This paper answers the title question, “Yes,” on both counts. The first part of the paper argues that modern liberals are socialists, and the second part argues that they are also social democrats. The main idea behind the first argument is that the state has effectively taken control of the incidents of ownership through its taxation, spending, and regulatory policies. The main idea behind the second argument is that the institutions of social democracy are replicated by the institutions favored by (...) modern American liberalism. Specifically, the takeover of the American healthcare system, Social Security, employers' mandatory contributions to unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation insurance replicate the institutions of social democracy. (shrink)

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap’s notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the (...) most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine’s break from Carnap), and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 49 Heft: 1 Seiten: 301-346.

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology” by Bernard Scott. Upshot: Scott’s proposal is well-founded and opens interesting possibilities. We selected some critical aspects of his argumentation and discuss them in the context of the constructivist perspective. We highlight as Scott’s “blind spot” his statement - presented without further argument - of the need for a conceptual and theoretical unification of psychology from the perspective of second-order cybernetics. We find this especially worrisome as it is based on (...) only one version of cybernetics. (shrink)

Hume, in the Enquiry, remarks in a footnote as follows.

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, and that (...) considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants. (shrink)

Theoretical reflection on moral disagreement can be pertinent from a practical point of view. When far reaching policies depend on agreement about conflicting moral options, the need may be felt to reflect on strategies for reducing conflict and reaching a consensus. In such a context, it may for instance be useful to study mechanisms that tend to bring about bias and prejudice. In this paper, however, I will not be concerned with whatever might be done to reduce disagreement. My approach (...) will be purely theoretical and will concentrate on the nature of moral disagreement, more particularly on the question how disagreement about conflicting moral claims differs from disagreements about conflicting empirical claims. This will lead me to the defence of a kind of perspectivism. I will argue for the view that moral disagreement is to be expected if morality is intimately associated with the quest for meaning. I will conclude by making a couple of critical remarks about a doctrine that tries to free morality from the quest for meaning and hence also from perspectivism. (shrink)

The current debate about the moral status of animals is strongly determined by a misunderstanding of the role of moral intuitions. It is often assumed that our moral intuitions contain an implicit understanding of something that could ideally always be made explicit in terms of a consistent set of general principles. I have argued that this assumption is certainly wrong with respect to our moral intuitions about how we should behave towards animals. The meaning of these intuitions will always be (...) intimately tied up with deeply ingrained attitudes which precede the endorsement of any explicit moral view. While it cannot be excluded that these attitudes might radically change, it is wrong to suppose that such a transformation could result from abstract reasoning. (shrink)

Carnap in the 1930s discovered that there were non-normal interpretations of classical logic - ones for which negation and conjunction are not truth-functional so that a statement and its negation could have the same truth value, and a disjunction of two false sentences could be true. Church ar-gued that this did not call for a revision of classical logic. More recent writers seem to disa-gree. We provide a definition of "non-normal interpretation" and argue that Church was right, and in fact, (...) the existence of non-normal interpretations tells us something important about the condi-tions of extensionality of the classical logical operators. (shrink)

The tenth volume in the Progress in Self Psychology series begins with four timely assessments of the selfobject concept, followed by a section of clinical papers that span the topics of homosexuality, alter ego countertransference, hypnosis, trauma, dream theory, and intersubjective approaches to conjoint therapy. Section III, "A Dialogue of Self Psychology," offers Merton Gill's astute appreciation of "Heinz Kohut's Self Psychology," followed by commentaries by Leider and Stolorow and Gill's reply. The concluding section offers Stolorow and Atwood's "The Myth (...) of the Isolated Mind," followed by discussions by Gehrie and the Shanes. A forum for the kind of spirited, productive exchanges that have long found a home within the self-psychological community, _A Decade of Progress_ builds on the past in responding to the theoretical and clinical challenges of the present. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to outline the missionary self-perception that is mediated in meaningful stories about activities and experiences of Protestants while serving as missionaries abroad. Research is based on a model of narrative identity that aids for understanding the dilemmatic aspects of identity: continuity/change, sameness/difference, agency/non-agency. Findings of a cultural psychological analysis of missionaries’ autobiographical narratives are presented in form of these three types of identity dilemmas and discussed with respect to their implications for cultural psychology of (...) religion. In utilizing qualitative research, the present study enlarges the understanding of the diversity of cross-cultural experiences in mission. (shrink)

