This article examines the ways in which the self-responsibilized individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen, on the one hand (Frericks, 2014), and the inequalities and anti-democratic politics that characterize contemporary neoliberal capitalism, on the other, are co-constituent elements in creating an antipathy to forms of solidarity that are affective as opposed to calculative. The active citizenship framework lacks a full appreciation of the interdependency of the human condition and is antithetical to universalistic, affectively-led forms of solidarity. The (...) deep relationality that is endemic to both social production and reproduction, and that impels an affective, morally-led form of solidarity needs to be recognized academically and intellectually, and politically sustained, if we are to move beyond a narrow, calculative, self-interested vision of solidarity in Europe. (shrink)

This book is an exploration of science in the making. It offers readers the opportunity to critically reflect on the process of development of Vygotsky's research program from the perspective of dialectics, focusing on the dramatic process of building and rebuilding cultural historical theory. Vygotsky's creative and dramatic journey is no less important than the concrete results of his research. An epistemological and historical investigation of the formulation of cultural historical theory sheds light on the process of knowledge production and (...) reveals hidden dimensions of creativity in science. (shrink)

Ethics is increasingly viewed to be an important component of business education. However, assessment of the ethics component of business education has not received the same degree of examination as has assessment of the functional areas. Instead, ethics education is often simply assumed to be effective. Is it? The objective of this study is to begin to explore this question by examining the effects of the integration of ethics into a functional area of business education, specifically a management principles course. (...) The results raise questions about the effectiveness of integrating ethics across the business curriculum. (shrink)

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen (...) to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two claims regarding complex demonstratives. On the one hand I argue that, when one of these expressions misdescribes the referred object, the right semantic analysis is to treat the expression as uninterpretable. On the other, I claim that the uninterpretability thesis finds itself in trouble when it comes to dealing with non-deictic uses of complex demonstratives, i.e., uses of “that F” in which the speaker has no acquaintance or direct perception of any object that could (...) satisfy the predicative material. In order to make these two claims compatible, I set out to modify the way the uninterpretability thesis has been traditionally formulated. (shrink)

This article argues for the utility in conceiving of two distinctive approaches to the structural power of finance—New Structural Power and Traditional Structural Power. While both are crucial to political economy scholarship, this article highlights the intellectual trade-off that is inherent to the adoption of one perspective over the other, and it stresses the explanatory advantages of the TSP perspective specifically. First, it shows how the TSP framework can facilitate an understanding of when policymaker ideas do and do not matter (...) in the exercise of structural power, retaining the concept of “automaticity” in structural power operations. Second, it demonstrates how each framework is custom-built to explain substantively different aspects of the policy process, with TSP research aimed at system-oriented limitation mechanisms and NSP research aimed at agent-oriented selection mechanisms. Third, it contends that TSP formulations must be embedded within a model of functional explanation, which is the best way to gain empirical traction on the most important macrostructural developments in contemporary finance-led capitalism. Methodologically, this implies an agenda of “explanation through commonalities” rather than the NSP-favored “explanation through variation.”. (shrink)

The article analyzes the anti-Islamic polemical discourse of Nicetas of Byzantium, one of the most important Byzantine apologists and polemicists flourishing in the intellectual-theological context of Patriarch Photios in Constantinople. This paper crystallizes the main topics of discussion in Nicetas’ Refutation of the Qur’an and presents his argumentation against Islam.To structure and evaluate the wayNicetas perceives Islam, I have developed a methodology of four thematic categories with correspondent polemical subcategories. This research approach may also serve as a paradigm enhancing further (...) studies on other sources related to Christian-Muslim interfaith dialogue. (shrink)

