Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences; pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs - all in the pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity.Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise. It always comes at a price: one that defines the ethical predicament of contemporary life.The (...) notion of intensity was the hidden key to Garcia's landmark book Form and Object. In The Life Intense, the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy, he begins to develop it in detail. This first book focuses on ethics; the forthcoming volumes will be devoted to politics and then metaphysics. (shrink)

Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography. Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life’s work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the (...) very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation. Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)

I argue in this chapter against a common Kantian-inspired misconception of human dignity that has prevailed in African philosophical discussions of the concept of late. This approach substitutes the normative ground of dignity in our inherent capacity for individual rational autonomy for our inherent capacity for communal relationality. Although this African communitarian correction to Kantian individualism rightly picks up on the relational character of human dignity in African ethics and political thought, it repeats the mistake of attributing dignity to single, (...) individual persons. This misses the value of the social ontology of human dignity, which may be attributed to a typically African relational approach. In contrast, I offer an interpretation that locates dignity in mutual recognition. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, (...) its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes. (shrink)

This paper describes a system for extracting typed dependency parses of English sentences from phrase structure parses. In order to capture inherent relations occurring in corpus texts that can be critical in real-world applications, many NP relations are included in the set of grammatical relations used. We provide a comparison of our system with Minipar and the Link parser. The typed dependency extraction facility described here is integrated in the Stanford Parser, available for download.

Georg Lukács wrote that "there is autonomy and 'autonomy.' The one is a moment of life itself, the elevation of its richness and contradictory unity; the other is a rigidification, a barren self-seclusion, a self-imposed banishment from the dynamic overall connection." Though Lukács' concern was with the conditions for the possibility of art, his distinction also serves as an apt description of the way that Hegel and Hegelians have contrasted their own interpretations of self-determination with that of Kant. But it (...) has always been difficult to see how elevation is possible without seclusion, or how rigidification can be avoided without making the boundaries of the self so malleable that its autonomy looks like a mere cover for the power of external forces. Yeomans explores Hegel's own attempts to grapple with this problem against the background of Kant's attempts, in his theory of virtue, to understand the way that morally autonomous agents can be robust individuals with qualitatively different projects, personal relations, and commitments that are nonetheless infused with a value that demands respect. In a reading that disentangles a number of different threads in Kant's approach, Yeomans shows how Hegel reweaves these threads around the central notions of talent and interest to produce a tapestry of self-determination. Yeomans argues that the result is a striking pluralism that identifies three qualitatively distinct forms of agency or accountability and sees each of these forms of agency as being embodied in different social groups in different ways. But there is nonetheless a dynamic unity to the forms because they can all be understood as practical attempts to solve the problem of autonomy, and each is thus worthy of respect even from the perspective of other solutions."Everyone recognizes the importance of Hegel's critique of Kantian morality as empty, but until now there has not been a fully worked out presentation of how Hegel's views in his discussion of Sittlichkeit actually provide the missing content. Yeomans has finally provided us with a reconstruction of Hegel's mature position that makes good on all the promissory notes that Hegel gives in his famous descriptions of his alternative to Kantian ethics. Yeomans offers a compelling account of Hegel's view of individuality, societal differentiation and its roots in Kantian and Fichtean moral theory. The book will be a major contribution to the scholarship on Hegel's practical philosophy." - Dean Moyar, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University -/- "Yeomans' book is a subtle, detailed and original explication of some key ideas having to do with how Hegel's general philosophy of action relates to his social and political philosophy. It is attentive to Hegel's texts, and it ties its discussions into all the relevant contemporary themes in philosophy. It is very ambitious in its attempt to make Hegel's theory into a real competitor to other views that are currently in wide play in the philosophical world. It will very likely become one of the key texts in the secondary literature on Hegel." - Terry Pinkard, University Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. (shrink)

Kristina Toutanova Christopher D. Manning Dept of Computer Science Depts of Computer Science and Linguistics Gates Bldg 4A, 353 Serra Mall Gates Bldg 4A, 353 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305–9040, USA Stanford, CA 94305–9040, USA [email protected] [email protected]..

I argue that we have good reason to reject Bernard Suits’ assertion that game-playing is the ideal of human existence, in the absence of a suitably robust account of utopian games. The chief motivating force behind this rejection rests in the fact that Suits begs the question that there exists some possible set of games-by-design in his utopia, such that the playing of its members would sustain an existentially meaningful existence for his utopians, in the event of a hypo-instrumental culture (...) of material superabundance obtaining. But the set of utopian games is unknown and unknowable. Thus any implications of Suits’ vision for the utilization of our leisure time in the present are vitiated by the collapse of his normative ideal: his ‘metaphysics of leisure’ misses its mark. (shrink)

This essay aims to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term “posthumanism” itself. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to render the face of the human unknowable to itself, then to what extent does the human that re-names itself “posthuman” do so (...) in order to lay claim once again to a dubious self-knowledge? The rhetoric of posthumanism, moreover, implies a progressive narrative that ironically mirrors the Enlightenment principles of perfectibility that it would oppose. Drawing from Derrida’s notion of the “democracy to come,” I argue that the advent of the posthuman must always remain deferred. Just as the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled, the posthuman must infinitely postdate its arrival in any present. (shrink)

