In this provocative new work, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo proposes that the earliest Platonic writings, in particular Apology, Crito, and sections of Gorgias, contain an underlying moral philosophy that can be attributed to Socrates with some degree of assurance. His aim is to show that Socratic moral philosophy is a reasonably systematic construction generated by a small number of principles or axioms.

: This response to Nikolaus Knoepffler's paper in the same issue of the Journal agrees that if the arguments supporting the first two of the eight human embryonic stem cell research policy options discussed are unsound, as Knoepffler argues, then it seems natural to move to the increasingly permissive options. If the arguments are sound, however, then the more permissive options should be rejected. It is argued that three of the rejected arguments, taken together, constitute very good reasons to hold (...) that a human embryo is endowed with dignity from fertilization onward. Thus, countries that want their public policies to match the moral imperative of respect for human beings should refrain from allowing destructive human embryo research and should devote considerable energy and public funds to research and clinical trials using non-embryonic ("adult") stem cells. (shrink)

This commentary considers the viability of ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) in the case of an adult who qualified for brain death. Although there has been some success with OTC in achieving pregnancy when the tissue is reimplanted in the original donor, attempting OTC in the case under discussion would have not been medically feasible.

Integrar o estudo de um jornal como o Índia Nova: jornal de expansão da cultura indiana numa publicação dedicada a estudos sobre revistas justifica-se por estarmos perante um projecto cultural, com inevitáveis ressonâncias políticas. Órgão dos estudantes goeses nas Universidades portuguesas, a sua criação deveu-se à iniciativa de um grupo de jovens intelectuais goeses, criados sob os auspícios da República, que, sob o signo da ruptura, vinham chamar a si a responsabilidade de intervenção na cidade. A publicação, se buscava atingir (...) o público europeu metropolitano, sensibilizando-o para a magnitude da civilização indiana, visava essencialmente os goeses na Metrópole e em Goa, assumindo o objectivo de recuperar uma identidade goesa formatada na tradição civilizacional indiana e de promover uma actividade cultural e científica centrada em temas e referências indianos. Através desta proposta, associava-se ao movimento político-cultural nacionalista que atingia a “Grande Índia” e, mais globalmente, aos diversos nacionalismos que despontavam por todo o continente asiático nas primeiras décadas do século XX. Finalmente, o grupo de estudantes goeses e os seus colaboradores goeses e metropolitanos, efectuando o percurso da particularidade goesa para a reflexão sobre os destinos da humanidade, integravam, por essa via, a corrente que a Ocidente e Oriente se batia por um novo humanismo, assentando a universalidade na harmonização da diversidade e tornando todos os indivíduos e povos coniventes na construção do futuro da humanidade. (shrink)

The era of post-modernity has completely changed the way that we see, recognize and question the world, and what we accept to be true. During and after the 1960s many witnessed the rise of a greater multiplicity of local narratives. Prior to this, the grand narratives of the past, such as religion, the Enlightenment, and science were taken as whole, singular truths. However, such metanarratives tend to ignore the individual experiences that do not fit neatly into categories constructed by major (...) institutional authorities. This disconnection from the personal pushed more people to doubt, in favour of the narrative where the Self is visible and heard. It can be argued that this revolution in thought, and meaning and narrative-making in America grew after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. By examining Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of postmodernity, and those who expanded on his ideas, we can highlight how the assassination of JFK marked the onset and rise of the postmodern conspiracy theory. This includes the deconstruction of trust, the breakdown of “objective” reality and identity markers as well as the use of new mass media technologies, such as the film camera and the television. (shrink)

The relation between aisthesis and interiority manifests in Wittgenstein’s account of the subject and his private language argument. But it is also an overlooked leitmotif in Dostoevsky’s novels—one of Wittgenstein’s favorite authors, and in W.G. Sebald’s work—who was inspired by Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This book reflects on the role literature can play in answering the philosophical question of an adequate presentation of intention and pain.

