Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

p. cm. — (Zeuthen lecture book series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-262-18187-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-262-68100-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Decision-making. 2. Economic man. 3. Game theory. 4. Rational expectations (Economic theory) I. Title. II. Series.

This article focuses on human dignity as a moral idea and, in particular, on a single but fundamental question: what conception of human dignity, if any, can generate an egalitarian duty to respect all persons? After surveying two mainstream and two alternative conceptions, the article suggests that explaining how human dignity generates an egalitarian duty of respect may be more difficult than has been appreciated.

Allemagne, Antisémitisme, Art, Bloch, Buber, Cantique des cantiques, Christianisme, Création, Dialogue, Esthétique, Eternel, Europe, Goethe, Guerre, Hébreu, Idéalisme, Islam, Levinas, Mal, Miracle, Pensée, Politique, Première Guerre mondiale, Rédemption, Religion(s), Révélation, Ricoeur, Scholem, Sécularisation, Sionisme, Talmud, Théologie, Torah, Traduction, parmi une centaine d'entrées. Une somme indispensable sur le philosophe et exégète allemand de la Bible du début du XXe siècle qui fut un grand acteur de la culture européenne et l'un des premiers à jeter des ponts entre les mondes juif et (...) chrétien. (shrink)

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

In addition to the familiar cardinal and proportional readings of many and few, there is yet another interpretation, the relative proportional reading. This reading, unlike the ordinary absolute proportional reading, is not conservative. Under the relative reading, 'Many ψs are φs' is true just in case the proportion of φs among ψs is greater than the proportion of φs among members of contextually given alternatives to ψ. I provide a definition of proportional readings that reduces the differences between absolute and (...) relative interpretations to the value of a single parameter.I argue that relative readings are not restricted to many and few, but are also exhibited by the adverbs often and seldom, and by generics. Interpretations of determiners that have been treated as "focus-affected readings," interpretations of adverbs of quantification that have been treated as "pure frequency readings," and interpretations of generics which have been claimed to be cases of "reverse interpretation" or "direct kind predication" are, in fact, instances of relative readings.A: Army reserve service is especially hard on people who own a small business.Q: Do many small-business owners serve in your regiment?A: I don't know what it's like in other regiments –Q: I am not asking you about other regiments.A: I know, but relatively speaking . . .(Interview on Israel Army Radio, June 8th, 2001). (shrink)

الفكر، والتَّفكير، والتَّفكُّر، والتَّدبُّر، والتَّذكُّر،... مفاهيمُ أساسية رافقت الوجود الإنساني، منذ بدء الخليقة، وسوف تبقى معه إلى نهايتها، دون أن تثبت مادتها وموضوعاتها ومستوياتها عند حد معين، في حياة الفرد البشري أو الجيل البشري. فكيف يمكن لكتاب أن يستقصي ذلك؟! هذا الكتاب إذاً، مدخل إلى الفكر وحسب؛ مدخل في مفاهيمه ومستوياته وخرائطه... تضمن تجوالاً فكرياً: في موضوع الفكر؛ وفي مصادره في الأصول والتراث والخبرة المعاصرة، وموضوعاته، وأدواته، ونصيب أصناف أهله منه، والمؤسسات المتخصصة فيه، وعلاقته بالعلم جملة، وبالعلوم النفسية والتربوية والاجتماعية (...) واللغوية والسياسية... وهو كذلك مدخل إلى عملية البناء الفكري؛ كيف تبدأ، ثم تتواصل مرحلة بعد أخرى؟ وكيف تترقى من مستوى إلى آخر؟ وكيف تتنوع في المحتوى الذي تبنيه؟ وهو قبل ذلك وبعده، أسئلة كثيرة، وإجابات قليلة؛ فقيمةُ التَّفكُّر في إثارة الأسئلة لا تقلُّ عن التفكر في البحث عن إجاباتها، وبعض الإجابات عارضة مؤقتة، تتغير وتتعمق مع مزيد من الفكْر والذِّكْر، والتَّفكُّر والتَّذكُّر. قد يجد القارئ في الكتاب بعض مواطن المتعة والطرافة، لكنه سوف يجد كذلك مواطن كثيرة تضطره إلى التَّفكُّر والتَّدبُّر، فإذا نجح الكتاب في الأمرين، فذلك ما كان يهدف إليه! (shrink)

I HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO SERVE a society whose guiding principle and raison d’être are to serve the academic interests of its constituency, namely, economic researchers who employ rigorous methodologies. The Society has maintained a consistent range of activities over the years, but this should not deter us from discussing in the future two major questions: Should we remain within the present scope of the Society or rede- fine it to achieve a broader common denominator? Should we restrict ourselves to (...) the traditional functions of publishing the journal, organizing conferences, and conferring honors, or should we expand our activities, especially in light of recent technological advances? 2. NEW JOURNALS I will start with what I think is the most important issue that we currently face, namely whether to establish two or three additional journals that would publish worthy papers that have been rejected from Econometrica due to overspecialization. The idea is that authors would be allowed to request the transfer of referee reports from the main journal to the somewhat more specialized journals. This would speed up the process and allow for more efficient use of the scarce refereeing resources available to Econometrica. Such an idea was suggested in 2002 in the report of the Committee for Electronic Issues and received mixed reactions. A new committee will make its recommendations about the desirability of such an initiative at the upcoming meeting of the Executive Committee. I very much hope that, in spite of the reservations, the Econometric Society will take up the challenge. This would be a major step in the current campaign to exclude commercialism from publishing and would be a groundbreaking innovation in the publication procedures currently employed in economics. The choice of the domains for the “baby Econometrica” will also delineate the Society’s boundaries. (shrink)

In recent times, the exponential growth of sequenced genomes and structural knowledge of proteins, as well as the development of computational tools and controlled vocabularies to deal with this growth, has fueled a demand for conceptual clarification regarding the concept of function in molecular biology. In this article, we will attempt to develop an account of function fit to deal with the conceptual/philosophical problems in that domain, but which can be extended to other areas of biology. To provide this account, (...) we will argue for three theses: (1) some authors have confused metatheoretical issues (about the meaning and application criteria of terms) with metaphysical ones (about teleology); this led them to (2) look for explicit definitions of “function”, in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria of application, in order to make the concept of function eliminable; however, (3) if one leaves metaphysical worries aside and focuses on functional attribution practices, it is more adequate to say that the concept of function has an open texture. That is, that a multiplicity of application criteria is available, none of which is sufficient nor necessary to attribute a function to a trait, and which only in concert form a clear picture. We distinguish this thesis from some usual forms of pluralism. Finally, we will illustrate this account with a historical reconstruction of the ascription of a water transport function to aquaporins. (shrink)

What ends should designers pursue? To what extent should they care about the societal and environmental impact of their work? And why should they care at all? Given the key influence design has on the way people live their lives, designing is fraught with ethical issues. Yet, unlike education or nursing, it lacks widespread professional principles for addressing these issues. -/- Rooted in a communitarian view of design practice, this lively and accessible book examines design through the lens of professions, (...) offering a critical vision that enables practitioners, academics and students of design in all disciplines to reflect on the practice’s overarching purposes. Considering how these are connected to others' flourishing and moulded by community interactions, "The Goods of Design" argues for a practice-based approach to cultivate professional ethics; it provides a normative direction that can meaningfully guide professional design activity, both individually and collectively. The volume also looks into the implications work has for the designer's self-growth as a person, offering ways to discover and navigate the complex tensions between personal and professional life. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

This book presents Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes for the first part of his well-known graduate course in microeconomics.

No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.道可道[也]，非常[恆]道名可名[也]，非常[恆]名无名，天地[萬物]之始有名，萬物之母 故常[恆]無欲，以觀其眇常[恆]有欲，以觀其徼[噭]此兩者同出而異名同謂之玄，玄之又玄，眾眇之門。The dao that can be spoken of is not the constant DaoThe name that can be named is not the constant name;Nameless, it is the beginning of heaven and earth [the myriad things]Named, it is the mother of the myriad things. Therefore,Constantly without desire, observe its marvels;Constantly with desire, observe its manifestationsThese two are the same, when emerged they are named differently.When merged, this is called mystery, (...) mystery upon mystery, the gateway to the numerous marvels. (Daodejing 1)1The paradoxical opening lines of the Daodejing have .. (shrink)

How should we think about apparent conflicts of moral rights? I defend a non-balancing and holistic specification model: non-balancing because moral rights have absolute deontic stringency regardless of any balance of independent values; holistic because the content of moral rights is limited only by that of other moral rights. Holistic Specification, as I call the model, offers a principled, non-consequentialist explanation of exceptions to moral rights. Moreover, Holistic Specification explains why moral rights matter to practical thought while rendering remedial duties (...) less mysterious. (shrink)

I discuss conceptual confusions shared by deep ecologists over such questions as gender, essentialism, normative dualism, and eco-centrism. I conclude that deep ecologists have failed to grasp both the epistemological challenge offered by ecofeminism and the practical labor involved in bringing about social change. While convergencies between deep ecology and ecofeminism promise to be fruitful, these are celebrated in false consciousness, unless remedial work is done.

