Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...) life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being. (shrink)

Buchanan’s work, and in particular The Calculus of Consent, which he wrote with Gordon Tullock, has been foundational in the field of public choicePublic choice. One of his students, Charles Plott, became a pioneer with multiple seminal contributions in the field of experimental public choice. In this chapter we focus on Buchanan’s work on decision making under majority rule, and any influence it may have had on Plott. While Buchanan and Tullock address environments with single decisions, they focus much more (...) on decision making under repeated votes, a topic they found of great interest. Plott’s seminal 1978 paper with Morris Fiorina, however, focuses on single decisions. It may seem puzzling, then, that Plott has often suggested Buchanan’s influence on his work. We offer a resolution to this puzzle. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss James Buchanan’s contribution in the narrow domain of understanding committee voting under majority rule. We then go on to discuss Charles Plott’s seminal experimental work on the topic that sparked a wave of public choice experimental work. However, given Plott’s claims that Buchanan influenced him significantly, it is puzzling that his work with Morris Fiorina explores a question outside of those which Buchanan and Tullock found interesting. We suggest several ways to resolve this tension. Our (...) chapter concludes by discussing a lacuna in the experimental public choice literature in which Buchanan was particularly interested—logrolling, or vote trading. (shrink)

La cuestión funeraria puede entenderse como un hecho social total que implica cuestiones de orden histórico, social, político, simbólico, jurídico o económico. Este estudio realiza un análisis comparado de las demandas y necesidades en materia funeraria de las comunidades judía y musulmana en el territorio de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid como caso de estudio. Ambas religiones comparten una historia de desarraigo y persecución en la sociedad española, configurada durante siglos como esencialmente católica, así como un proceso de recuperación y (...) relegitimación en época contemporánea. Las leyes reconocen a ambas comunidades el derecho a practicar sus respectivos ritos funerarios, que tienen elementos disonantes con la práctica social mayoritaria, y a disponer de cementerios propios o habilitados por las administraciones públicas. Sin embargo, judíos y musulmanes experimentan un acceso diferencial a ese derecho en la Comunidad de Madrid. El objetivo de este trabajo es abordar las razones de esa diferencia, que tienen que ver con la historia reciente de ambas comunidades, con sus procesos de institucionalización, con sus características sociodemográficas y con los problemas simbólicos que suscita su presencia. (shrink)

This review article provides a new perspective on the ethics of green nudging. We advance a new model for assessing the ethical permissibility of green nudges (GNs). On this model, which provides normative guidance for policymakers, a GN is ethically permissible when the intervention is (1) efficacious, (2) cost-effective, and (3) the advantages of the GN (i.e. reducing the environmental harm) are not outweighed by countervailing costs/harms (i.e. for nudgees). While traditional ethical objections to nudges (paternalism, etc.) remain potential normative (...) costs associated with GNs, any such costs must be weighed against the injunction to reduce environmental harm to third parties. (shrink)

The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism.

A collection of essays in French or English on the reception of Cartesian philosphy.

Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves us (...) at a loss as to which policy should be chosen in the non-trivial cases for which there is substantial disagreement between the different measures in their assessment of policy. (shrink)

Perhaps the most remarkable feature about this book is the effort made by its author in order to shed light on the most intriguing question that surrounds disgust: how is it possible for disgust to be so flexible with its objects? This book is highly recommended for those readers interested in the latest and most exciting aspects of current scholarship on the study of the emotions. Readers too who are interested on evolutionary psychology, moral psychology or neuroethics will find this (...) book stimulating. However, it should be noted that perhaps it may not be liked for readers allergic to evolutionary approaches and the vocabulary of cognitive science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, the aim is to demonstrate the ethical-semantic impact of great time in the reaccentuation of two reformulations of the expression “let this cup pass from me.” Theoretically, we describe great time as semantic sectors of existence which frame the possibilities of meaning actualized in speech genres and concrete utterances. Methodologically, the song Cálice by Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil and the RAP Cálice by Criolo are dialogically disposed in relation to their context of production, to one (...) another and to the biblical narratives Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and The Last Supper, which simultaneously convey status of utterance to the expression of which cup configures a metonym and fix the expression as an item of a cultural memory that we can now name Roman Catholic memory.1 The discussion shows that the transposition of this utterance from one semantic sector of existence to another alters the reflection and refraction processes of ideological signs through a game of memories. (shrink)

