Academia

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them - David Hume

When I was studying, inter alia, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh many years ago, local boy made good David Hume was a name never far any philosophy professor or tutor's lips. Aeon now writes movingly of Hume's life:

"While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’."

A professor and former dean at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University argued in a 2013 book that corporations should restructure around three key principles:

• First, articulate clear values: why does the company exist, and what does it believe in?
• Second, appoint “trustees” to protect the interests of stakeholders and uphold the values of the corporation.
• Third, restrict voting shares to long-term investors - and he also believes that governments should use the corporate tax system to encourage “public values by private corporations”.