The prevalence of chronic diseases has increased in recent decades. Some forms of the built environment adopted during the 20th century—e.g., urban sprawl, car dependency, and dysfunctional streetscapes—have contributed to this. In this article, I summarise ways in which the built environment influences health and how it can be constructed differently to promote health. I argue that urban planning is inevitably a social and political activity with many ethical dimensions, and I illustrate this with two examples: the construction of a (...) hypothetical new suburb and a current review of planning legislation in Australia. I conclude that (1) constructing the built environment in ways that promote health can be ethically justified, (2) urban planners and public health workers should become more skilled in the application of ethical considerations to practical problems, and (3) the public health workforce needs to become more competent at influencing the activities of other sectors. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book revisits the writings of classic theorists in an effort re-evaluate the importance and influence the psychology of esteem has on the economy. The authors explore ways the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes and offer new ways of thinking about how society works and may be made to work.

Words like you, here, and tomorrow are different from other expressions in two ways. First, and by definition, they have different kinds of meanings, which are context-dependent in ways that the meanings of names and descriptions are not. Second, their meanings play a different kind of role in the interpretations of the utterances that contain them. For example, the meaning of you can be paraphrased by a description like "the addressee of the utterance." But an utterance of (1) doesn't say (...) the same thing as an utterance of (2). (shrink)

Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind. One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them.

Category theory and topos theory have been seen as providing a structuralist framework for mathematics autonomous vis-a-vis set theory. It is argued here that these theories require a background logic of relations and substantive assumptions addressing mathematical existence of categories themselves. We propose a synthesis of Bell's many-topoi view and modal-structuralism. Surprisingly, a combination of mereology and plural quantification suffices to describe hypothetical large domains, recovering the Grothendieck method of universes. Both topos theory and set theory can be carried out (...) relative to such domains; puzzles about ‘large categories’ and ‘proper classes’ are handled in a uniform way, by relativization, sustaining insights of Zermelo. (shrink)

"The book's major parts, one on polarity and the other on analogy, introduce the reader to the patterns of thinking that are fundamental not only to Greek philosophy but also to classical civilization as a whole. As a leading classicist in his own right, Lloyd is an impeccable guide. His sophistication in adducing anthropological parallels to Greek models of polarity and analogy broadens his perspective, making him a forerunner in the study of what we are now used to calling semiotics. (...) A striking example of Lloyd's approach is his re-examination of the dichotomy of Olympian and chthonian gods in ancient Greek world view, which surpasses the reductionist and pseudo-historical models of sky-gods and earth-goddesses that are still commonly invoked to account for polarities in Greek pantheon. "In the second part, dealing with analogy, three crucial metaphorical models for the universe turn out to be basis for a dazzlingly wide variety of scientific and philosophical perspectives. Each model is tested in the whole spectrum of Greek artistic, philosophical and scientific thought. This work is a treasure-house of insights for experts and non experts alike." --Gregory Nagy, Harvard University. (shrink)

If faraway peoples have different ideas from our own, is this because they have different mentalities? Did our remote ancestors lack logic? The notion of distinct mentalities has been used extensively by historians to describe and explain cultural diversity. Professor Lloyd rejects this psychologising talk of mentalities and proposes an alternative approach, which takes as its starting point the social contexts of communication. Discussing apparently irrational beliefs and behaviour, he shows how different forms of thought coexist in a single culture (...) but within conventionally defined contexts. (shrink)

Some remarks on determination, physicalism, model theory, and logical truth.//An attempt to defend physicalism against objections that its bases are indeterminate.

Essays on photography and the medium's history and evolving identity.

"Introducing Tibetan Buddhism is the ideal starting point for students wishing to undertake a comprehensive study of Tibetan religion. This lively introduction covers the whole spectrum of Tibetan religious history, from early figures and the development of the old and new schools of Buddhism to the spread and influence of Tibetan Buddhism throughout the world. Geoffrey Samuel covers the key schools and traditions, as well as Bon, and bodies of textual material, including the writings of major lamas. He explores (...) aspects such as the path to liberation through Sutra and Tantra teachings, philosophy, ethics, ritual, and issues of gender and national identity. Illustrated throughout, the book includes a chronology, glossary, pronunciation guide, summaries, discussion questions and recommendations for further reading to aid students' understanding and revision"--. (shrink)

Berkeley is one of the most influential and yet most misunderstood of eighteenth-century philosophers. In this new, revised edition of his classic introduction, G.J. Warnock examines all Berkeley's major philosophical works and discusses his most original and interesting contributions to questions still debated by philosophers today. The aim of the book is to help the reader learn not so much about Berkeley, but rather, through Berkeley, something about philosophy itself.