This essay compares “expert” attempts, commissioned by the US government, to imagine future nuclear risk with the attempt made by Lydia Millet in her novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. During the Cold War, nuclear attack was conceptualized primarily as a matter of instantaneous, remainderless destruction—a destruction so total that it would annihilate any position from which it could be assessed or measured—and that conception has a lingering hold even now, a generation later. Recent attention has shifted, however, to (...) the equally problematic issue of how to imagine the long-term, even posthuman risks posed by radioactive waste. Conventional models of risk and threat are inadequate to thinking through the problems of temporality raised by nuclear materials: those problems may well require the speculative resources of fiction if we are even to begin conceptualizing them. Millet's novel is read as an attempt to imagine these threats and problems and to conceive of how we might think our way beyond them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confessions of an American PsychoJames Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to ViolenceDaniel Cojocaru (bio)My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility.... I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was instantly at liberty; and what I now am, the Almighty knows! Amen.—James Hogg, The Private Memoirs (...) and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.... My pain is constant and sharp.... But even after admitting this... and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself.... This confession has meant nothing.—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho2A hundred and sixty-seven years lie between the publication of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (henceforth referred to as Confessions) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Yet one cannot but be amazed at the striking similarities of the main [End Page 185] protagonists’s insights at the end of these two novels. Although connections between works of Gothic Romanticism and postmodern narratives have been duly noted, the possible reasons for the analogies remain largely unexplored.3It will be argued here that both novels are representations of worlds immersed in what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (henceforth referred to as Deceit), has termed “deviated transcendency,” resulting in similar stages of narrative progression, which in turn can be analyzed in terms of Girard’s mimetic cycle of violence.At a first glance, the two pieces seem to be concerned with themes that to a secularized age must appear most disparate. But as Girard has noted: “The very idea of mediation encourages literary comparisons at a level which is no longer that of genre criticism or thematic criticism.... It may illuminate the works through each other.”4 Hogg’s narrative deals with the problem of antinomianism and the resulting spiritual pride. The anti-hero of the narrative, Robert Wringhim, relies on his belief that he is one of the elect and cannot fall from grace and consequently is convinced by his elusive friend Gil-Martin to become a murderer without having to fear punishment. American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman. However, one could argue that in its very first pages, American Psycho presents the reader with a secularized version of antinomianism. Michael Steig has fleetingly noted that the egocentric doctrines of antinomianism psychologically resemble the “I’m alright tenets” of yuppie pseudo-psychology.5 Timothy Price, one of Bateman’s colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.”6 Translated into antinomian terms, one could say that he is one of the elect, one of the privileged enjoying a capitalist heaven on earth; and by saying that society cannot afford to lose him, he, like Robert Wringhim, is showing that he believes he cannot fall from grace—or at least he tries to believe it.“I was well aware that the devilish powers of his mother would finally prevail; and either the dread of this, or the inward consciousness of having wronged him, certainly unnerved my arm.”7 If, in this reference to a quarrel with a fellow pupil at school, Robert gives away the fact that he doubts his own words, through the rhetorical device of correctio, so does Timothy Price by his choice of words. In fact, it is exactly because he is an asset that society can afford to lose him. As he is literally transformed into a commodity, society can discard him and in the novel indeed does so. It is one of the many ironies of the narrative that Price disappears soon after the above... (shrink)

Autour de la grande conference de Jacques Derrida, intitulee Justices, prononcee en 2003 et demeuree inedite en francais a ce jour, cet ouvrage collectif convoque certains des meilleurs specialistes de son oeuvre. Il s'agit moins ici de commemorer ou de dresser un etat des lieux que de penser, a partir de Derrida et avec lui, ce qui vient et de repondre a l'appel, aux appels pluriels qui resonnent dans son travail philosophique. Sont ainsi examines les principaux legs de sa pensee (...) dans les differents domaines (philosophie, politique, science des religions, esthetique, litterature) qu'elle a profondement transformes. Autant de reponses et de responsabilites, autant de provocations a lire et a relire l'oeuvre de Jacques Derrida a sa hauteur, comme elle nous y engage toujours. Avec les textes de: Gil Anidjar, Philip Armstrong, Fernanda Bernardo, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Gianfranco Dalmasso, Francoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Silvano Facioni, Edoardo Ferrario, Jerome Lebre, Georges Leroux, Michel Lisse, Rene Major, Marie-Louise Mallet, Serge Margel, Joana Maso, Ginette Michaud, J. Hillis Miller, Raoul Moati, Jean-Luc Nancy, Evando Nascimento, Francois Nault, Laura Odello, Jean-Michel Rabate, Marta Segarra, Peter Szendy, Chantal Talagrand, Francesco Vitale et Hent de Vries. (shrink)

This article proffers an invitation to neoclassical sociology. This is understood as a Habermasian reconstruction of the fundamental vision of the discipline as conceptualized by classical theorists, particularly Weber. Taking the cases of Eastern and Central Europe as a laboratory, we argue against the idea of a single, homogenizing globalizing logic. Currently and historically what we see instead is a remarkable diversity of capitalist forms and destinations. Neither sociological theories of networks and embeddedness nor economic models of rational action adequately (...) comprehend this diversity. A neoclassical approach enjoins an empirical research agenda comparing capitalisms, and an ironic, historical approach to analysis to inform an immanent critique of capitalist possibilities. (shrink)

This book represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to explore and test Derrida's contribution and influence on the study of theology, biblical studies, and the philosophy of religion. Over the course of the last decade, the writings of Derrida and the key concepts that emerge from his work such as the gift, apocalypse, hospitality, and messianism have wrought far-reaching and irresistible changes in the way that scholars approach biblical texts, comparative religious studies, and religious violence, for instance, as well (...) as the way they understand basic religious themes as myth, creation, forgiveness, one-ness, and multiplicity. In addition to original contributions from over twenty highly-regarded scholars including John Caputo, Daniel Boyarin, Edith Wyschogrod, Tim Beal, and Gil Anidjar, the volume opens with a lengthy interview with Derrida. (shrink)