In a recent article published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, David DeGrazia criticized the two pivotal assumptions that underlie President Bush’s policy on funding stem cell research. Those assumptions are that we originate as single-cell zygotes at the time of conception and that we have full moral status as soon as we originate.In this paper, I would like to concentrate on the first of those assumptions and show in light of recent findings in embryological development that DeGrazia’s (...) criticisms have to be rejected. I shall save my discussion of DeGrazia’s critique of the second assumption for a later article that can take into account DeGrazia’s further elaboration of his position. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Neurology of Culture, or How We Move From Rage to Ritual in the Process of HominizationGregory J. Lobo (bio)The most (or rather the only) effective form of reconciliation—that would stop this crisis, and save the community from total self-destruction—is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat, designated by mimetism itself, and unanimously adopted as such.—René Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 64.INTRODUCTIONHow (...) do we move from rage to ritual? How do we become human? The work of René Girard would seem to offer an answer to this question. In this brief essay I want to simply add some evolutionary and neuroscientific details to Girard's theory, which flesh out while also corroborating the basic components of it. [End Page 255]To do this I need to draw a distinction between religion and culture. I mention this from the outset because the main source upon which I draw to represent Girard's thinking is the book Evolution and Conversion. Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, published in 2008. I use this particular source because, as Girard's interlocutors say in their foreword to it, this book "is intended as a reassessment of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 30 years on,"1 and it evidences the "ways in which, over 30 years, mimetic theory has matured, and its fruitfulness become more apparent, even since the initial excitement of Girard's groundbreaking works in the 1970s."2 I highlight my need to distinguish between culture and religion due to the fact that in Evolution and Conversion Antonello and Castro Rocha state forthrightly that for Girard (and, one might presume, for Girardians), culture and religion "amount to the same thing."3 But it is not totally clear that this holds. For as Girard, in the same book, says, "religion, as an institution, comes into being through the scapegoat mechanism."4 Thus, the question arises as to what it is that allows humans to have institutions in the first place. Surely the answer is the capacity for culture as such, understood as the very capacity for symbolic thought, for the manipulation of mental images and their combination into new ones. Hopefully, in the discussion that follows, my insistence on the need to analytically distinguish between culture and religion will be born out. For now, I simply ask the reader to play along. If the reader is game, I can restate my purpose: What is the neurology of culture, such that we can become human, or move from blind rage to deliberate ritual?THE MIMETIC MECHANISMGirard, we should recall, insists that we start "from a purely naturalistic standpoint."5 With this injunction in mind, I will give an account of the "mimetic mechanism," an expression that "describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of a mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution"6 that strives for naturalistic representation. Therefore, I will avoid terms like "community" or even "group," which already suggest the existence of something like cultural realities. A naturalistic standpoint, which I take to be a scientific standpoint, must strive to circumvent begging the question by using terms like these, for they refer exactly to the phenomena we are trying to explain: a self-conscious sense of belonging and community. [End Page 256]For those familiar enough with its presuppositions about the human nature that underlies, or is the foundation of, human culture, the mimetic mechanism can be presented in a somewhat straightforward fashion. This presentation relies on Chapter 2 of Evolution and Conversion.The desire of Homo sapiens is in essence mimetic. That is, an individual member of the species desires what its proximal conspecifics—its models—desire. That two conspecifics should desire the same thing leads, inevitably, to two intermediate outcomes. First, the desire for what the other desires intensifies, due to the effects of mimesis; second, this drives the two now mutual models almost inevitably into conflict, as they become doubles. This is conflictual mimesis. The conflict can turn violent and... (shrink)

I would like to challenge this view on various grounds, but before I do so, I wish to provide a broader setting for the problems discussed in this paper.

This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.

