This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

This article contains the Spanish translation of the entry “Staat”, of Hermann Heller, with an introduction to his political and juridical thought.

The Michael Heller’s article entitled “How is philosophy in science possible?” was originally published in Polish in 1986 and then translated into English by Bartosz Brożek and Aeddan Shaw and published in 2011 in the collection of essays entitled Philosophy in Science. Methods and Applications. This seminal paper has founded further growth of the ‘philosophy in science’ and become the reference point in the methodological discussions, especially in Poland. On the 40th anniversary of Philosophical Problems in Science we wanted (...) to make this paper freely available to the international public by reprinting its English version. In this issue it is followed by two additional articles-commentaries. (shrink)

The authors conducted this interview with Luce Irigaray in her home in Paris in May, 1994.

We suggest that the hierarchical predictive processing account detailed by Clark can be usefully integrated with narrative psychology by situating personal narratives at the top of an individual's knowledge hierarchy. Narrative representations function as high-level generative models that direct our attention and structure our expectations about unfolding events. Implications for integrating scientific and humanistic views of human experience are discussed.

This is an anatomy of the ethical and political preconceptions which underlie theories of justice. The author takes as her cue Hegel's description of modernity in which politics and ethics have fallen out of harmony with one another.

Tomasello describes how the sense of moral obligation emerges from a shared perspective with collaborative partners and in-group members. Our commentary expands this framework to accommodate multiple social identities, where the normative standards associated with diverse group memberships can often conflict with one another. Reconciling these conflicting obligations is argued to be a central part of human morality.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 182-215.

: A rich array of twelfth to fifteenth century Arabic texts captures the advent of a supererogatory prayer known as ṣalāt al-raghā’ib, on the eve of the first Friday of the month of Rajab in late eleventh-century Jerusalem, and its wide dissemination. This corpus offers an unusually vivid picture of the formation and the transformation of a medieval bid’a, or, of an ‘invention of tradition’. Combining our expertise in Islamic law and in Ayyūbid and Mamluk era history, we use this (...) corpus for an in-depth study of popular piety, power politics, scholarly polemics and legal discourse. Twenty eight translated excerpts of various texts are presented in this paper, preceded by a detailed introduction. Exploring legal reasoning in its concrete political and social context provides a nuanced understanding of the development, mass proliferation and ensuing debate over a highly controversial and extraordinary potent religious practice. (shrink)

In this paper I shall examine the nebular riddle and discuss how attempts were made to solve it. The history of the riddle illustrates how astrophysics evolved from a science founded on empirical procedures to a mature field having a substantive theoretical underpinning.

This text is devoted to arguing for the thesis that our standard ontology of physical objects is not correct, and to offering a replacement for that ontology. None of the things that we normally take to exist really do exist. There are no animals, vegetables, or minerals. Nothing that I say against the specific physical objects of our standard ontology counts against the general claim that there are physical objects. In fact, I propose an ontology of physical objects that does (...) not suffer from the defects of our standard ontology or from any other defect. What exist, according to the ontology that I propose, are four dimensional hunks of matter, and every filled region of spacetime is exactly filled by one such object. ;In chapter 1, I explain this proposed ontology of four dimensional hunks of matter, give some reason for preferring four dimensional objects over three dimensional ones, and answer some objections to such an ontology. In chapter 2 the ontology is developed in more depth, paying special attention to those features of an object that seem to be most tied to its identity--its persistence conditions and essential properties. It turns out that four dimensional hunks have their spatiotemporal boundaries essentially. I also begin my attack on the standard ontology, offering some reason to believe that they do not really exist, or at least that they do not have the persistence conditions and essential properties that we typically attribute to them. In chapter 3 I present my strongest argument against our standard ontology--a version of the Sorites paradox. I discuss all the possible ways of handling vagueness and show that the only acceptable one is the denial of our standard ontology. In chapter 4 I show that rejecting the standard ontology is not as extreme as it might first seem since another ontology can be offered in its place and a paraphrase can be set up, thereby showing that even our most important and effective utterances need not be committed to the standard ontology. This other ontology is that of four dimensional hunks of matter. (shrink)

O artigo que ora apresentamos problematiza a formação e os enfrentamentos da Associação Liberdades Poéticas para atender ao Objetivo Número 16 da ONU, “Paz, Justiça e Instituições Eficazes”. Trata-se de um grupo de voluntários, composto por pessoas de diferentes sexualidades, formações acadêmicas, atuações profissionais e faixas etárias, criado em 2020 durante a pandemia, que tem como premissa reconhecer a prática da leitura como um Direito Humano, indispensável à humanização e à transformação dos sujeitos. Atuamos com remição de pena por leitura (...) no sistema prisional paulista, que confere, às pessoas privadas de liberdade, quatro dias de redução na sentença para cada obra lida, em um limite de dez títulos/ano. Nossa fundamentação teórica sustenta-se em Antonio Candido, em Lynn Hunt, no Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), na Constituição Federal, entre outros. Concluímos que, apesar da orientação geral da ONU e dos esforços do governo federal com a publicação da Resolução 391/2021, do Conselho Nacional de Justiça, para flexibilizar a remição de pena por meio da leitura, agentes do sistema penitenciário no estado de São Paulo ainda operam sob uma lógica autoritária que não corresponde à do CNJ, tampouco à ODS 16. (shrink)

Agnes Heller conversó con la Redacción de Areté el 24 de abril de 2003, durante una visita a la Universidad Católica para dictar la Lección Inaugural del Año Académico de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. En la conversación estuvieron presentes los profesores Pepi Patrón, Fidel Tubino y Miguel Giusti.

This provocative book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as 'How is it that an object can survive change?' and 'How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed'? To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls (...) 'hunks', four-dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics. (shrink)