the misconstrual of Popper’s critical rationalism by Bartley, Popper’s disagreement with Bartley’s criticism of critical rationalism, Popper’s disagreement with Bartley’s claim that his formulation is superior to Popper’s formulation of critical rationalism in The Open Society and Its Enemies, and the clash of Bartley’s ambitions with Popper’s rather cold attitude toward his cherished ideas. New (so far unpublished and not discussed) archival material—Popper’s interview and two letters to Leslie Graves dated 1992—is invoked to provide crucial evidence for this interpretation. (shrink)

Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called 'ontologies,' for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They are often idiosyncratically structured, accessible only to those who (...) created them, and unable to serve as inputs for automated reasoning. This volume shows, in a nontechnical way and using examples from medicine and biology, how the rigorous application of theories and insights from philosophical ontology can improve the ontologies upon which information management depends. (shrink)

Recent results from the neurosciences demonstrate that pleasure and pain are not two symmetrical poles of a single scale of experience but in fact two different types of experiences altogether, with dramatically different contributions to well-being. These differences between pleasure and pain and the general finding that “the bad is stronger than the good” have important implications for our treatment of nonhuman animals. In particular, whereas animal experimentation that causes suffering might be justified if it leads to the prevention of (...) more suffering, it can never by justified merely by leading to increased levels of happiness. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is (...) certain. On the surface, it is curious that such a man would bring experiments to university physics. After all, in demonstrating experiments to his students, he was teaching them through their senses, not reason. However, if we consider the institutional context of de Volder’s teaching, we come to see de Volder’s Cartesian experimentalism as representative of a certain form of pre-Newtonian Dutch Cartesian science, as well as part of a larger tradition of teaching through observation at the University of Leiden. Considering de Volder’s institutional context will help us see that de Volder’s experimentalism was not in spite of his Cartesianism, but motivated by it. This paper will describe de Volder’s physics curriculum, the Theatre in which it was taught and how his work predates similar efforts in other European Universities. The second part will consider three aspects of the culture at the University of Leiden: a tradition of teaching through observation, a particular reception of Cartesianism, and an eclectic approach to the New Philosophy. The concluding portion shows how de Volder would have understood his enterprise in Cartesian terms. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider the standard objections put against the construction of metanarratives in the philosophy of history. The author distinguishes following intelectual sources questioning the grasp of Entirety in the philosophy of history: anti-naturalistic German philosophy of science, dogmatic Marxism, liberalism and postmodernism. Analysis of the content of these stances allows for disclose of hidden methodological and theoretical premises which are responsible for misunderstanding and critique of the historiosophical discourse.