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The introductory chapter explains that every ethics and consequently every managerial or corporate ethics is built on and fundamentally determined by an ontological understanding of the entity that it deals with, whether this ontological understanding is explicitly articulated or not. In the case of managerial and corporate ethics it is thus critical to work out a clear ontological account of what the corporation in its very nature actually is. The corporation plays a prominent, if not overwhelming, role as a logic for organising productive behaviour in the current epoch. There are numerous shortcomings in this logic with, among others, significant ethical implications, which, as will be argued, cannot be remedied within the current pre-understanding of the very nature of corporations and their management. Therefore, the task at hand is to get a deeper understanding of the very nature of the corporation and its management. The project that is aimed at getting a deeper understanding of the very nature of any phenomenon and, in this case in particular, of the phenomena "corporation' and "corporate management', is the task of a branch of philosophy called "ontology'. Lastly, this chapter motivates the choice of Heidegger as a leading thinker in the endeavour to ascertain both the very nature of the corporation and the very nature of corporate management. The reason why Heidegger's thinking qualifies for this task is because he is the thinker who is regarded as the most prominent philosopher to ask both the question regarding "Being' itself and regarding the very nature of entities. Furthermore, he was dedicated to the project of both understanding and going beyond the Cartesian tradition, a way of thinking that dominates modern philosophy and, as will be pointed out in Chapter Three, is at the foundation of the kind of phenomenon known as "the corporation'

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1875-3_1

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