In this paper I explore elements from Kant’s philosophy of right to develop a relational account of the wrong of poverty. Poverty is a relational wrong because it involves relations of problematic dependence, inequality, and humiliation. Such relations infringe the rights to freedom and equality of the poor. And the called-for response is one of public recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. This position means we must radically reconceptualize our individual duties to the poor: not _private beneficence_, (...) but _private remedies for public failures_. (shrink)

In spite of the burgeoning philosophical literature on human dignity, Stephen Darwall's second-personal account of the dignity of persons has not received the attention it deserves. This article investigates Darwall's account and argues that it faces a dilemma, for it succumbs either to a problem of antecedence or to the wrong kind of reasons problem. But this need not mean one should reject a second-personal account. Instead, I argue that an alternative second-personal conception, one I will call relational, promises to (...) solve the dilemma by avoiding both the problem of antecedence and the wrong kind of reasons problem. More generally, distinguishing these two second-personal conceptions of the dignity of persons is important to enrich the available philosophical accounts of human dignity. (shrink)

The paper is a discussion of the interpretation of game theory. Game theory is viewed as an abstract inquiry into the concepts used in social reasoning when dealing with situations of conflict and not as an attempt to predict behavior. The first half of the paper..

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at most one. A mechanism specifies a set of messages that the speaker can send and a rule that determines the listener’s response, namely, which aspect he checks and (...) whether he accepts or rejects the speaker’s request. We study mechanisms that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request when it is justified and rejects the request when it is unjustified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We show that a simple optimal mechanism exists and can be found by solving a linear programming problem in which the set of constraints is derived from what we call the L-principle. (shrink)

The standard economic choice model assumes that the decision maker chooses from sets of alternatives. In contrast, we analyze a choice model in which the decision maker encounters the alternatives in the form of a list. We present two axioms similar in nature to the classical axioms of choice from sets. We show that they characterize all the choice functions from lists that involve the choice of either the first or the last optimal alternative in the list according to some (...) preference relation. We then relate choice functions from lists to the classical notions of choice correspondences and random choice functions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that received accounts of the concept of human dignity face more difficulties than has been appreciated, when explaining the connection between human dignity and the duty of respect that dignity is supposed to generate. It also argues that a novel, relational, account has the adequate structure to explain such connection.

While opinions on the semantic analysis of generics vary widely, most scholars agree that generics have a quasi-universal flavor. However, there are cases where generics receive what appears to be an existentialinterpretation. For example, B's response is true, even though only theplatypus and the echidna lay eggs: (1) A: Birds lay eggs. B: Mammals lay eggs too. In this paper I propose a uniform account of the semantics of generics,which accounts for their quasi-existential readings as well as for their more (...) familiar quasi-universal ones. Generics are focus-sensitiveoperators: their domain is restricted by a set of alternatives, which may be provided by focus. I claim that, unlike otherfocus-sensitive operators, generics may, but do not have to, associate with focus. When alternatives are introduced, either by focus or by other means, generics get their usual quasi-universal readings. But when no alternatives are introduced, quasi-existential readings result.I argue that generics, unlike adverbs of quantification, do not introduce tripartite structures directly, but are initially interpreted as cases ofdirect kind predication. Only when this interpretation fails to make sense, the phonologically null generic quantifier is derived, and tripartite structures result. This two-level interpretation has the effect that while adverbs of quantification require focus to determine which elements go to the restrictor and which to the nuclear scope, and hence must associate with focus, generics do not, and hence may fail to associate with focus, resulting in quasi-existential readings. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the issue of the alleged circularity in the determination of homologies within cladistic analysis. More specifically, I focus on the claims made by the proponents of the dynamic homology approach, regarding the distinction (sometimes made in the literature) between primary and secondary homology. This distinction is sometimes invoked to dissolve the circularity issue, by upholding that characters in a cladistic data matrix have to be only primarily homologous, and thus can be determined independently of phylogenetic (...) hypotheses, by using the classical Owenian criteria (for morphological characters) or via multiple sequence alignment (for sequence data). However, since in the dynamic approach, sequence data can be analyzed without being pre-aligned, proponents have claimed that the distinction between primary and secondary homology has no place within cladistics. I will argue that this is not the case, since cladistic practice within the dynamic framework does presuppose primary homology statements at a higher level. (shrink)

