This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, both ancient and contemporary. The authors analyze prevailing assumptions about these societies and propose more faithful, sensitive analyses of their ontological views about…
"This book is for all those who are seeking a human perspective on economic and organizational processes. It lays the foundations for a value based approach to the economy. The key questions are: “What is important to you or your organization?” “What is this action or that organization good for?” The book is directed at the prevalence of instrumentalist thinking in the current economy a…
This open access volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing research on hope theory by combining insights from both its long history and its increasing multi-disciplinarity. In the first part, it recognizes the importance of the centuries-old reflection on hope by offering historical perspectives and tracing it back to ancient Greek philosophy. At the same time, it provides novel per…
When listeners talk about their listening experiences, they often refer to music as if it were a narrative. But can music actually tell a story? Can music be narrative? Traditionally, narrativity is associated with verbal and visual texts, and the mere possibility of musical narrativity is highly debated. In this study, Vincent Meelberg demonstrates that music can indeed be narrative, and that …
This Open Access book brings together authoritative voices in animal and environmental ethics, who address the many different facets of changing human-animal relationships in the Anthropocene. As we are living in complex times, the issue of how to establish meaningful relationships with other animals under Anthropocene conditions needs to be approached from a multitude of angles. This book offe…
This open access book proposes a novel approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics. AI offers many advantages: better and faster medical diagnoses, improved business processes and efficiency, and the automation of boring work. But undesirable and ethically problematic consequences are possible too: biases and discrimination, breaches of privacy and security, and societal distortions such as…
This open access book presents new approaches for researching values as they are performed or materialized. Values have been an important topic in academic literature for a long time; they are at the core of institutional theories and are often connected to ideals in organisations or ways of valuing. The various values-constructs are typically highlighted to underpin discussions of identity, et…
The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals’ behavior predictable, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to rely upon each other, and thereby contribute to sustaining characteristically human social institutions such as jobs, money, government…
For over 80 years, the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) has been a leader in the promotion of ethical practice within the field of engineering. One of the Society’s greatest contributions is the formation and adoption of the NSPE Code of Ethics. But the code, with its six "Fundamental Canons," is only truly instructive if engineers can bridge the gap between principles and ac…
Debating Humanity explores sociological and philosophical efforts to delineate key features of humanity that identify us as members of the human species. After challenging the normative contradictions of contemporary posthumanism, this book goes back to the foundational debate on humanism between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger in the 1940s and then re-assesses the implicit and expli…