In 2005, Chinese President Hu Jintao instituted a “Harmonious Society” policy marking a new China’s approach toward development. This generated intense excitement among observers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) who perceive an overlap in objectives between CSR and Harmonious Society and believe that Harmonious Society will lead to increased CSR engagement in China. However, there is little exploration of how Harmonious Society will contribute to increasing CSR engagement. This article seeks to explore whether Harmonious Society will meet this promise. It (...) does so by drawing up a list of actions that if taken by the government would increase the level of CSR in China and make Harmonious Society a relevant factor in the development of Chinese CSR. To do so, my article studies comparative literature on CSR development to develop a framework that divides causes of CSR in a country into environmental constraints and discretionary responses. Understanding what drives the development of CSR allows us to understand what measures the Chinese government can take to influence the level of CSR. Using this framework, my article suggests that Harmonious Society is unlikely to promote CSR in China’s growing private sector because policy measures that affect the “constraints” driving CSR are bounded by other political considerations. (shrink)

The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s “mahat-buddhi” appears to be riddled with obscurity. Standard realist interpreters struggle to explain its cumbersome, textually unsupported bivalence, namely, how the mahat-buddhi can represent both a cosmological entity and a psychological capacity. Idealist readings, meanwhile, neglect the historically deep ontological meaning of this tattva by reducing it to a power of the transcendental ego. This paper moves beyond the impasse of the realism-idealism framework for interpreting the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and examines the mahat-buddhi through the existential phenomenology of (...) José Ortega y Gasset. It begins by re-framing classical Sāṃkhya metaphysics as an existential phenomenology of life, whereby life—as lived reality, not an external physical world or a field of mental experience—conveys the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti. From this, the paper then argues that the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take other-beings-as. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 41-79.

At Cratylus 385b–c, Plato appears to argue that names have truth-value. Critics have almost universally condemned the argument as fallacious. Their case has proven so compelling that it has driven editors to recommend moving or removing the argument from its received position in the manuscripts. I argue that a close reading of the argument reveals it commits no fallacy, and its purpose in the dialogue justifies its original position. I wish to vindicate the manuscript tradition, showing that the argument establishes (...) that there is subject matter for investigation, and there is a correctness of names. (shrink)

We examine an argument for the non-context-freeness of English that has received virtually no discussion in the literature. It is based on adjuncts of the form 'X or no X', where X is a nominal. The construction has been held to exemplify unbounded syntactic reduplication. We argue that although the argument can be made in a mathematically valid form, its empirical basis is not secure. First, the claimed unbounded syntactic identity between nominals does not always hold in attested cases, and (...) second, an understanding of the semantics of the construction removes the necessity of making reference to any syntactic reduplication. (shrink)

In the accompanying paper I have attempted a new collation of the manuscripts of Moschus’Europa, in order to correct some errors and omissions that may be detected in the critical apparatus of Winfried Büihler’s excellent edition of this work . Büihler’s textual decisions, for instance, are refreshingly free from slavish preconceptions and inert prejudice. When he prints an emendation or opts for the daggers of despair, he is usually right. The occasions when he rejects the manuscript tradition without overriding justification (...) are rare. At 77 there is probably no need to posit corruption in δήγάρ At 127 κóλου foreshadows with typical Hellenistic ambiguity the verb λοώθηin 129.2 It is possible that there are two other places also where the manuscript tradition has wrongly been suspected: κυανin 47 and ϊαρόν in 60. (shrink)

Quantum logic as genuine non-classical logic provides no solution to the "paradoxes" of quantum mechanics. From the minimal condition that synonyms be substitutable salva veritate, it follows that synonymous sentential connectives be alike in point of truth-functionality. It is a fact of pure mathematics that any assignment Φ of (0, 1) to the subspaces of Hilbert space (dim. ≥ 3) which guarantees truth-preservation of the ordering and truth-functionality of QL negation, violates truth-functionality of QL ∨ and $\wedge $ . Thus, (...) from within both the classical framework and that of any QL that preserves elementary set theory, two distinct (nonsynonymous) sets of connectives are discernible. Classical derivations of QM paradoxes are all available unless the language of QM is not classically closed. Maintaining this requires a strong and selfdefeating verification theory of meaning, the philosophical cornerstone of the Copenhagen interpretation to which QL was to provide an alternative. (shrink)

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external (...) environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of elucidating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on similarity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their experience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what's happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging (...) struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful.In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies. (shrink)

This purely theoretical paper examines the relationship between the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunity and environmental impact. Specifically, we attempt to more effectively define environmentally-relevant entrepreneurship through comparisons of different extant definitions in the literature, and to extend Schumpeterian theory through the inclusion of environmental entrepreneurship within his framework. By doing so, we contribute to the entrepreneurship literature through a more encompassing and specified definition of environmental entrepreneurship, and by incorporating environmental entrepreneurship into Schumpeter’s (1934) theoretical framework. We propose that (1) (...) Waste-Equals-Food, (2) Public Goods, and (3) Externalities each demonstrate thatenvironmental entrepreneurship is the act of creating future goods and services with positive environmental consequences. Finally, we assert that Schumpeter would likely characterize the pursuit of any such opportunity as “opening up a new source of supply.”. (shrink)