We argue for a new mode of interpretation for attributed attitudes, what we call de translato interpretation. De translato interpretation assigns a meaning to an expression based on the interpretation given to that expression by the attitude subject rather than that standardly given by the attributor. We argue that this new mode of interpretation is distinct from but compatible with de dicto, de re and de qualitate interpretation. Formally, de translato interpretation is analyzed as introducing a modification in the language (...) used for interpretation, where the modification alters the attributor’s language in such a way as to more closely approximate the presumed language of a perspective holder. Attitude predicates are taken to introduce the perspective of their subject as a parameter of interpretation for the clause they embed. (shrink)

Ambidextrous firms are those that can simultaneously manage exploitative and explorative innovation, which is why ambidexterity is key for firms that desire to pursue strategic entrepreneurship. Researchers have explored many of the reasons why some firms are more ambidextrous than others. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding how attributes of top decision makers can influence their firms' ambidexterity. By drawing on upper echelons theory and goal orientations research, we explain how firms' ambidexterity can be affected by top decision (...) makers' motivations in achievement situations. Testing our hypotheses on a sample of 274 top decision makers of firms in the United States, we find that top decision makers' learning goal orientation – their desire to take risks and maximize learning–has an inverted U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity while top decision makers' performance prove goal orientation – their desire to demonstrate competence with existing skills – has a U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity. These effects are weaker for top decision makers who have greater role experience. (shrink)

We are currently witnessing the emergence of a discourse on responsible research and innovation in the field of quantum technology. Working on the assumption that the initial stage of discourse is of particular importance with regard to the ascription of meaning to an emerging field, our point of departure is a small corpus of prominent policy-oriented reports on quantum technology recently published in Europe. With a view to these publications, the article analyses various approaches to RRI and discusses lessons learned (...) in nanotechnology discourse as these may impact on emerging discourse on quantum technology and its stance towards RRI. On the basis of our analyses, we outline a strategy for fostering RRI in this promising field of science and technology. We propose implementing a “strong” RRI approach which entails linking parliamentary or other core policy processes to stakeholder dialogues, decision-supporting public engagement and a wide variety of other public communication activities. At the same time, taking our cue from lessons learned in nanotechnology discourse, we argue that a strong RRI approach to quantum technology should be modest and focused in terms of thematic and societal scope. (shrink)

A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that ...

Both Nancy and Badiou probe the contemporary power of the political, seeking to refashion communism as, respectively, an ontology that issues an imperative, and an as yet unrealized hypothesis to be seized in the present. In both accounts of politics, the limit of the human and the animal plays a crucial yet hidden role. Badiou's articulation of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’ poses troubling problems for the relation between the limits of the human and the limits of the political. (...) In contrast, in the second volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy reworks his notion of the human animal as a ‘being of sense’ in a way that poses awkward questions for his ontology of those who have nothing in common. For both Nancy and Badiou—but in opposite ways—the question of the limits and scope of the political is inextricably intertwined with the nature of the human/animal distinction. (shrink)

In this article, I look at the role of appeals to the emotions in criminal law defences. A position commonly held is that appeals to the emotions can excuse but cannot justify. However, we should be careful that this view does not rest on too simple and non-cognitive a view of the emotions. I contrast a simple picture, according to which action from emotion involves loss of rational control, with the more Aristotelian picture recently offered by RA Duff. I then (...) look at John Gardner’s theory of excuses, which seeks to avoid the non-cognitive account of action from emotion as loss of rational control, but nevertheless denies that reference to the emotions can even partially justify. I argue that what is at issue between Gardner and Duff is what Gardner calls the ‘no-difference’ thesis, namely that the reasons that count in favour of an emotion count also in favour of action done from that emotion. I conclude that Gardner has not yet explained why we should reject the no-difference thesis. (shrink)

It is sometimes assumed that Kant’s claim that a judgement of taste is grounded in a pleasure ‘without concepts’ leaves little room for any credible account of critical judgements of art. I argue that even Kant’s conception of free (as opposed to dependent) beauty can provide the framework for an analysis of aesthetic judgements about art works. It is a matter of understanding what roles for concepts Kant prohibits in his analysis of pure judgements of taste: conceptual cognition must be (...) neither what gives rise to the subject’s pleasure nor part of the evidential basis for the subject’s judgement. But this does not entail that the subject encounters the object in a wholly ‘concept–free’ manner. Kant’s account of free beauty is quite different from Schopenhauer’s superficially similar theory, and is compatible with the thought that increased conceptual knowledge can enhance critical judgements of art. (shrink)

