Nam Nguyen

A Philosophy of Sacred Nature introduces Robert Corrington’s philosophical thought, “ecstatic naturalism,” which seeks to recognize nature’s self-transforming potential. Ecstatic naturalism is a philosophical-theological perspective, deeply seated in a semiotic cosmology and psychosemiosis, and it radically and profoundly probes into the mystery of nature’s perennial self-fissuring of nature natured and nature naturing. Edited by Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen, this collection aims to allow readers to see what can be done with ecstatic naturalism, and what directions, interpretations, and creative uses that doing can take. A thorough exploration of the prospects of ecstatic naturalism, this book will appeal to scholars of Continental philosophy, religious naturalism, and American pragmatism.

Whether the self is situated in the semiotic community or in the encompassing realm of Existenz , an anthropocentric obsession with the self as the arbiter of knowledge has been continuously privileged. And whether located by modernism or dislocated by postmodernism, the anthropocentric self is still plagued with its own "crisis of subjectivity" . As a foundling within nature, the self is ontologically fissured. Ecstatic naturalism succinctly states: "At the heart of the self is a cleft, a wound that emerges with the first dawn of consciousness and remains with the self until its death." The self is but one frail perspective of and in nature. One way in which the so-called nature's "primal self" can be semiotically and metaphysically explored and examined is through the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, which probes into the ontological divide or difference between nature naturing and nature natured. Because both Peirce and Jaspers affirmed the anthropocentric principle, they ignored the self's metaphysical relations to the ontological difference of nature naturing and nature natured as profoundly and radically articulated by Corrington's ecstatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism, as a descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, is well equipped to probe deeply beneath the surface layers of the anthropocentric self theorized by Peirce and Jaspers in order to elicit the self's hidden origin, which is directly and infinitely sustained in its "primal ground," the unconscious of nature

We use variation in corruption convictions across judicial districts in the US to examine the relationship between political corruption and risk-taking of public firms. Firms headquartered in regions with high levels of political corruption have lower total risk and lower idiosyncratic risk on average. Further analysis shows that corruption tends to encourage firms to pursue risk-decreasing investments, lower the riskiness of their operations, and decrease asset liquidity. While managerial ownership is intended to align the interests of managers and shareholders, the presence of corruption appears to encourage undiversified managers to decrease risk-taking. Our evidence is consistent with agency theory and the asset-shielding argument that political corruption discourages managers from taking risks that expose firms to expropriation by politicians, resulting in suboptimal corporate policies.