In a critical scene deeply troubled by questions of justice and responsibility, and beset by political and moral scandals, no issue in recent years has been more urgent or more unsettled than the question of ethics. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, whose previous book, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, was one of the first to announce the critical renewal of ethics, attempts in this new book to explain why ethical questions resist settlement. He urges a new account of ethics (...) not as a stable set of principles, values, or prescriptions, but as a variable factor of "imperativity" immanent in language, analysis, narrative, and creation. (shrink)

Critical reflection on the available neuropsychological evidence suggests that the roles of emotion and reason in moral judgment may not be distinct. This casts significant doubt on our current understanding of moral judgment, and therefore also on all philosophical theories based on that understanding. Most notably, it raises doubts about both sentimentalism and rationalism, which historically have often been treated as exclusive and exhaustive theories regarding the nature of moral concepts. As an alternative, I endorse pluralism with regard to the (...) emotional and rational nature of moral concepts. (shrink)

Standard presentations of axioms for set theory as truths simpliciter about actual-objects the sets-confront a number of puzzles associated with platonism and foundationalism. In his classic, Zermelo suggested an alternative "many worlds" view. Independently, Putnam proposed something similar, explicitly incorporating modality. A modal-structural synthesis of these ideas is sketched in which obstacles to their formalization are overcome. Extendability principles are formulated and used to motivate many small large cardinals. The use of second-order logic as a coherent and clear framework for (...) set theory is supported. (shrink)

Arguments about constitutional and personal rights often invoke the concept of privacy. In the United States it has been said that the constitution "embodies a promise that a certain private sphere of individual liberty will be kept largely beyond the reach of government". A number of formulae has been invoked in an attempt to define the sphere of constitutional privacy. They include: Fundamental rights of interests; personal decisions and issues; important questions intimately affecting private lives; and decisions affecting education, child-rearing, (...) marriage and contraception.Canadian and Europian courts have resorted to balancing formulae and to proportionality to set the limits to liberty guarantees. All of them need, however, an implied general theory of liberty such as that propounded by Mill , since privacy is a special sub-category of liberty.Privacy claims are made not only against the State, but in tort law relations between individuals, or between individuals and organisations such as the Press. Proposals for legislation to protect personal privacy encompass two different types of claim. One relates to physical intrusion: the other to proprietary rights over information of certain kinds. It is questionable whether general legislation to establish a statutory tort of breach of privacy is defensible. It may even be dangerous and be exploitable to protect government information. A public interest defence is essential. That throws the balancing role back on the courts, but they cannot rely on any obvious social consensus in weighing the interests at issue. In der Auseinandersetzung über subjektive Rechte, die von einer Verfassung garantiert sind oder deren Verletzung privatrechtliche Ansprüche auslöst, berufen sich viele Stimmen auf das Konzept der Privatsphäre. Nach einer in den Vereinigten Staaten vertretenen These liegt der amerikanischen Verfassung "das Versprechen zugrunde, daß die Privatsphäre, d.i. eine bestimmte Sphäre individueller Freiheit, im großen und ganzen außerhalb des Zugriffs des Staates liegt". Wie läßt sich rechtlich präzisieren, was diese verfassungsrechtlich garantierte Privatsphäre eigentlich einschließt? Eine Reihe von Antworten, die auf diese Frage gegeben werden, bezeichnen als vom Begriff der Privatsphäre erfaßt a) fundamentale Rechte oder Interessen, b) persönliche Probleme oder Entscheidungen, c) wesentliche Fragen, die das Privatleben ganz existenziell berühren, d) Entscheidungen, die die Erziehung und Ausbildung von Kindern, Empfängnisverhütung und Eheschließung betreffen. Einige dieser Formeln enthalten Elemente eines logischen Zirkels, da sie bei dem Versuch, die Privatsphäre näher zu umschreiben, ihrerseits selbst den Ausdruck "privat" benutzen. Andere sind entweder offensichtlich zu weit oder zu eng oder sonst schlechterdings ungenügend. Darüber hinaus ist es nicht klar, wann bei den subjektiven Rechten, die als fundamental bezeichnet werden, Ausnahmen gemacht werden. Ein Beispiel liefert die US-amerikanische Entscheidung Bowers v. Hardwick. (shrink)

Following a brief preface, the second section of this paper discusses Mill's early reflections on the problem of how deductive inference can be illuminating. In the third section it is suggested that in his Logic Mill misconstrued the feature that the premises of a logically valid argument contain the conclusion as the ground of a charge that deductive proof is question-begging. The fourth section discusses the nature of the traditional petitio objection to syllogism, and the fifth shows that Mill had (...) a theory capable of answering it. The final section cites the confusion described in section 3 to explain why Mill nevertheless continued to think that syllogistic proofs beg the question. (shrink)

"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman. "Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism..... This study of Heidegger is a fine example of (...) how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books "Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit.... Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, _Research in Phenomenology_ "The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review. (shrink)