RésuméGian-Carlo Rota est l’un des rares grands mathématiciens de la deuxième moitié du XX e siècle dont l’intérêt pour la logique formelle soit aussi ouvertement déclaré et ne se soit jamais démenti, depuis sa formation d’étudiant à Princeton jusqu’à ses derniers écrits. Plus exceptionnel encore, il fait partie des rares lecteurs assidus de Husserl à s’être aperçu que la phé-noménologie poursuivait un projet de réforme de la logique formelle. L’article propose d’attester l’existence d’un tel projet chez Husserl ; d’en examiner (...) la réappropriation et les prolongements chez Rota.Gian-Carlo Rota is among the few great mathematicians of the second-half of the XXth century whose interest in formal logic is openly declared and has never flagged, since his training as a student in Princeton up to his last writings. Even more exceptional, he belongs to the rare diligent readers of Husserl, who noticed that phenomenology was pursuing a project of reform of formal logic. This paper propose to testify to the existence of such a project in Husserl; to examine how it is taken over and continued by Rota. Gian-Carlo Rota è uno dei pochi grandi matematici della seconda metà del ventesimo secolo, il cui interesse per la logica formale è, dalla sua formazione come studente a Princeton al suo ultimi scritti, apertamente dichiarato e mai negato. Cosa ancora più eccezionale, Rota è uno dei rari lettori assidui di Husserl ad aver percepito che la fenomenologia stava perseguendo un progetto di riforma della logica formale. L’articolo propone di attestare l’esistenza di un tale progetto in Husserl e di esaminare la sua riappropriazione e le sue estensioni proposte da Gian-Carlo Rota.This article is in French. (shrink)

Une épistémologie phénoménologique est nécessairement intéressée aux points de contact et de passage entre problèmes scientifiques et problèmes philosophiques. Il est instructif, dans cette perspective, de revenir sur un moment historiquement décisif, mais éminemment équivoque, encore porteur de prolongements et de retournements dont nous n’avons peut-être pas encore pris toute la mesure : l’énoncé du principe de Pauli. Le statut logique de cet énoncé est lui-même ambigu : règle technique, semi-empirique, postulat, principe ou théorème, etc. Pour le meilleur et le (...) pire, ce principe se trouve accouplé dès l’origine au problème de l’individuation en physique. Nous proposons de revenir sur quelques traits philosophiquement saillants des interprétations que Weyl et de Broglie proposent dudit « principe d’exclusion Pauli » (ou PEP). L’un et l’autre y voient l’occasion d’un approfondissement du principe d’individuation prévalant jusqu’alors dans la physique classique : l’espace. Weyl associe le PEP au principe leibnizien des indiscernables et tente de modéliser l’espace en jeu au moyen de la théorie des groupes. Les changements de position de Pauli lui-même à ce propos ne sont pas moins instructifs. La position de De Broglie sur ce principe est un marqueur de sa trajectoire : de la théorie audacieuse, et, équivoque, de « l’onde-pilote », jusqu’à celle dite de la « double solution », en passant par la période de rétractation consécutive au congrès de Solvay de 1927. Ce qui persiste d’un bout à l’autre, c’est un partage entre espace « réel » empirique et espace de configuration mathématique imaginaire. Chez l’un et l’autre, cette interprétation est ainsi indissociable d’un nouveau partage du subjectif et de l’objectif et d’une réflexion critique sur le principe traditionnel d’individuation qu’est l’espace (ou le temps physique) au profit d’une articulation toujours plus subtile et complexe entre l’espace de la phénoménalisation (de l’observation) et les « espaces » de la modélisation mathématique, en particulier les espaces des états possibles décrits dans le formalisme de la statistique quantique. (shrink)

Cet article réfléchit à ce que nous dit une photo prise durant les manifestations de rue qui ont secoué le Chili à l’automne 2019. Une voiture sur laquelle a été peint un graffiti Esto es montaje aide à analyser les différentes couches de machination, de montage, de résistance, de frustrations et d’espoirs qui se sont retrouvées pendant quelques mois dans les rue de Santiago – et qui nous parlent aussi peut-être de mobilisations et d’immobilisation comparables en d’autres points du globe.