For me, economics is a collection of ideas and conventions which economists accept and use to reason with. Namely, it is a culture. Behavioral economics represents a transformation of that culture. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Camerer and Loewenstein (2003), its methods are pretty much the same as those introduced by the Game Theory revolution. At the core of most models in Behavioral Economics there are still agents who maximize a preference relation over some space of consequences and the solution (...) in most cases still involves standard equilibrium concepts. However, the behavioral economists are not committed to what is usually referred to as rational motivations. An economic fable (or a model as we would call it) that has at its core fairness, envy, present-bias and the like is by now not only permitted but even preferred. (shrink)

On a souvent voulu expliquer les oeuvres par la vie de leur auteur. Ariel Suhamy fait l'inverse : il raconte ce qu'on sait de la vie de Spinoza à la lumière de sa doctrine. Son objet, c'est donc la vie humaine, la "vie véritable", celle qui ne se définit pas par la simple circulation du sang et la durée de l'existence, mais par l'intelligence de Dieu, du monde et de soi, et par les actes qui en découlent. Alors, comment (...) l'auteur de l'Éthique a-t-il vécu? Comment a-t-il mis en application sa pensée? Les mythes qui entourent cet homme, ce que l'Histoire peut reconstituer de sa vie, ne dérivent-ils pas aussi de cette pensée et de sa réception? Un livre novateur pour redécouvrir Spinoza."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational account promises (...) to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts. (shrink)

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

الفكر، والتَّفكير، والتَّفكُّر، والتَّدبُّر، والتَّذكُّر،... مفاهيمُ أساسية رافقت الوجود الإنساني، منذ بدء الخليقة، وسوف تبقى معه إلى نهايتها، دون أن تثبت مادتها وموضوعاتها ومستوياتها عند حد معين، في حياة الفرد البشري أو الجيل البشري. فكيف يمكن لكتاب أن يستقصي ذلك؟! هذا الكتاب إذاً، مدخل إلى الفكر وحسب؛ مدخل في مفاهيمه ومستوياته وخرائطه... تضمن تجوالاً فكرياً: في موضوع الفكر؛ وفي مصادره في الأصول والتراث والخبرة المعاصرة، وموضوعاته، وأدواته، ونصيب أصناف أهله منه، والمؤسسات المتخصصة فيه، وعلاقته بالعلم جملة، وبالعلوم النفسية والتربوية والاجتماعية (...) واللغوية والسياسية... وهو كذلك مدخل إلى عملية البناء الفكري؛ كيف تبدأ، ثم تتواصل مرحلة بعد أخرى؟ وكيف تترقى من مستوى إلى آخر؟ وكيف تتنوع في المحتوى الذي تبنيه؟ وهو قبل ذلك وبعده، أسئلة كثيرة، وإجابات قليلة؛ فقيمةُ التَّفكُّر في إثارة الأسئلة لا تقلُّ عن التفكر في البحث عن إجاباتها، وبعض الإجابات عارضة مؤقتة، تتغير وتتعمق مع مزيد من الفكْر والذِّكْر، والتَّفكُّر والتَّذكُّر. قد يجد القارئ في الكتاب بعض مواطن المتعة والطرافة، لكنه سوف يجد كذلك مواطن كثيرة تضطره إلى التَّفكُّر والتَّدبُّر، فإذا نجح الكتاب في الأمرين، فذلك ما كان يهدف إليه!. (shrink)

Shaʻar rishon. Sugyot nashim -- Shaʻar sheni. Dilemot be-ḥaye mishpaḥah -- Shaʻar shelishi. Me-etgare ha-ḥayim ba-arets.

"Some sentences contain no overt quantifier, yet are interpreted quantificationally, e.g., Plumbers are available (entailing that some plumbers are available), or Plumbers are intelligent (whose entailment is less clear, but seems to be saying that a large number of plumbers are intelligent). Where does the quantifier come from? In this book, Ariel Cohen makes the novel proposal that the quantifier is not simply an empty category, but is generated by reinterpretations mechanisms, which are governed by well specified principles. He (...) demonstrates how the puzzling and sometimes mysterious properties of such sentences can be naturally derived from the reinterpretation mechanisms that generate them. The resulting picture has substantial implications that language contains hidden elements, underlying its surface structure"--. (shrink)