Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 relates to ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. The SDGs mention only a few political indicators and SDG2 in particular is largely devoid of political considerations to end hunger and achieve food security. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen famously observed the absence of famine in democracies, suggesting that a democratic system provides checks and balances that prevent famine. His observation has elicited further debate and triggered empirical studies in recent years. (...) Going beyond Sen’s hypothesis, this essay examines other political factors that would explain vulnerability to famine and that need to be addressed more explicitly in SDG 2 and similar initiatives. By taking the case of pastoralists in the Afar region of Ethiopia, this research explores selected political determinants of vulnerability to famine. The Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the ensuing border closure have had a detrimental effect on the livelihood of pastoralists in Afar – many pastoralists were deprived of a market and a reliable source of income. In addition, Afar pastoralists were sidelined from the informal salt sector on which they used to rely. The state facilitated this expropriation, leaving pastoralists even more vulnerable to famine. I argue that political considerations are crucial in successfully ending hunger and achieving food security. The essay uses a qualitative case study design and is based on a PhD dissertation. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy uses experimental research methods from psychology and cognitive science in order to investigate both philosophical and metaphilosophical questions. It explores philosophical questions about the nature of the psychological world - the very structure or meaning of our concepts of things, and about the nature of the non-psychological world - the things themselves. It also explores metaphilosophical questions about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its proper methodology. This book provides a detailed and provocative introduction to this innovative field, (...) focusing on the relationship between experimental philosophy and the aims and methods of more traditional analytic philosophy. Special attention is paid to carefully examining experimental philosophy's quite different philosophical programs, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and the different kinds of contributions that they can make to our philosophical understanding. Clear and accessible throughout, it situates experimental philosophy within both a contemporary and historical context, explains its aims and methods, examines and critically evaluates its most significant claims and arguments, and engages with its critics. (shrink)

A traditional interpretation holds that Kant's political theory simply constitutes an account of the constraints which reason places on the state's authority to regulate external action. Alexander Kaufman argues that this traditional interpretation succeeds neither as a faithful reading of Kant's texts nor as a plausible, philosophically sound reconstruction of a `Kantian' political theory. Rather, he argues that Kant's political theory articulates a positive conception of the state's role.

This is a rewarding book. In terms of area, it has one foot firmly planted in metaphysics and the other just as firmly set in the philosophy of science. Nature's Metaphysics is distinctive for its thorough and detailed defense of fundamental, natural properties as essentially dispositional and for its description of how these dispositional properties are thus suited to sustain the laws of nature as (metaphysically) necessary truths.

R. W. Sharples provides a new edition, with introduction and commentary in English, of the Greek text. The Mantissa is a collection of short discussions, transmitted as a supplement to the treatise On the Soul by the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.200 AD).The collection includes discussion of a range of topics, among them the nature of soul and intellect, theories of how seeing takes place, issues in ethics, and the nature of fate. The text is based upon a (...) new collation of the principal manuscript, the ninth century Venetus Marcianus graecus 258, and the apparatus corrects Bruns' misreportings of the principal manuscript and of the others that he used. Account has also been taken of the medieval Arabic and Latin versions of some of the sections which circulated independently, notably On Intellect which had a substantial influence on medieval philosophy. The introduction is chiefly concerned with the manuscripts and the relation between them. The commentary is based on the notes to the editor's English translation of the work (London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); however, the commentary also takes into account more recent work on the collection by various scholars. (shrink)

Alexander Eliot, distinguished critic and art historian, breaks through to the silent world of masterpieces and makes them live anew in the eye of the imagination. Eliot plumbs the truths expressed by the greatest works of painting, sculpture and architecture. Eliot¿s style is crystalline, and his purpose plain: to bring art back to the center of our culture.

