North Korea references gender equality in its socialist constitution, but the de facto social and legal circumstances that women face in the country are far below the de jure status they are purported to enjoy. North Korean women endure extremely low public health standards and pervasive harassment. Yet their growing market power and social influence are underestimated. Women account for the majority of North Korean border crossers, and their informal economic activities are supporting families while modernizing the economy. This essay (...) examines the dangers of exploitation that North Korean women face and highlights the ethical and legal imperatives of supporting their roles in marketizing the economy and liberalizing the society in one of the worst human rights–violating states. Women are North Korea's most deserving recipients of international assistance and the country's most promising partners to the world. (shrink)

This article deals with the concept of infinity in classical American philosophy. It focuses on the philosophical and technical developments of infinity in the 19th Century American thinkers Royce and Peirce.

The view that belief is a dyadic relation between a believer and some other object, e.g., a proposition, appears to receive support from the fact that we can infer ‘There is something that Jones believes' from ordinary belief ascriptions such as ‘Jones believes that the tallest man is wise’. On consideration, however, it turns out that even a crude nonrelational view of belief can accommodate this inference. In order to permit the inference the nonrelationalist must read‘ There is something that (...) Jones believes' as equivalent to‘ Jones has a belief. (shrink)

In this response I take issue with Professor Ausland’s use of the account of the soul in Republic 4 as a basis for reading Republic 8-9. I believe that the method and assumptions of Republic 4 are pre-dialectical and that Books 8-9 should be read in light of the digressive Books 5-7. By placing greater emphasis on the asymmetry between Book 4 and Books 8-9, the basic assumptions governing the decline of regimes will show themselves to tell a different story (...) of moral experience and moral decomposition than we find in Professor Ausland’s instructive and insightful reading of the dialogue. (shrink)

I address two seemingly unrelated topics: the first is the subject and formulation of the hypotheses and the second is the number of hypotheses. On the topic of the subject of the hypotheses, my position is that we are initially given an indefinite monad, a “one”, which is in no case “the one”, “the one itself”, or the form of unity. We are meant to read the hypotheses with the question in mind, “what one is this?” If we do so, (...) we are confronted with strikingly different answers, which, when taken together, point us toward key insights into the nature of intelligibility. On the topic of the number of hypotheses: we are led to expect four, but we are given eight. My position is that we are meant to disarm apparent contradictions between paired hypotheses, especially H1-H2 but also H3-4, 5-6, and 7-8, because doing so will help us further determine the different types of monad Parmenides has in view. In the end, two primary types of monad emerge from the process of disambiguation, namely, form and sensible particular, and we, having differentiated these types of “one”, will have gathered resources for understanding how sensible particulars are grounded in forms. (shrink)

In this paper I call attention to Adam Smith’s 'Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages' in order to facilitate understanding Adam Smith from a Darwinian perspective. By ‘Darwinian’ I mean a position that explains differential selection over time through natural mechanisms. First, I argue that right near the start of Wealth of Nations Smith signals that human nature has probably evolved over a very long amount of time. Second, I connect this evidence with an infamous passage on infanticide in (...) The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to argue that Smith is committed to group selection. Third, I argue that in Dissertation on Languages one can find building blocks for the claim that mind and language co-develop over time. More controversially I claim that in TMS there is a distinction between natural sentiments and moral sentiments. Natural sentiments are evolved (presumably through cultural selection) and moral sentiments are developed (through acculturation within society). Along the way, I argue that this distinction would have improved Darwin’s Descent of Man by blocking a move toward eugenics. (shrink)

À partir du paradigme du cahier des charges imposés par l’ ars aux cmpp de Nouvelle-Aquitaine, l’article témoigne des menaces que font peser les politiques publiques de santé sur les institutions. Il s’agit d’une part de comprendre « l’idéo-logique » qui préside au démantèlement des institutions pour favoriser une conception postmoderne du soin où les institutions sont transformées en prestataires de services ; d’autre part, d’analyser ce glissement progressif de la désinstitutionalisation à la « désinstitution » qui menace les fondements (...) du soin psychique dans ses fonctions de reliance, de créativité, de transformation. Ainsi, l’article s’attache à cerner les effets de cette effraction qui infiltre les institutions, les équipes, jusque dans l’intimité de la rencontre thérapeutique. Cette néo-conception qui dénie ce qu’est la réalité psychique, la souffrance, invite à penser des questions pourtant légitimes de la diversité des pratiques, de la place des familles et de l’inclusion des sujets dans la société. (shrink)

Translated Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford UP and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series). Pages: xxiii + 161. Pb: 0 8047 2385 0; 10.95. Hb: 0 8047 2376 I; 25.00. Originally published in French as Musica Ficta (Figures de Wagner). Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991.

