Challenges to the exercise of the basic socio-economic rights of half the global population give rise to some of the most pressing issues today. This timely book focuses on world poverty, providing a systematic exposition of the evolving legal responsibility of the international community of states to cooperate in addressing the structural obstacles that contribute to this injustice. This book analyzes the approach, contribution, and current limitations of the international law of human rights to the manifestations of world poverty, inviting (...) the reader to rethink human rights, and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their contemporary protection. (shrink)

As Acharya Vidyanand writes in the Foreword of Samayasara, it is the ultimate conscious reality. The enlightened soul has infinite glory. It has the innate ability to demolish the power of karmas, both auspicious as well as inauspicious, which constitute the cycle of births and deaths, and are an obstacle in the path of liberation of the soul. Samayasara is an essential reading for anyone who wishes to lead a purposeful and contented life. It provides irrefutable and lasting solutions (...) to all our problems, concerning worldly ways as well as spiritual curiosities and misgivings. (shrink)

Contents: Translator's foreword – Author's foreword – The Sportive Origin of the State (El origen deportivo del Estado, 1924) – Unity and Disunity of Europe (Prólogo para franceses, 1937) – Man the Technician (Meditación de la técnica, 1939) – History as a System (Historia como sistema, 1935) – The Argentine State and the Argentinean (El hombre a la defensiva, 1929).

This book offers a thorough technical elaboration and philosophical defense of an objectivist informational interpretation of quantum mechanics according to which its novel content is located in its kinematical framework, that is, in how the theory describes systems independently of the specifics of their dynamics. -/- It will be of interest to researchers and students in the philosophy of physics and in theoretical physics with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Additionally, parts of the book may be used (...) as the basis for courses introducing non-physics majors to quantum mechanics, or for self-study by those outside of the university with an interest in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

It would make a wonderful musical study – perhaps someone has already done it – to compare the various operatic and instrumental versions of the famous myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. [...] We know all too well the anxiety question par excellence, the disquieting “ Che vuoi? ” traversing our symbolically embedded lives. So, let me indulge a bit in this uncanny zone and ask: “ Che vogliamo? ”, what is our goal with this issue? Why did we start this (...) project? To be honest, I’m more than uncomfortable with this question, as it pushes me dangerously close to the awkward regions of the Lacanian “ Moi, la vérité, je parle ”. Nevertheless, for the greater good let me play this role for a little while and do my best to outline an answer. (shrink)

The ancient Western conception of philosophy as a way of life was eclipsed as philosophy became an academic discipline, a development that peaked under the influence of 13th-century scholasticism. Domański both traces this development and explores how some resisted it.

Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Vol. I/II; 1893/1903) is a modern classic. Since the 1930s it has belonged to an exclusive class of only eleven works in the history of symbolic logic, which contain the ‘first appearance of a new idea of fundamental importance’ [Church, 1936, p. 122], and its author is the only one whose other major works — Begriffsschrift (1879) and Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) — also belong to this distinguished group. Together with (...) the seminal paper ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ these three monographs represent the essential contributions to one of the most fascinating foundational projects in mathematics, then and now. For decades Frege struggled with the question, ‘how are we to apprehend logical objects, in particular, the numbers? What justifies us in acknowledging numbers as objects?’ [Frege, 2013, ‘Afterword’, p. 265]. His favourite answer, for a long time, was that arithmetic is a complex branch of logic. But since there is no logicism without logic, Frege started in Begriffsschrift with the invention of a nearly perfect formalization of higher-order classical predicate logic. To discover how far we can get in arithmetic by analytic means alone, it was even necessary to clarify the semantic character of the concept of number. This was done in a marvellous way by Frege five years later, in Grundlagen. The next step was nothing less than the complete execution of his logicist project, a monumental undertaking; and it is well known that here Frege failed, due to Russell’s derivation of the antinomy in 1902. But, despite the contradiction, Grundgesetze contains Frege’s legacy to logicism, which became more and more attractive. (shrink)

Foreword : Consistency, Contradiction, and Consequence.