This paper discusses two passages from Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary on Aristotle’s _ Topics _ that are transmitted in Ps-Jābir’s _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _. It argues that the Arabic translation of Alexander’s commentary may have been made from a fuller version than what came down to us in Greek. Especially since the author(s) of the Jābir-corpus form a tradition different from the school of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 873) and authors associated to the ‘Baghdad school’, whose earliest figure (...) is Abū Bishr Mattā b. Yūnus (d. 940), the Arabic fragments of Alexander’s commentary preserved in the _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _ promise to shed more light on the early reception of the _ Topics _ and the different contexts in which Aristotelian dialectic was studied in the Islamic world. (shrink)

Alexander Pfander's classical phenomenological logic, a masterwork of unmatched clarity, is presented here for the first time in English. The book unfolds the general essence of logic, its object, not acts of thinking but objective "thoughts," meanings and higher unities formed by them: the nature and kinds (1) of judgments (propositions) and their truth and truth claims, (2) of concepts, and (3)of inferences; (4)the first foundational principles of logic (the principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason) and (...) of valid inferences, their foundation in ontological principles, as well as the valid forms of reasoning recognized in traditional logic and the reasons of their validity. Being a new phenomenological exposition of traditional logic, it reduces the symbolic language used to a minimum in order to concentrate on the logical meanings and laws themselves for which these symbols are signs.". (shrink)

The eminent philosopher and classical scholar Alexander Nehamas presents here a collection of his most important essays on Plato and Socrates. The papers are unified in theme by the idea that Plato's central philosophical concern in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics was to distinguish the authentic from the fake, the original from its imitations. In approach, the collection displays Nehamas's characteristic combination of analytical rigor and sensitivity to the literary form and dramatic effect of Plato's work. Together, the papers represent (...) Nehamas's distinct and original contributions to scholarship on Plato and Socrates and serve as a comprehensive introduction to the thought of these two philosophers. In the book's opening section, Nehamas discusses Plato's representation of Socrates as a model of authentic human goodness, showing that Plato's Socrates is a more skeptical, troubling, and individualistic thinker than is usually supposed. The papers in the second section form a sustained defense of a new and important understanding of Plato's theory of the forms and the evolution of that theory in Plato's later writings. The third section examines Plato's contention that popular entertainment--by which he meant Greek epic and tragic poetry--misleads its audience into a debased life, an argument Nehamas relates to modern anxieties about television and other forms of popular culture. The collection also includes a discussion of Plato's use of the dialogue form in his representation of Socrates and carefully examines the combination of literary and philosophical elements in his work. Nehamas argues in the book that Plato's specific judgments of what is authentic are often flawed, but that his idea of authenticity as the mark of truth, beauty, and goodness is stronger than many modern scholars have assumed. In drawing together Nehamas's many influential ideas about Plato and Socrates, Virtues of Authenticity is a major contribution to the study of ancient Greek philosophy. (shrink)

This is the first book that integrates nonmonotonic reasoning and belief change into a single framework from an artificial intelligence logic point-of-view.

What exactly do social scientists and biologists say when they make causal claims? This question is one of the central puzzles in philosophy of science. Alexander Reutlinger sets out to answer this question. He aims to provide a theory of causation in the special sciences (that is, a theory causation in the social sciences, the biological sciences and other higher-level sciences). According one recent prominent view, causation is that causation is intimately tied to manipulability and the possibility of intervene. (...) Reutlinger's main negative target is to argue interventionist account of causation is not adequate. Where do interventionist accounts go wrong? Reutlinger argues that the central concept of the interventionist theories – that is, the very concept of an intervention – is tremendously problematic. Reutlinger's main positive claim consists in replacing the interventionist approach by an alternative explication of causation in the special sciences, the comparative variability theory of causation. This alternative preserves many insights of the interventionist account without a commitment to the claim that causation and interventions are intimately tied together. (shrink)

In this book Alexander García Düttman explores and expands the works of Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Adorno, Benjamin, and Derrida. Out of his very fresh and pointed re-reading, he uncovers a peculiar correspondence of obsessions, interests, and priorities between these diverse twentieth century philosophies, And from these discoveries Düttman details a singular philosophical theory of memory and promise. Düttman's methodology is as groundbreaking as his discoveries, Alan Udoff writes: "This is not an exposition in the conventional sense: a scholarly, historical report, (...) with some attempt at criticism, Rather, it is at every turn a thinking through of certain texts, a thinking that, in putting questions to the texts... reveals or releases what is... stored in those texts." Düttman's questions are so philosophically and theologically penetrating that the reader is set out in new direction of thinking. While Düttman's book helps the reader achieve a new understanding of the gift of language in the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, his study also is fraught with implications for reading Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard. (shrink)

In this volume his object is to fully examine his friend's writings and characters and draws upon his own personal recollections to do so.