The 4th National Cyber Security Workshop organised by IEEE India Council was held in Mumbai at the sprawling Yantra Park, Thane Campus of Tata Consultancy Services on 11 & 12 November, 2016. This event follows two successful editions of the workshop in Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

This article is a response to Frank Hindriks’ “Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World.”.

By going back to the starting point of Derrida’s debates with some of the main representatives of structuralism in France, I propose to highlight the ambiguities that cover the very notion of structure, and to take the measure of the exact role that the reference to phenomenology plays then and will continue to play thereafter. Among these ambiguities: the one that touches the mathematical notion of structure, central in the triumphant structuralist mathematical current in France at that time; and especially: (...) the one called “groups of transformations,” the most important one to understand at the same time the audacities and the impasses of structuralism. The hard core of mathematization of modern physics, with Galileo’s principle of relativity, then developed in a masterly way in Einstein’s theory of relativity rest on this very structure. After tracing the broad outlines of these initial discussions, we engage in an analysis of how it is possible to understand the “epistemological contemporaneity” of relativity theory and Husserl’s transcendental aesthetics. Based on a thorough exploration of the analyses of the intersubjective constitution of space, time and the objective common world, we identify this central structure that Husserl calls “intersubjective group of transformation.” Equipped with this phenomenological structure, we trace this motif in Derrida’s work. Its insistence allows us to understand how the phenomenological premises of his critique of structuralism can help to understand his theoretical positions, especially in contrast to Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 51, Issue 6, Page 555-573, December 2021. John Searle’s social ontology distinguishes between linguistic and non-linguistic institutional facts. He argues that every instance of the latter is created by declarative speech acts, while the former are exceptions to this far-reaching claim: linguistic phenomena are autonomous, their meaning is “built in,” and this is necessary, Searle argues, to avoid “infinite regress.” In this essay I analyze Searle’s arguments for this linguistic exceptionalism and reveal its flaws. (...) My method is to follow Searle’s argument closely and comprehensively so as to avoid, insofar as is possible, a selective reading of his argument in my favor. Against Searle’s position, I argue that linguistic phenomena are not exceptions to his general theory of institutional facts, for they too always require supplementary representations in order to exist. Language itself is analogous to all other institutions and infinite regress turns out to be unavoidable. (shrink)

This edited collection addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time.

Resumen El artículo analiza los rituales conmemorativos de los asesinatos de dos miembros del Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD), Maximiliano Kosteki y Darío Santillán, ocurridos el 26 de junio de 2002. Específicamente, se examinan los cortes del Puente Pueyrredón -que une a la ciudad de Avellaneda, localizada en el conurbano bonaerense, con la Capital Federal- el 26 de cada mes, entre 2002-2008, en los que se desenvuelven los rituales conmemorativos de dichos asesinatos y los modos en que en éstos se (...) actualizan y conjugan las prácticas y los lenguajes de dos narrativas claves de la cultura política nacional: la retórica revolucionaria y de los derechos humanos. (shrink)

Due to COVID-19, universities have been facing challenges in generating the best possible experience for students with online academic training programs. To analyze professors' expectations about online education and relate them to student academic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and considering the socio-demographic, entry, and prior university performance variables of students. A prospective longitudinal design was used to analyze the expectations of 546 professors in T1. In T2, the impact of the expectations of 382 of these professors was analyzed, who (...) taught courses during the first semester to a total of 14,838 university students. Professors' expectations and their previous experience of online courses were obtained during T1, and the students' academic information was obtained in T2. A questionnaire examining the Expectations toward Virtual Education in Higher Education for Professors was used. 84.9% of the professors were considered to have moderate to high skills for online courses. Differences in expectations were found according to the professors' training level. The professors' self-efficacy for online education, institutional engagement, and academic planning had the highest scores. The expectations of professors did not directly change the academic performance of students; however, a moderating effect of professor's expectations was identified in the previous student academic performance relationship on their current academic performance. (shrink)