I apply some of the lessons from quantum theory, in particular from Bell’s theorem, to a debate on the foundations of decision theory and causation. By tracing a formal analogy between the basic assumptions of causal decision theory (CDT)—which was developed partly in response to Newcomb’s problem— and those of a local hidden variable theory in the context of quantum mechanics, I show that an agent who acts according to CDT and gives any nonzero credence to some possible causal interpretations (...) underlying quantum phenomena should bet against quantum mechanics in some feasible game scenarios involving entangled systems, no matter what evidence they acquire. As a consequence, either the most accepted version of decision theory is wrong, or it provides a practical distinction, in terms of the prescribed behaviour of rational agents, between some metaphysical hypotheses regarding the causal structure underlying quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

I use concepts from Foucault's analysis of the human condition to investigate how we recognize or fail to recognize ourselves in machines like computers. Human beings are traditionally defined as "rational animals" or as "thinking things". I examine how this self-conception determines our use of computing machines as logical mirrors in which we both hope and fear to see our truest selves. I examine two analogies: (1) how we think of computers as if they were human (self-projection) and (2) how (...) we think of humans as if they were computers (self-reflection). I interpret the humanization of computers and the computerization of humans as ways that thought tries to master its own freedom by thinking of itself metaphorically in terms of something else. (shrink)

We investigate the question of whether one can characterize complexity classes in terms of efficient reducibility to the set of Kolmogorov-random strings . This question arises because and , and no larger complexity classes are known to be reducible to in this way. We show that this question cannot be posed without explicitly dealing with issues raised by the choice of universal machine in the definition of Kolmogorov complexity. What follows is a list of some of our main results.• Although (...) Kummer showed that, for every universal machine U there is a time bound t such that the halting problem is disjunctive truth-table reducible to in time t, there is no such time bound t that suffices for every universal machine U. We also show that, for some machines U, the disjunctive reduction can be computed in as little as doubly-exponential time.• Although for every universal machine U, there are very complex sets that are -reducible to , it is nonetheless true that . • Any decidable set that is polynomial-time monotone-truth-table reducible to is in .• Any decidable set that is polynomial-time truth-table reducible to via a reduction that asks at most f queries on inputs of size n lies in. (shrink)

(2005). Wonder in the face of scientific revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton's ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 697-732. doi: 10.1080/09608780500293042.

Two articles on the reduction of chemistry are examined. The first, by McLaughlin (1992), claims that chemistry is reduced to physics and that there is no evidence for emergence or for downward causation between the chemical and the physical level. In a more recent article, Le Poidevin (2005) maintains that his combinatorial approach provides grounding for the ontological reduction of chemistry, which also circumvents some limitations in the physicalist program. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Chemistry and (...) Biochemistry, UCLA, 607 Charles E. Young Drive East, Box 951569, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

We investigate whether age profiles of ethnobiological knowledge development are consistent with predictions derived from life history theory about the timing of productivity and reproduction. Life history models predict complementary knowledge profiles developing across the lifespan for women and men as they experience changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring. We evaluate these predictions using an ethnobiological knowledge assessment tool developed for an off-grid pastoralist population known as Choyeros, from Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results indicate that (...) while individuals acquire knowledge of most dangerous items and edible resources by early adulthood, knowledge of plants and animals relevant to the age and sex divided labor domains and ecologies (e.g., women’s house gardens, men’s herding activities in the wilderness) continues to develop into middle adulthood but to different degrees and at different rates for men and women. As the demands of offspring on parents accumulate with age, reproductive-aged adults continue to develop their knowledge to meet their children’s needs. After controlling for vision, our analysis indicates that many post-reproductive adults show the greatest ethnobiological knowledge. These findings extend our understanding of the evolved human life history by illustrating how changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring predict the development of men’s and women’s ethnobiological knowledge across the lifespan. (shrink)

Rosenberg's The Thinking Self also takes Husserl to task. Without going into the details here, Rosenberg finds Husserl's reliance on retentions to be inadequate. Instead, Rosenberg proposes that previous representations enter into our unified, instantaneous awareness of a succession as ones of which we are aware that we are, or were, aware of; as items of so-called meta-awareness. But this account falls prey to the same worries as Husserl's. For again, it is by no means clear what a series of (...) awarenesses, meta-awarenesses, meta-meta-awarenesses, etc. have to do with the representation of a temporal series. (shrink)

Is God dead? -- The western split : transcendent, deity, desacralised nature -- The western split : God's otherness, humanity's degradation -- The western split : gender discrimination, its origins, and its consequences -- Energy and divinity -- Divinity within -- The Christian doctrine of incarnation : restricted immanence -- Incarnation and atonement mythology -- Creativity, divine, and human -- Divinity and ethics -- Religion and science -- The problem of evil : providence -- Death and beyond.