The "Supplement" transmitted as the second book of "On the Soul" by Alexander of Aphrodisias is a collection of short texts on a wide range of topics from psychology, including the general hylomorphic account of soul and its faculties, and the theory of vision; questions in ethics ; and issues relating to responsibility, chance and fate. One of the texts in the collection, "On Intellect", had a major influence on medieval Arabic and Western thought, greater than that of (...) class='Hi'>Alexander's "On the Soul" itself. The treatises may all be by Alexander himself; certainly the majority of them are closely connected with his other works. Many of them, however, consist of collections of arguments on particular issues, collections which probably incorporate material from earlier in the history of the Peripatetic school. This translation is from a new edition of the Greek text based on a collation of all known manuscripts and comparison with medieval Arabic and Latin translations. (shrink)

Contemporary architecture is increasingly grounded in science and mathematics. Architectural discourse has shifted radically from the sometimes disorienting Derridean deconstruction, to engaging scientific terms such as fractals, chaos, complexity, nonlinearity, and evolving systems. That's where the architectural action is -- at least for cutting-edge architects and thinkers -- and every practicing architect and student needs to become conversant with these terms and know what they mean. Unfortunately, the vast majority of architecture faculty are unprepared to explain them to students, not (...) having had a scientific education themselves. Here is an architecture book by an architect/scientist, just in time to help architects in the new millennium. Alexander discusses many of the scientific terms arising in cutting-edge architecture, and explains them to those who don't have scientific training or advanced mathematical knowledge. We find discussions of the evolution of forms; the importance of process in design; iteration; genetic algorithms; sequences of transformations; different levels of scale (i.e. fractals); etc. They are explained here by an architect who is also a scientist, because he wants to change the way architects think and build. Alexander is not merely popularizing other scientists' results and making them accessible to architects: he is in fact presenting new and original scientific work that ties many of these concepts together in a way that will be useful to architects. (shrink)

In an age of widespread cutbacks on social spending, the prospects of social policy generally appear to be grim. If noticeable progress has been recently made in the European Union, then it is in regard to rooting out discrimination. Indeed, anti-discrimination law and policy appears to be the one sphere of social policy whose success is causally connected to the European Union. But how successful can anti-discrimination law be? This book uses legal analysis in order to expose the intrinsic shortcomings (...) of common approaches. Anti-discrimination law fails to provide adequate legal guidance and therefore invites constant supplementation by pedagogical projects of social engineering. This book offers a genuinely leftist critique on anti-discrimination law, and concludes with a discussion of alternative models of solidarity in the Union. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the ontological nature of the past and our experience of the present in relation to the actual. It is argued that philosophers mistakenly equate the real with the actual. The actual is what is presented to us in experience, but what is presented to us in experience is confined to the present; so one might think that it follows that only the present is real. This presentist theory is subsequently rejected. Past, present and future are real (...) and certain mental acts such as memories of the past and expectations of the future have as their content objects at those times; these objects are just as real as the objects of present experiences. This paves the way for a distinctive brand of eternalism that is defended in the remainder of this chapter. (shrink)

Summary: De planken van de Amsterdamse Artis Bibliotheek staan vol met uiterst zeldzame en belanghebbende natuurhistorische werken. Eerste drukken van het werk van Charles Darwin (onder andere van "On the origin of species") staan gebroederlijk naast het oeuvre van Darwins wetenschappelijke evenknie Alfred Russel Wallace. Daarnaast worden er tal van natuurwetenschappelijke archieven, zoals dat van de Amsterdamse hoogleraar biologie, geneticus en Nobelprijslaureaat Hugo de Vries, beheerd. Alexander Reeuwijk maakt samen met Redmond O'Hanlon een reis door de geschiedenis van de (...) evolutie aan de hand van boeken, manuscripten en parafernalia zoals die in deze natuurwetenschappelijke schatkamer worden bewaard. (shrink)