Bigotry distractions are strategic invocations of racism, transphobia, or negative stigma toward other marginalized groups to shape political discourse. Although the vast majority of Americans agree on large policy issues ranging from reducing air pollution to prosecuting corporate crime, bigotry distractions divert attention from areas of agreement toward divisive identity issues. This article explores how the nefarious targeting of identity groups through bigotry distractions may be the tallest barrier to health reform, and social change more broadly. The discussion extends the (...) literature on dog whistles, strategic racism, and scapegoating. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone realizar un análisis histórico, filosófico y político de la concepción del comunismo de Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021). Con ese fin, se toma como referencia una serie de textos del autor, publicados entre 1986 y 2021, donde la cuestión del comunismo es abordada en relación con temáticas tales como el totalitarismo, la comunidad, lo común, la literatura, la democracia y la civilización capitalista. A lo largo del trabajo se indaga el desarrollo de su planteo hasta el momento en (...) que alcanza su forma más o menos definitiva, a mediados de la década del 2000, en el marco del debate sobre “la Idea del comunismo” (Alain Badiou). La interpretación de la posición que Nancy adopta en este debate de alcance internacional desemboca en los dos principales aportes del artículo. En primer lugar, la caracterización de una comprensión ontológica o existencial del comunismo que se diferencia radicalmente de otros posicionamientos actuales y que no registra antecedentes dentro de las tradiciones teóricas comunistas. En segundo lugar, la identificación de un umbral en el pensamiento de Nancy, y por extensión en el pensamiento contemporáneo, donde el sentido del “comunismo”, como la exigencia de otorgar un valor inestimable a cada existencia, se comunica con la búsqueda de otro “espíritu” para nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images. Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and (...) mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers. (shrink)

Resumo: O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar o tema da corrupção, a partir da filosofia política de Enrique Dussel. No marco dos movimentos críticos que emergem no chamado Sul Global, a produção teórica de Dussel busca desenvolver uma estrutura que possibilite a crítica ao que denomina como fetichização do poder. Esse conteúdo é abordado como fundamento da corrupção das instituições que, despercebido pela tradição filosófica moderna, implica uma teoria política que legitima o poder corrompido. Na argumentação aqui concretizada, será (...) exposta a arquitetônica da política dusseliana, distinguindo os conceitos de potentia e potestas. Estes, por sua vez, permitem a diferenciação entre o uso delegado do poder e a execução corrompida do poder. Em seguida, será explicitado o movimento que Dussel assume da crítica de Marx à economia política, para, então, indicar o conteúdo material a partir do qual a constituição crítica de uma nova teoria política deve ser desenvolvida - inspirado em experiências políticas latino-americanas.: The purpose of this article is to present the theme of corruption, based on Enrique Dussel’s political philosophy. Under the scope of the critical movements that emerge in the so-called Global South, Dussel’s theoretical production aims to develop a structure that makes it possible to criticize what he calls the fetishization of power. The fetishization of power is presented as a foundation for the corruption of institutions that, unnoticed by the modern philosophical tradition, implies a political theory that legitimizes corrupted power. In our argument, we will expose the architecture of Dusselian politics, distinguishing the concepts of potentia and potestas. These concepts, in turn, allow for the differentiation between the delegated use of power and the corrupt execution of power. Then, we will make explicit the movement that Dussel assumes from Marx’s critique of political economy to indicate the material content from which the critical constitution of a new political theory must be developed - content that is inspired by Latin American political experiences. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

In _The Smile of Tragedy_, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. (...) Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide. (shrink)

This study deals with the ontological background reference of religious experience in general, and it aimed to demonstrate how our existential condition of finitude is imposed to understand the most varied forms of manifestations of religious phenomena that arise in the contemporary world. Thus, we will start from the distinction between a hermeneutic-phenomenological conception of the religious experience in its essence and the empirical approaches on its diverse concrete configurations. In the end, we will try to point out that the (...) possibilities of apprehension of religious phenomena in general lack an existential element that is essentially constitutive for us, namely, the condition of the precariousness of the finite being faced with the opening of meaning that exceeds it in its horizon of transcendence. As general contribution, this way of understanding must foreclose every claim to make absolute a background meaning that should remain open as the most radical condition of possibility for the religious phenomena. (shrink)

Sometimes it feels as though we can control our minds. We catch ourselves looking out the window when we should be paying attention to someone talking, for example, and we purposefully return our attention to the conversation. Or we wrest our minds away from the bothersome thought of an upcoming dental appointment to focus on anything we can find that makes us less nervous. Control attempts such as these can meet with success, leaving us feeling the masters of our consciousness. (...) Yet at other times.. (shrink)

Asim Barut once,en passant, asked the question “For what transitions of the hydrogen atom do the spectral lines coincide”? It is a pleasure for us to give the answer in this paper.