Through empirical investigation of the Eurozone and Greek debt crisis 2010–12, this article demonstrates how a peak organization of financial firms—the Institute of International Finance —was able to mobilize its members transnationally to secure several key political and economic objectives. At the height of the crisis, large European banking firms were threatened by the prospect of a disorderly Greek default, coercive intervention by governments, and, potentially, a regional banking collapse. In this context, representatives from the IIF entered the policymaking process (...) to facilitate concerted private sector action, assisting EU officials with the negotiation of a substantial and orderly creditor writedown, and cooperating with legal action by the Greek government to sideline a minority of financial firms hostile to the deal. The article shows that the IIF’s disproportionate influence over policymaking was a result of their technical expertise, their ability to recruit individuals with long-standing experience of sovereign debt restructuring from the public and private sector, and the operation of elite revolving-door processes. In contrast to recent studies showing that financial actors are able to exercise more power at the national level by remaining collectively inactive, these findings suggest that, at the transnational level, financial actors can be most effective at securing their preferences when they are well organized and when they coordinate politically on the basis of collective interests. (shrink)

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international (...) duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational ‘atmospheric’ political obligations, which in turn may justify protests – even those causing some damage to private property – against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of ‘atmospheric’ citizenship obligations. (shrink)

Originally published in 1993, Modalities in Medieval Philosophy looks at the idea of modality as multiplicity of reference with respect to alternative domains. The book examines how this emerged in early medieval discussions and addresses how it was originally influenced by the theological conception of God acting by choice. After a discussion of ancient modal paradigms, the author traces the interplay of old and new modal views in medieval logic and semantics, philosophy and theology. A detailed account is given of (...) late medieval discussions of the new modal logic, epistemic logic, and the logic norms. These theories show striking similarities to some basic tenets of contemporary approaches to modal matters. This work will be of considerable interest to historians of philosophy and ideas and philosophers of logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

The word "modem" in the title of this book refers primarily to post-medieval discussions, but it also hints at those medieval mo dal theories which were considered modem in contradistinction to ancient conceptions and which in different ways influenced philosophical discussions during the early modem period. The me dieval developments are investigated in the opening paper, 'The Foundations of Modality and Conceivability in Descartes and His Predecessors', by Lilli Alanen and Simo Knuuttila. Boethius's works from the early sixth century belonged (...) to the sources from which early medieval thinkers obtained their knowledge of ancient thought. They offered extensive discus sions of traditional modal conceptions the basic forms of which were: (1) the paradigm of possibility as a potency striving to realize itself; (2) the "statistical" interpretation of modal no tions where necessity means actuality in all relevant cases or omnitemporal actuality, possibility means actuality in some rel evant cases or sometimes, and impossibility means omnitemporal non-actuality; and (3) the "logical" definition of possibility as something which, being assumed, results in nothing contradic tory. Boethius accepted the Aristotelian view according to which total possibilities in the first sense must prove their met tle through actualization and possibilities in the third sense are assumed to be realized in our actual history. On these presump tions, all of the above-mentioned ancient paradigms imply the Principle of Plenitude according to which no genuine possibility remains unrealized. (shrink)

This article considers three medieval approaches to the problem of future contingent propositions in chapter 9 of Aristotle's _De interpretatione_. While Boethius assumed that God's atemporal knowledge infallibly pertains to historical events, he was inclined to believe that Aristotle correctly taught that future contingent propositions are not antecedently true or false, even though they may be characterized as true-or-false. Aquinas also tried to combine the allegedly Aristotelian view of the disjunctive truth-value of future contingent propositions with the conception of all (...) things being timelessly present to God's knowledge. The second approach was formulated by Peter Abelard who argued that in Aristotle's view future contingent propositions are true or false, not merely true-or-false, and that the antecedent truth of future propositions does not necessitate things in the world. After Duns Scotus, many late medieval thinkers thought like Abelard, particularly because of their new interpretation of contingency, but they did not believe, with the exception of John Buridan, that this was an Aristotelian view. (shrink)

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework (...) that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry. (shrink)

A obra Eletric Waves foi o ponto de partida para a análise filosófico-metodológica das teorias científicas por parte de H. Hertz e a culminância dessa prática deu-se com a sua obra póstuma The Principles of Mechanics. Nas introduções a essas duas obras um tema metacientífico se apresenta como núcleo central. Nelas Hertz trata das diferentes representações, imagens ou modelos dos fenômenos físicos: no caso da primeira obra, dos fenômenos eletromagnéticos; no caso da segunda, dos fenômenos mecânicos. E a questão que (...) tenta resolver é a seguinte: qual é a origem da pluralidade de imagens nas teorias científicas? Seria ela inevitável? É sobre esse tipo de questões que se fixa o presente trabalho na intenção de apresentar o papel da noção de representação na concepção de ciência de Heinrich Hertz. (shrink)

