Colloquium Talk on Business Ethics: UPDATE

The Philosophy Department, in conjunction with the AU Philosophy Club and Phi Sigma Tau

proudly sponsor the following presentation:

“Business Ethics: Can Aristotle Help Us?”

Dr. James Stover

Wheeling Jesuit University,WV

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

4 pm

Schar Ronk Lecture Hall

This talk is an attempt at a sort of fusion of horizons with regards to ethics.  It asks two questions: First, is Aristotle’s ethics a viable system for a person living in the 21^st century?  Second, is Aristotle relevant for today’s business ethics?  This second question became especially poignant at the beginning of this millennium with such debacles as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and WorldCom.  Moreover, these debacles were trumped by the recent financial scandals of Lehman brothers, Countrywide Financial, AIG, and others, associated with the financial meltdown of 2008 and 2009.  Are there ancient answers to these modern questions?  More specifically, what can Aristotle who lived over twenty-three hundred years ago, contribute to how we live our lives and operate our businesses today?

Dr. Stover is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheeling Jesuit University.  He specializes in the areas of philosophical ethics, ancient philosophy, and business ethics.

Mediasite Presentation:

CLICK HERE TO WATCH!

Faculty Update: Dr. William Vaughan Gives Workshops on Phenomenology

Dr. William Vaughan

Dr. Vaughan recently delivered two invited workshops on Phenomenology at the College of Wooster, August 28th and September 4th, 2014.

The first workshop addressed the arguments of Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation, the distinctions between ‘static’ and ‘genetic’ phenomenology, and the historical reception of Husserl’s efforts. The second workshop detailed the phenomenology of intersubjectivity in reaction to Husserl through select works of major German and French thinkers Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.

In the first workshop, Dr. Vaughan zeroed in on the unfortunate historical circumstances of Husserl’s career and publications that had led to misunderstandings of his views. An entire generation of both German and French thinkers had reacted to Husserl’s work Cartesian Meditations, wherein Husserl had seemingly argued that understanding and relating to others (known as intersubjectivity in this literature) could be taken only as sense-correlates of one’s own conscious processes. On this view, actual other human beings never condition the processes of this monadic ego; they are always only quasi-reproductions of oneself. However, subsequent scholarship and release of Husserl’s Gesammelte Werke (complete works) has shown that he had in fact developed a much more nuanced conception of intersubjectivity in his unpublished manuscripts.

“Husserl was not well served by historical circumstances,” said Vaughan. “We have 20 volumes of unpublished work that is probably superior to his published work. His publications were always out of joint with where his actual thinking was leading. He could have used a better book-agent.”

In the second workshop, Dr. Vaughan explicated both how famous thinkers reacted to and criticized Husserl, and also how they misunderstood Husserl. Rather than merely a ‘static’ phenomenology with a rigid structure that focuses on constitution by an already-constituted ego, Husserl had already developed a genetic phenomenology that addresses temporal phenomena, historical accumulation and community, features which he came to conclude were the actual features of human intersubjectivity.  Later thinkers unfortunately came to identify Husserl with static phenomenology only, reinforcing the Cartesian framework that the subject or ego is absolute.

“Contemporary scholarship is correcting the historical record, but the existentialist bus had already left the station. These later classical phenomenologists thought they were articulating general features of the human condition, but in many respects we can now see some of their work as extensions of the debilitating cultural aspects of the world wars.”

What makes something 'good'?

 What makes good things and good people?  Young people discuss this issue with philosopher Michael Lacewing from Heythrop College, using a curious thought experiment called the "Goodness Detector". Click on the link below to listen to a short discussion:

The Goodness Detector