Byron Kaldis

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems.

The moral dimensions of how we conduct business affect all of our lives in ways big and small, from the prevention of environmental devastation to the policing of unfair trading practices, from arguments over minimum wage rates to those over how government contracts are handed out. Yet for as deep and complex a field as business ethics is, it has remained relatively isolated from the larger, global history of moral philosophy. This book aims to bridge that gap, reaching deep into the past and traveling the globe to reinvigorate and deepen the basis of business ethics. Spanning the history of western philosophy as well as looking toward classical Chinese thought and medieval Islamic philosophy, this volume provides business ethicists a unified source of clear, accurate, and compelling accounts of how the ideas of foundational thinkers—from Aristotle to Friedrich Hayek to Amartya Sen—relate to wealth, commerce, and markets. The essays illuminate perspectives that have often been ignored or forgotten, informing discussion in fresh and often unexpected ways. In doing so, the authors not only throw into relief common misunderstandings and misappropriations often endemic to business ethics but also set forth rich moments of contention as well as novel ways of approaching complex ethical problems. Ultimately, this volume provides a bedrock of moral thought that will move business ethics beyond the ever-changing opinions of headline-driven debate.

This paper presents aphilosophical approach to the semiotics of lawin terms of an exercise in symbolictransposition whereby aesthetic categories arebrought to bear on jurisprudence, and inparticular on two of its foundationalquestions. These questions, the backdropagainst which the analysis unfolds, ask (1)whether law is static or dynamic; and (2)whether law `constitutes' human beings, in somespecific sense, or whether the reverse holds. The notions of universality and necessity andthat of utopia are employed together with twoopposite art symbols and a model of theirantitheses is constructed revealing diverseanswers as to how to conceive law in relationto the two questions. One answer is singled outby adopting the principles of Kantian aesthetic(reflective) judgement: to elicit an aestheticclaim, law must be seen as a utopian socialorder exhibiting purposiveness without,however, presupposing any predeterminedsubstantive normative end. This is effected bya special reading permitting the combination ofnecessitation (obligation) with free play – thisbeing the common ground shared by both law andaesthetics but only in this limiting utopianmoment. This is a unique sense in which legaldiscourse is formally assimilated to aestheticnon-purposive judgements yet withoutrelinquishing law's distinctive feature aspurposive order prescribing, however,prescription alone as a formal end.

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems.

Observational learning is ubiquitous. We very often observe and pick up information about how others behave and subsequently replicate similar behaviours in one way or another. Focusing on observational learning, I investigate human imitation, the mechanisms that underpin it as well as the processes that complement it, in order to assess its contribution to learning and education. Furthermore, I construe emotion as a scaffold for observational learning and bring together evidence about its influence on selective attention. Finally, I flesh out possible ways in which the insights about the role of imitation in learning could help design a more effective and equally rewarding learning environment. Specifically, I suggest that perhaps the simplest and most effective way to foster learning via promoting imitation is through letting learners of various ages co-exist. The benefits of learning in a mixed-age group are assessed.

This paper programmatically posits, argues for the relevance of, and briefly addresses the question whether innate conceptual repertoires, if admitted as plausible, should matter to transhumanist debates. The latter should turn their attention to analyzing the radically enhanced cognitive capacities with which such future human beings will be endowed. The answers eventually given to this puzzle will inevitably challenge received views on education, especially the kind of education appropriate for such future minds.

This book raises and examines the philosophical problem of how it is possible that the social world is constituted as a unified totality. A novel theory of social i holism is put forward on the basis of what is specified as formal ontology. The first part of the book discloses the non-extensional constitution of the social world and proposes that the individual is to be understood as a 'Leibnizian entelechial monad' in conceptual communication with the others. it is further established that the categories of social holism must be placed within a transcendental locus. in the second part, this conceptual communication is analysed as the possession and application of social concepts, meaningful linguistic behaviour, and the intentionality of mental acts. Finally, in the last part, the event-structure to the social world is described. Social states of affairs as constituents of an event-dense social world are shown to be complex wholes irreducible to their subjects and instantiating an intensional nexus of relations of social properties.

This paper identifies three sets of problems of a specific ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the conflict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the first problem is encountered. The problem identified here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round--i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identified as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral conflict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identified in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must first acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral conflict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but conflicting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion. These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical difficulties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such difficulties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se

This article addresses the question as to whether it is logically possible to fashion a discourse exclusively for the natural environment. Could such a discourse emerge without colonization by other social spheres acting as proxy? The prospects appear to be rather bleak, for even in the case of two apparently non-human-directed or non-committal discourses, that of extensionist ethics and new sophisticated management (of environmental crises), the latent social-constructionism built into both renders them monistic discourses hegemonically mapping the territories of what they refer to. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the human epistemic locatedness anti-anthropocentric critics demand. Despite this, such an exercise offers us the benefit of being mindful of what the crisis of social-scientific discourses amounts to as well as what to expect of discourse analysis as such. Furthermore, the prospects of the two discourses examined are being mapped onto two modified models drawing on Foucault and Deleuze thus helping us understand the pattern of our diverse environmental responses. Ecological thinking is perhaps the first subject-matter that transcends or shatters discourse boundaries and strains both imagination and human powers when selecting between conceptual frameworks, making us aware of the ineluctable feature of social-constructionism present in our social thought

Is a Health Care Ethics possible? Against sceptical and relativist doubts Kantian deontology may advance a challenging alternative affirming the possibility of such an ethics on the condition that deontology be adopted as a total programme or complete vision. Kantian deontology is enlisted to move us from an ethics of two-person informal care to one of institutions. It justifies this affirmative answer by occupying a commanding meta-ethical stand. Such a total programme comprises, on the one hand, a dual-aspect strategy incorporating the macro- (institutional) and micro- (person-to-person) levels while, on the other, it integrates consistently within moral epistemology a meta-ethics with lower-ground moral theories. The article describes the issues to be dealt with and the problems which have to be solved on the way to a unifying theory of that kind (Sections I-III) and indicates elements of Kantian moral philosophy which may serve as building blocks (Section IV). Among these are not only Kant’s ideas concerning the moral acting of persons and his ideas concerning civil society and state but also his ideas concerning morality, schematism and religion

This paper places certain religious ideas of Eastern Christianity about our relationship to nature critically against techno-scientific thinking and practice. Specifically, the two focal issues of the discussion are the concept of religious sin, on the one hand, and the peculiarly modern fusion of science and technology, resulting in the novel phenomenon of techno-science, on the other. Two corresponding theses are advanced: that of sin as an epistemic, and not as a moral, error, and that of the “Eucharistic” viz., celebratory relation with God. The paper then proceeds to trace significant parallels that may be discerned between the Orthodox theological view and Heidegger’s position on technology, and metaphysics more generally, culminating in the suggestion that the way out of the ‘danger’ of technology as techno-science must be found in art or religion