Loneliness—perceived social isolation—is defined as a discrepancy between existing social relationships and desired quality of relationships. Whereas most research has focused on existing relationships, we consider the standards against which people compare them. Participants who made downward social or temporal comparisons that depicted their contact with others as better reported less loneliness than participants who made upward comparisons that depicted their contact with others as worse. Extending these causal results, in a survey of British adults, upward social comparisons predicted current (...) loneliness, even when controlling for loneliness at a previous point in time. Finally, content analyses of interviews with American adults who lived alone showed that social and temporal comparisons about contact with others were both prevalent and linked to expressed loneliness. These findings contribute to understanding the social cognition of loneliness, extend the effects of comparisons about social connection to the important public health problem of loneliness, and provide a novel tool for acutely manipulating loneliness. (shrink)

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at (...) night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author_s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler_s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author_s. At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:_These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world._ Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that _inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God._ Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings. (shrink)

En 2007, la Declaración sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas fue adoptada por la Asamblea General con la mayoría de los estados miembros de las Naciones Unidas. La declaración tiene relevancia para cualquiera que esté al mando o en contacto con los pueblos indígenas. Un efecto central de la dominancia de la cultura globalizada sobre culturas indígenas es la asimetría de la percepción e influencia mutua. Debido a los efectos de la presión social externa de la globalización los pueblos (...) indígenas tienen poca libertad de elección. Ejercer su derecho a una autonomía cultural en educación y estilo de vida es muy difícil para los indígenas. Por parte de gobiernos, problemas con los derechos sobre la tierra son un obstáculo para reconocer la autonomía de los pueblos indígenas. Algunos artículos de la declaración de derechos indígenas son presentados que tienen relevancia para personas externas, como investigadores o turistas, en contacto con personas indígenas. -/- The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples is an instrument to combat inequalities on an international level. However, the implementation is still a matter of disregard and conflict, as states are reluctant to give up their privileges. Yet, with the Declaration, a foundation has been laid to claim acceptance and respect of indigenous lifestyles, the use of their territories by themselves, the passing-on of culturally specific knowledge to the next generations, and other aspects. The new situation of International Law also brought along consequences for any external person contacting an indigenous culture, be it scientists, tourists or others. (shrink)

Across these essays Arnold Berleant demonstrates how aesthetic values and theory can be used to reappraise our social practices. He tackles issues within the built environment, everyday life and politics, breaking down the dichotomy between the natural and the human. His work represents a fresh approach to traditional philosophical questions in not only ethics, but in metaphysics, truth, meaning, psychology, phenomenology and social and moral philosophy. Topics covered include the cultural aesthetics of environment, ecological aesthetics, the aesthetics of terrorism (...) and the subversion of beauty. The corruption of taste by the forces of commercial interests as well as how aesthetics can advance our understanding of violence is also considered. Berleant's exploration is supported by his analysis of 19th-century art to the present day, starting with impressionism through to postmodernism and contemporary artistic interventions. By critically examining the field in this way and casting new light on social understanding and practice, this collection makes a substantive contribution in identifying and clarifying central human issues, guided by an understanding of aesthetic experience and appreciation as a powerful tool for social critique. (shrink)

We construct by diagonalization a non-well-founded primitive recursive tree, which is well-founded for co-r.e. sets, provable in Σ1 0. It follows that the supremum of order-types of primitive recursive well-orderings, whose well-foundedness on co-r.e. sets is provable in Σ1 0, equals the limit of all recursive ordinals ω1 ck . RID=""ID="" Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 03B30, 03F15 RID=""ID="" Supported by the Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina grant #BMBF-LPD 9801-7 with funds from the Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie. RID=""ID="" (...) I would like to thank A. SETZER for his hospitality during my stay in Uppsala in December 1998 – these investigations are inspired by a discussion with him; S. BUSS for his hospitality during my stay at UCSD and for valuable remarks on a previous version of this paper; and M. MÖLLERFELD for remarks on a previous title. (shrink)

This paper investigates provability and non-provability of well-foundedness of ordinal notations in weak theories of bounded arithmetic. We define a notion of well-foundedness on bounded domains. We show that T21 and S22 can prove the well-foundedness on bounded domains of the ordinal notations below 0 and Γ0. As a corollary, the class of polynomial local search problems, PLS, can be augmented with cost functions that take ordinal values below 0 and Γ0 without increasing the class PLS.

Macroeconometric models are built on astonishingly precarious grounds and yet are used by policy makers to project precision and certainty. Econometricians use lagged dependent variables, “add factors,” and other techniques to make their models more accurate—at the expense of the integrity of the models. The reason for the unscientific nature of macroeconometric models is that, unlike the objects of controlled experimentation, real-world events are often unique and non-repeatable. Models that use repeatable events are poorly suited to accurate prediction or historical (...) explanation. (shrink)

This article aims to show why Sellars' critique of epistemic givenness has proven so apt in characterizing the philosophical problems that confront the project of Dignaga and Dharmakirti -- problem that result from the etent to whih these buddhists valorized "non-conceptual awareness.