Logical and Theological Fatalism

When teaching requirements engineering, we need to teach the so called human factor. However, traditionally we concentrate on hard facts such as how to identify and consolidate requirements. Thus, experiencing soft facts is left aside. Here, we propose a way to instruct soft facts in requirements engineering, using improvisation theatre techniques, and therefore helping the participants to experience the human factor.

This chapter addresses the intersection of open theism and the pastoral problem of evil. It argues that, in spite of what Greg Boyd claims, open theism's implications actually make the pastoral problem of evil more difficult. Boyd explained that he indeed rejected the concept of substitutionary atonement. He opposed understanding the divine economy in a way that implied every bit of Christ's sacrifice had to be accounted for in some particular sin or other. The loving character shown in the picture of the atonement is inconsistent with a God who would act harmfully to the author in other circumstances. The chapter focuses on God's moral trustworthiness and not the trustworthiness of His sovereign ability. Boyd locates open theism's advantage, in responding to the pastoral problem of evil, in the relationship between love and freedom as characterized by the open view.

PurposeThis paper aims to summarize the scope, methodology, and main findings of a doctoral thesis about cross‐company project management in the automotive industry. The concept of the collaborative project scorecard (CPS) is described and the results of its application to a project are summarized and discussed.Design/methodology/approachThe project adopted an action research approach which included a series of interviews, surveys, workshops, and a case study where the developed project management concept was tested and evaluated in a real project setting.FindingsThe concept of the CPS supports the alignment of project goals with business strategies, improves transparency in networked project organizations with respect to roles, responsibilities, goal achievement, stakeholder identification, and performance assessment. Project goals is not only based on and measured by hard facts but also on soft facts such as trust and employee satisfaction. The balanced choice of common strategic project goals improves the achievement of long‐term strategies in a project partnership.Practical implicationsDifficulties in defining appropriate indicators are identified, and resistance to change can need to be overcome so that every project member has a clear understanding of the concept's benefits. Legal issues (contract) may need to be discussed when the concept is used by a cross‐corporate project team. The method helps the delivery of performance to become more clearly measurable.Originality/valueThe project gives insight into a new cross‐company project management concept that was tested and evaluated in the automotive industry. Furthermore, an information technology (IT) solution is developed and implemented, and advantages and disadvantages of the concept and its IT solution are analysed and recommendation on its application given. The project demonstrates how the Balanced Scorecard can successfully be applied to networked project environments.

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads.

In an article recently published in The Philosophical Review entitled Freedom and Foreknowledge,' John Martin Fischer issues what he calls a general challenge to any sort of Ockhamist to explain the distinction between (so called) hard and soft facts and, thereby, to defeat the incompatibilist claim that if God exists, and is eternal as well as essentially omniscient, no human action is freely performed. As a point of departure, Fischer reviews with approval an argument that I offered some time ago in an article called Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action2 defending the incompatibilist thesis just mentioned. The bulk of his paper then consists of an attempt to show that the reply to my argument made by Marilyn McCord Adams in Is the Existence of God a 'Hard' Fact?3 is not only deficient, but represents a kind of response to the incompatibilist position (Fischer calls it Ockhamism) that is unpromising in the extreme. As regards the merits of Fischer's paper, I think that it includes some things that contribute importantly to the literature on the foreknowledge problem. However, I also think that in the end, Fischer fails to make contact with the point of Adams's objection to my original incompatibilist argument and that the reason for this rests finally in the fact that in a very important way, Fischer fails to make contact with my original argument itself. In the next few pages following, it will be my purpose (1) to reestablish the importance of an element in my reasoning that Fischer deletes from his own formulation of my incompatibilist argument; and (2) to make clear how this omission blinds Fischer to the thrust of Adams's response to that argument and thus results in a gap of some consequence in his general challenge to the partisans of Ockham. I should add that my reflections are offered in the hope that they will have corrective as well as more broadly conceived clarificatory value in the ongoing discussion of the divine foreknowledge problem. I hope, too, that they will not detract from the things of merit in Fischer's ofttimes stimulating paper.

This paper argues that when we examine the traditional dilemma of infallible divine foreknowledge and human free will, we uncover a deeper dilemma that has nothing to do with God, infallibility, or free will. Many historically important ways out of theological fatalism are irrelevant to this problem, which arises within the metaphysics of time. The assumption that the past has a kind of necessity that the future lacks is inconsistent with the principle that temporal necessity is transferred over entailment and the possibility that a proposition about the past entails a proposition about the future. The most reasonable response to this dilemma is to reject the view that the necessity of the past is a purely temporal modality; in fact, it is not a form of necessity in the formal sense of necessity. The paper proposes that it reduces to the metaphysical thesis that the past is causally closed. With this interpretation of the necessity of the past, the argument for theological fatalism must be revised in a way that reveals confusions in our notions of causality and the arrow of time.

In this contribution an original Purchasing and Supply Management Maturity Framework (PSM2F) is going to be presented based on the findings of a comprehensive literature and empirical research and a comparative analysis of maturity/stage models published between 1983 and 2014 as well as (management) frameworks published between 1998 and 2014 in Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM). In total 20 maturity models published from authors with an academic or scientific background, 18 maturity models offered from consulting firms and 19 management frameworks of purchasing management were examined. Beside the presentation of eight core modules that contribute to a mature and professional PSM (e.g. strategy & plans, controlling & performance management, organization & internal interfaces, supplier management & external interfaces), contentrelated as well as descriptive findings are going to be discussed. Based on that, the development as well as the overall concept of the Purchasing and Supply Management Maturity Framework will be presented. To cover also the future aspects of professional PSM, 16 studies about trends and challenges in PSM were analyzed. Contrary to the large part of the published maturity models in PSM, this framework is designed as a management model for (1) the assessment of the PSM maturity in a company and (2) the creation of an improvement roadmap that should lead to higher maturity. In addition to the hard facts (What a company has to do to reach higher maturity in PSM?) also soft facts (How to proceed to reach higher maturity in PSM?) derived from change management theory will be addressed.

This paper begins with a standard argument for theological fatalism and unravels deeper dilemmas in stages, arriving at an argument that has nothing to do with divine foreknowledge or free will. I then focus on the problem of the incoherence or at least confusion in the idea of the necessity of the past. In the final section I replace the necessity of the past with the causal closure of the past, and argue that the causal closure principle has the same problem of incoherence as the modal principle.