David Carl Wilson

A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell.

This essay examines the concept of leadership as it is commonly understood within the field of leadership studies today. The inquiry is framed by an analysis of three generally accepted definitions of leadership. I look at the selected definitions from four angles, which I call the four dimensions of leadership: the behavioral (what the leader does, or ought to do, that makes it leadership), the asymmetrical (in what sense a leader is different from the others in the group), the social (what it is that the leader is leading), and the teleological (what the direction is). By doing this, I find that these definitions can be problematic, if instructively so. I identify two underlying concerns. The first problem is the tendency to fuse informal and formal leadership into a single concept. I argue that informal and formal leadership can be more helpfully understood, rather, as two separate, if sometimes overlapping, concepts, each needing its own definition and analysis. This is because formal leadership is a functional concept, while informal leadership is not; this entails not only that each type of leader is leading a different type of entity, but also that each is judged by different standards. The second problem is, paradoxically, a bias against leadership. To put this less polemically: scholars who recognize that organizational success can be hindered by excessive emphasis upon hierarchy, and who thus study the dynamics of egalitarian collaboration, can inadvertently generate confusion by allowing the honorific of “leadership” to be applied also to that work. So, I propose definitions of the two key concepts, formal and informal leadership, with the suggestion that this provides a helpful method of sorting leadership scholarship into three categories: formal leadership; informal leadership; and egalitarianism.

This essay reviews the recently released Handbook of Philosophy of Management, using it as a jumping off point to explore some potential confusions in contemporary philosophy of management. The handbook itself, comprising 58 articles and some 1,000 pages, is a milestone for the field. At the same time, it brings a few problems into sharp relief. I argue for more clarity about the distinction between the philosophy of management and the philosophy of management research. I make the case that logic as a de facto method for conducting inquiry may or may not be useful, while logic as a de jure standard for evaluating its conclusions is indispensable. I develop the view that neither management nor management studies is properly considered a science, or even an applied science. I contend that the seminal contributions of Alasdair MacIntyre are unjustly neglected by the field. And I advance the thesis that perhaps the leading issue for the philosophy of management today is the question of the purpose of management, pointing in some suggested directions for answering the question.

This paper introduces the special theme on management and political philosophy, following a call for papers in the journal Philosophy of Management. The scope of this introduction is to emphasize the importance of political philosophy as a subtheme in the discipline of philosophy of management by shedding light on a cornerstone conversation: the role of the state in fostering corporate accountability for social injustice. For doing so, we present the papers invited to this special theme and show how they contribute to this conversation. Inspired by the arguments that the articles in this special theme develop, we also provide further thoughts for the directions that future research should pursue for enriching the discussions in the political philosophy of management.

Some of our beliefs are justified regardless of the quality of the evidence for them. This, at least, is what Alvin Plantinga argues; and, he adds, belief in God is typically just such a belief. With the objective of determining whether Plantinga is right, I conduct a broad inquiry into the pertinent epistemological issues. ;I begin with meta-epistemology. A justified belief, I argue, is a belief that satisfies the internal necessary conditions for knowledge. Alternatively, it is a belief that we would be willing to take someone's word for, on the assumption that we did not know the identity of the belief but did know the internal conditions that the belief satisfied. By looking at particular instances of such beliefs and at the principles that such beliefs must satisfy, the correct theory of justified belief can be discovered. ;I then turn to substantive epistemology. The three most popular theories of justified belief are reliabilism, foundationalism, and coherentism; but each is ruled out by the preceding meta-epistemology. To be preferred is a composite view, which I present as a system of hypothetical imperatives directing us, if we want to know the answer to a particular question, to accept the answer that displays the appropriate empirical and propositional fit. ;I finally employ this theory in assessing the original claim--that some beliefs can be justified without regard for the quality of their evidence. If the claim is that some beliefs can be justified without satisfying the necessary conditions for justification, it is trivially false. If the claim is that some beliefs can be justified without the existence of arguments in their favor, it may well be true--but, pace Plantinga, belief in God cannot be one of those beliefs. If the claim is that some beliefs can be justified without the believer's producing evidence or even being able to produce evidence for the belief, it is true; in fact, in this way it is true for all justified beliefs. And it is only in this way that belief in God, if justified, can be evidentially privileged