1,054 research outputs found
A. D. MacIntyre Documents
No full textLetters and documents, dated 1816 - 1923, received from Mr. A.D. MacIntyre, West Bay Road, Cape Breton. Two documents (#4 and #18) were too large for the scanner and were not included here
Leader narratives in Scottish banking: an Aristotelian approach
No full textThe banking sector has been under public scrutiny since the credit crisis of 2007/8, and a range of diagnoses and cures have been offered, particularly in terms of regulatory and financial structures. In the public media, much comment has been made about ethics in the sector, but this has provoked surprisingly little response from academic researchers. This thesis explores the crisis in banking as a moral one, taking Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics as a framework for understanding the careers of Scottish banking leaders.
The method used for the study is narrative, and depends both on MacIntyre’s philosophy of tradition-constituted enquiry, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Conversations were held with ten leaders of Scottish banking whose careers typically span between 25 and 40 years, and the record of those conversations forms the primary data set for the research.
The resulting narratives are frank, rich descriptions of deeply felt changes in a particular mode of working life. This was a way of life characterised up until the 1980s by a well-defined status within local communities, professional expertise and a well-ordered tradition. The deregulation of banking and subsequent structural and technological changes to retail banking services eroded that professional tradition, and replaced it with new modes of work dominated by institutional priorities of sales, profit and growth, rather than by an ethic of professional expertise and customer service.
The thesis finds that there are structural barriers to the recovery of a professional ethic in banking. It offers new perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly in the application of his idea of traditions to mainstream economic activity. It also explores common ground between Gadamer and MacIntyre, proposing ways in which both philosophers can enhance our pursuit of qualitative empirical research
On the decidability of finite extensions of decidable fields
No full textThis paper is primarily concerned with the following question which first appeared in Koenigsmannâs On a Question of Abraham Robinsonâs: Is a finite field extension of a decidable field always decidable?
This offers a âtwistâ to a question that was originally posed by Abraham Robinson in 1973 which had asked whether every finitely generated extension of an undecidable field remains undecidable. The above-mentioned work of Koenigsmann from 2016 (and independently, a result of Cherlin, van den Dries, and Macintyre much earlier in the 1980s) showed that there are indeed undecidable fields which admit decidable finite extensions. This paper aims to show that one could, similarly, find examples of decidable fields which admit undecidable finite extensions, thereby answering the above-stated question negatively.
This result is achieved by identifying a sufficient condition which a decidable field must satisfy in order for it to have an undecidable finite extension. In an earlier iteration of this work, we had pointed out what we had believed to be one such condition. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case, which we illustrate using an explicit example. Through this demonstration, we were able to accentuate the weakness of the formerly mentioned criterion, which we strengthen in this thesis. We provide justification that the strengthened criterion is indeed sufficient â any decidable field satisfying this strengthened criterion would form a counterexample to the above-mentioned question.
We study one such class of decidable fields, known as the wonderful extensions of the rational numbers, first introduced by Ershov in the early 2000s, whose (sufficiently saturated) elementary extensions satisfy this strengthened criterion. This provides us with a concrete counterexample which shows that there are indeed decidable fields which admit undecidable finite extensions. We also point out various attempts at finding other counterexamples to the above-mentioned question, the difficulties faced in those instances, and some further questions in the flavour of the above-mentioned question that appear to be interesting in their own rights.</p
- …