Some philosophers and physicians have argued that alcoholic patients, who are responsible for their liver failure by virtue of alcoholism, ought to be given lower priority for a transplant when donated livers are being allocated to patients in need of a liver transplant. The primary argument for this proposal, known as the Responsibility Argument, is based on the more general idea that patients who require scarce medical resources should be given lower priority for those resources when they are responsible for (...) needing them and when they are competing with patients who need the same resources through no fault of their own. Since alcoholic patients are responsible for needing a new liver and are in direct competition with other patients who need a new liver through no fault of their own, it follows that alcoholic patients ought to be given lower priority for a transplant. In this article, I argue against the Responsibility Argument by suggesting that in order for it to avoid the force of plausible counter examples, it must be revised to say that patients who are responsible for needing a scarce medical resource due to engaging in behavior that is not socially valuable ought to be given lower priority. I'll then argue that allocating organs according to social value is inconsistent or in tension with liberal neutrality on the good life. Thus, if one is committed to liberal neutrality, one ought to reject the Responsibility Argument. (shrink)

What is law? The usual answer is that the law is a system of norms. But this answer gives us at best half of the story. The law is a way of relating to one another. We do not do this as lovers or friends and not as people who are interested in obtaining guidance from moral insight. In a legal context, we are cast as 'character masks', for example, as 'buyer' and 'seller' or 'landlord' and 'tenant'. We expect to (...) have our claims respected simply because the law has given us rights. We do not want to give any other reason for our behavior than the fact that we have a legal right. Backing rights up with coercive threats indicates that we are willing to accept legal obligations unwillingly. This book offers a conceptual reconstruction of the legal relation on the basis of a critique of legal positivism. (shrink)

У статті розглянуто результати археологічного дослідження трипільського храмового комплексу – Небелівського храму. Автор виокремлює особливу знахідку, а саме – залишки керамічного диска з групою фішок до нього. Ця знахідка в науковому світі дістала назву Небелівський Диск. Відзначено, що засадничим явищем інтер’єрного простору Небелівського Храму стала умовна яма (заглиблення) у самому центрі ритуального залу. Вона є центральною храмовою точкою, яка надає ключ до інтерпретації головного храмового символу, котрий ймовірно був рослинного походження. У статті проводяться паралелі між головним ритуальним залом Трипільського Храму (...) та особливою ритуальною спорудою ведичної релігії «prâcînavamsa» («прачинаванса»), в якій проводився найголовніший ритуал ведичної релігії «ашвамедха». Це засвідчує значну подібність двох сакральних споруд, а найголовніше – це подібність заглиблень у центрі священного простору, яке позначалося «Світовим Деревом» (за В. Топоровим). Автор доводить, що особливості інтер’єрного наповнення Небелівського Храму висвітлюють уявлення давніх людей про структуру священного Космосу, про місце людей у ньому та символи, які пов’язують сакральне суспільство з космологічними уявленнями. Особливість даного дослідження полягає в тому, що внутрішнє храмове наповнення є, по суті, матеріалізованим духовним світом давніх землеробів, який транслює їхню релігійну космологію. (shrink)

In this third edition of a popular business ethics textbook, Alec Hill carefully explores the foundational Christian concepts of holiness, justice, and love, showing how some common responses to business ethics fall short of a fully Christian mindset. Updated throughout, this edition includes a new chapter on international business and uses penetrating case studies to clothe principles in concrete business situations.

We study simplicity and stability in some large strongly homogeneous expansions of Hilbert spaces. Our approach to simplicity is that of Buechler and Lessmann 69). All structures we consider are shown to have built-in canonical bases.

It is an old idea, lately out of fashion but now experiencing a revival, that quantum mechanics may best be understood, not as a physical theory with a problematic probabilistic interpretation, but as something closer to a probability calculus per se. However, from this angle, the rather special C *-algebraic apparatus of quantum probability theory stands in need of further motivation. One would like to find additional principles, having clear physical and/or probabilistic content, on the basis of which this apparatus (...) can be reconstructed. In this paper, I explore one route to such a derivation of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics, by means of a set of strong, but probabilistically intelligible, axioms. Stated very informally, these require that systems appear completely classical as restricted to a single measurement, that different measurements, and likewise different pure states, be equivalent (up to the action of a compact group of symmetries), and that every state be the marginal of a bipartite non-signaling state perfectly correlating two measurements. This much yields a mathematical representation of (basic, discrete) measurements as orthonormal subsets of, and states, by vectors in, an ordered real Hilbert space – in the quantum case, the space of Hermitian operators, with its usual tracial inner product. One final postulate (a simple minimization principle, still in need of a clear interpretation) forces the positive cone of this space to be homogeneous and self-dual and hence, to be the state space of a formally real Jordan algebra. From here, the route to the standard framework of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics is quite short. (shrink)