Although T.L.S. Sprigge described idealist philosophy as the stage beyond religion, his pantheistic idealism, while not itself a religion, offers a conception of God that seeks to meet the aspiration of human beings to understand their own place in the universe. While he shared with most mid twentieth century British philosophers a basic assumption of the primacy of experience, Sprigge took this strong empiricist assumption in a Berkeleyian rather than a Humean direction. This enabled him to find a place for (...) the phenomenon of religious consciousness, which he saw as the source of a yearning that can be met by absolute idealism's conception of a 'Whole' that encompasses ourselves and all aspects of our world. He describes this recognition as the faltering adumbration of a truth - one that is sometimes encountered in aesthetic experience, and sometimes more directly in the lives of mystics.The metaphysical basis for this form of absolute idealism is provided by a concept of time in which each fleeting 'now' has a fixed and permanent place, and by a theory of identity according to which personal individuality is dissolved in a unitary 'Whole'. (shrink)

. Gustav Radbruch is one of the most important German-speaking philosophers of law of the twentieth century. This paper raises the question of how to classify Radbruch's theories in the international context of legal philosophy and philosophy in general. Radbruch's work was mainly influenced by the southwest German school of Neo-Kantianism, represented by Windelband, Rickert, and Lask. Their theories of culture and value show an affirmative-holistic understanding of philosophy as a source of wisdom and meaningfulness. Kant, on the other hand, (...) belongs more to a fundamentally different, critical camp of philosophy. Although Radbruch has incorporated Kantian Elements into his theory, he is rather a member of the affirmative-holistic camp. In the end the question will be raised as to what ought to be preserved of his philosophy. (shrink)

I examine the ancient and perennial notion of the elements (stoicheia) and its relation to an idea of place proper (topos) and natural place (topos oikeios) in Aristotle's work. Through an exploration of his accounts, I argue that Aristotle develops a robust theory of place that is relevant to current environmental and geographical thought. In the process, he provides a domestic household and home for earth, air, fire and water that offers a supplement or an alternative to more abstract and (...) controversial uses of a conception of 'nature' (physis). I identify and elaborate upon environmental aspects of place-based and elemental philosophy. (shrink)

This study examines a sample of three editions of 19 financial accounting and auditing textbooks (n = 57) to explore the state of accounting educational content through the coverage of five key topics (ethics, professional judgment, governance, corporate social responsibility, and fraud) and 16 accounting scandals/troubled corporations. The study method is descriptive and uses independent sample t tests to identify significant differences over time and between countries. The major findings are fourfold. First, some topics' coverage and/or scandals exist in most (...) of the sample's books based on their indexes. However, the page coverage for these topics/scandals is not overwhelming when compared to the number of pages in these texts. Second, the scandals/troubled corporations' page coverage increased between the earliest and the later editions as did a depth of coverage trend measure. Third, U.S. texts in the sample contained significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals than the non-adapted Canadian sample texts. Finally, and as expected, the sampled auditing texts contain significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals compared to the other financial accounting texts in the sample. Educators and textbook authors interested in the future of business and accounting education will find this study of interest. If reminding accounting students of the ethical dilemmas they will face in their future careers is important, then this study indicates places where coverage in this sample of texts may be enhanced either through the use of standalone supplementary ethics texts or instructor introduced sources. (shrink)

Prof. Haack answers a series of questions on pragmatism, beginning with the origins of this tradition in the work of Peirce and James, its evolution in the work of Dewey and Mead, and its influence beyond the United States in, for example, the Italian pragmatists and the radical British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller. Classical pragmatism, she observes, is a rich and varied tradition from which there is still much to be learned—as the many ways her own work in logic, (...) epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of law has been informed by the old pragmatists testify. Of late, however, this tradition has been misunderstood, impoverished, and vulgarized by self-styled neo-pragmatists; here, Haack turns her attention specifically to the conception of pragmatism as essentially a political philosophy, and the near-vacuous equation of pragmatism with “problem-solving.”. (shrink)