For many philosophers of science, mathematics lies closer to logic than it does to the ordinary sciences like physics, biology and economics. While this view may account for the relative neglect of the philosophy of mathematics by philosophers of science, it ignores at least two pressing questions about mathematics that philosophers of science need to be able to answer. First, do the similarities between mathematics and science support the view that mathematics is, after all, another science? Second, does the central (...) role of mathematics in science shed any light on traditional philosophical debates about science like scientific realism, the nature of explanation or reduction? When faced with these kinds of questions many philosophers of science have little to say. Unfortunately, most philosophers of mathematics also fail to engage with questions about the relationship between mathematics and science and so a peculiar isolation has emerged between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics. In this introductory survey I aim to equip the interested philosopher of science with a roadmap that can guide her through the often intimidating terrain of contemporary philosophy of mathematics. I hope that such a survey will make clear how fruitful a more sustained interaction between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics could be. (shrink)

Hope is important in Thomas Aquinas’s account of the emotions: it is one of the four primary emotions and the first of the irascible emotions. Yet his account of hope as a movement of the sensory appetite toward a future possible good that is arduous to attain appears to be overly restrictive, for people often hope for things that are not cognized as arduous. This paper examines Aquinas’s reasons for limiting hope to arduous goods.

When a normative moral theory collides with our beliefs, we must change either our beliefs or our theory. It is not always clear which we should change; but it is clear that we must change something. I shall consider two collisions between utilitarianism and what we believe, or are supposed to believe. About the first collision, I am going to say that the belief is false and that therefore there is no call to change utilitarianism. About the second, I am (...) going to say that if the belief is true, utilitarianism cannot be changed to accommodate it; I shall leave it open, though, whether the belief is true. The two collisions are related, though different. They both concern the utilitarian thesis about self-sacrifice. (shrink)

Deliberative and participatory approaches to democracy seek to directly include citizens in decision-making and agenda-setting processes. These methods date back to the very foundations of democracy in Athens, where regular citizens shared the burden of governance and deliberated every major issue. However, thinkers at the time rightly believed that these methods could not function beyond the scale of the city-state, or polis. Representative democracy as an innovation improved on the scalability of collective decision making, but in doing so, sacrificed the (...) extent to which regular citizens could participate in deliberation. Modern technology, including advances in computational power, machine learning algorithms, and data visualization techniques, presents a unique opportunity to scale out deliberative processes. Here we describe Polis, an open source web application capable of collecting and synthesizing feedback from people in a scalable and distributed fashion. Polis has shown itself capable of building shared understanding, disincentivizing counterproductive behavior, and cultivating points of consensus. It has done this in the context of journalistic and academic research, and directly as part of decision-making bodies at local and national levels, directly affecting legislation. These results demonstrate that deliberative processes can be scaled up beyond the constraints of in-person gatherings and small groups. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Despite an increase in international business ethics research in recent years, the number of studies focused on Latin America and China has been deficient. As trade among Pacific Rim nations increases, an understanding of the ethical beliefs of the people in this region of the world will become increasingly important. In the current study 208 respondents from Peru and China are queried about their ethical ideologies, firm practices, and commitment to organizational performance. The empirical results reveal that Chinese workers are (...) more relativistic and less idealistic than their Peruvian counterparts. One explanation for the disparity between these two groups is likely the variation in collectivism that can be traced to different levels of importance across ingroups and outgroups. In addition to a summary of the results, future research directions and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

The chapter examines aspects of Schopenhauer's central concept of will: the role of will in relation to action and to sexual drive, the argument that the individual has no freedom of will, the notion of the will or 'will to life' as the 'inner nature' of the individual, and the notion that the will is the thing in itself.

In the United States, food banks served an estimated 46 million people in 2015. A combination of government policy reforms and political economic trends contributed to the rising numbers of individuals relying on private food assistance in the US, the United Kingdom and other high-income countries. Although researchers frequently map urban food environments, this project is one of the first to map private food assistance and potential need at the census-tract scale. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, demographic data, and food (...) assistance locations to develop a rapid assessment tool that could support food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, and government agencies that seek to answer the question of whether people with the greatest need have food distribution sites in close proximity. We define access based on distance and then calculate potential food insecurity using either poverty rates or a food insecurity index. We apply these methods in a case study analysis of Santa Clara County, California. Our findings suggest that food assistance distribution locations match the areas of potential need in more than 80% of urban census tracts. However, there are several potentially underserved locations and populations that could benefit from new food assistance operations. The poverty and index-based approaches show significant spatial overlap in mapped areas of high food insecurity and low access. The poverty only approach produces a higher estimate of food insecurity rates, is easier to calculate, and draws attention to the need to address poverty as a root cause of hunger. (shrink)

Organisms receded from view in much of twentieth-century biology, only to undergo a sort of renaissance at the start of the twenty-first. The story of why this should be so is complicated and fascinating, but belongs primarily to the history of biology. On the other hand, to the extent that it is so, a question naturally arises: what, after all, are organisms? This question has a long and complicated history of its own, both within and without of biology; an investigation (...) of this history yields some guidance as to how organisms might yet be conceived today. One suggestion borne of these investigations is this: organisms are, for better or worse, normatively delineated unities. (shrink)