(2012). Foreword. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, SPECIAL ISSUE 1: Uses of Non-Classical Logic: Foundational Issues; SPECIAL ISSUE 2: Formal Models of Norm Change, pp. 1-1. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.682433.

Foreword to Special issue on Logics for Multi-agent Systems.

Foreword to the Special issue on Interval Temporal Logics and Duration Calculi.

(2001). Foreword. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 16, No. 2-3, pp. 73-77.

This foreword explores the history of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and its role in promoting access to care and antiracism.

This is a foreword to the special issue of Kantian Review (27.4) entitled Radicalizing Kant?, co-edited by Corey W. Dyck and Charles W. Mills.

A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my favorite dishes when I need to order at a local restaurant. I use it to calculate, when I need to figure out bills and tips. (...) It is a tremendous resource in an argument, with Google ever present to help settle disputes. I make plans with it, using its calendar to help determine what I can and can’t do in the coming months. I even daydream on the iPhone, idly calling up words and images when my concentration slips. Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But if Andy Clark is right, all this would do is speed up the processing, and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already. Clark is a connoisseur of the myriad ways in which the mind relies on the world to get its work done. The first part of this marvelous book explores some of these ways: the extension of our bodies, the extension of our senses, and crucially, the use of language as a tool to extend our thought. The second part of the book defends the thesis that in at least some of these cases, the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me. This is the thesis of the extended mind: when parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind. The thesis has a long history: I am told that there are hints of it in Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. But no-one has done as much to give life to the idea as Andy Clark. In a series of important books and articles—Being There, Natural-Born Cyborgs, “Magic words: How language augments human computation”, and many others—he has explored the many ways in which the boundaries between mind and world are far more flexible than one might have thought.. (shrink)

Today, somewhat counter-intuitively, we no longer have an obvious venue for thinking-in-the world about our actuality. Despite, or because of, the endless conferences, seminars, mobility, publication outlets, new media and the like in which it is easier and easier to be connected, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the diagnostic that it is harder and harder to relate. This Foreword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ considers the contemporary problem of the inversion of connectedness and relatedness in (...) the light of Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre. Proceeding from a discussion of the three kinds of friendship distinguished by Aristotle, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual persona is invoked as a way of thinking through conceptual friendship and the forms of relationality that an engagement with Strathern’s work requires and sustains. (shrink)

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE: From 1808 to 1816, Hegel served as professor of philosophy and headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg. He lectured on a wide variety of subjects - from logic and ethics to phenomenology and metaphysics - and prepared a series of notebooks which he used as the basis of his lectures. Students made their individual transcriptions of his oral dictations, and Hegel would revise these, in a steady stream of redactive work over the years. In 1838, seven years after (...) Hegel’s death, the notebooks-cum-transcriptions were found by Karl Rosenkranz, who edited and put them together for publication as Hegel’s Philosophische Propaedeutik. This became Volume 18 of Hegel’s Werke. Rosenkranz wrote a lively foreword to the volume, discussing Hegel’s approach to teaching and his views on the role of philosophy in secondary-school education. To this, Rosenkranz added his own views on the function of philosophy in culture as a whole - and one cannot help feeling that the biting piquancy of his language on these issues carries echoes of numerous talks with Hegel. This translation of the Rosenkranz essay will be incorporated into the text of the first English translation of Hegel’s Philosophical Propaedeutic, now completed and under consideration by a university press. (shrink)

Franz Brentano is known today primarily for his contributions to theoretical philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind. But much of his thinking was devoted to moral philosophy, and The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong is his most important text in this area. In what follows, I (1) describe the main tenets of Brentano’s moral philosophy, (2) explain its historical and intellectual significance, and (3) offer a guide to the text, including the innovations in the present edition.

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung and The Open Society and Its Enemies, contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, translated into (...) English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨urzburg School. The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx, an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that most important advances in science are revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one that many philosophers attribute to Kuhn. Another insight, also often forgotten, is the emphasis in Chapter 23 on the social character of science, which acts as the main custodian of its claim to objectivity. (shrink)