In this article, I shall consider medieval discussions of the principles of Aristotelian syllogistic which were called the dictum de omni et nullo and the expository syllogism. I am particularly interested in how theological questions contributed to the introduction of some influential new medieval ideas, such as the extensional sameness of the subject as the basis of predication, the interpretation of the expository syllogism from this point of view, and the explication of the logical subject of universal and particular syllogistic (...) premises with the phrase `Anything/something which is A. . .'. I end with some remarks about the increasing medieval awareness that these developments were beyond Aristotle's purview. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish (...) Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)

The article defends the no-harm principle as an intuitively plausible and a common-sense way to justify individual emitters’ duties to take more radical steps in the fight against climate change. The appearance of climate change as requiring large-scale collective action should not lead us astray with respect to the fundamental moral nature of the problem: individual emitters who knowingly sustain and foster the carbon intensive ways of acting also bear personal moral responsibility for the foreseeable climate-related harm and acquire in (...) line with the no-harm principle a direct personal duty to contribute to the efforts of preventing the harm. The article examines more closely the so-called collectivistic approach, according to which emitters’ responsibilities are primarily collective, and argues that without individualistic grounds of emitters’ personal moral responsibility for the harm the collectivistic approach fails to provide unstructured emitters with sufficient reason to act together and fulfil their correlative duty of effective harm prevention. The article argues that since an emitter's personal moral responsibility warrants others to expect her personal engagement in the efforts of effective harm prevention and can justify blame if she fails, identifications of personal responsibility may also significantly increase unstructured emitters’ collective capability of remedying the climate crisis. (shrink)

This paper discusses the issues of deciding to have a child with mental retardation, and of terminating a pregnancy when the future child is known to have the same disability. I discuss these problems by criticizing a utilitarian argument, namely, that one should act in a way that results in less suffering and less limited opportunity in the world. My argument is that future parents ought to assume a strong responsibility towards the well-being of their prospective children when they decide (...) to reproduce. The moral point in cases in which our acts affect the well-being of future children should be expressed strictly in terms of parents' culpability. Future children thus do not have current moral standing but presently living persons have current obligations to consider the presumable effects of their actions on future people. I will also argue that there are morally significant differences between 'selective contraception' and selective abortion. (shrink)

JAAKKO HINTIKKA GAPS IN THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING: AN EXERCISE IN THE METHODOLOGY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS* For some historians, to understand everything is to pardon everything. For others, like Lord Acton, history is not only a judge, ...

My purpose is to analyze the peculiar thinking of Weil, according to the categories of reasoning, as a choice to avoid violence. In his definition of man, Weil recovers the notion of realization, with which man is redefined in terms of what he must be and not merely for what he is. There-to, man is ..

This paper has the intention to analyze the possible mill’s liberalism on utilitarian basis, enhancing the tension focus of such an interpretation, as well as indicating its controversial profile along the rights and the justice.

This paper attempts to elucidate Wittgenstein’s remark about the “strange resemblance between a philosophical investigation (especially in mathematics) and an aesthetic one” from 1937 by looking at its textual and philosophical context. The conclusion is that the remark can be seen both as a description of a particular conception of philosophy, a prescription or declaration of intent (to proceed in a particular way), and a reminder (to Wittgenstein himself) about the form of a philosophical investigation. Furthermore, it is concluded that (...) the Darstellungsform he has in mind is the one that finds expression especially in the first part of the PI. (shrink)

A note on the special issue from the editor-in-chief.

This paper discusses whether prospectiveparents ought to find out about their geneticconstitution for reproductive reasons. It isargued that ignoring genetic information can bein line with responsible parenthood or perhapseven recommendable. This is because parenthoodis essentially an unconditional project inwhich parents ought to commit themselves tonurturing any kind of child. Besides, thetraditional reasons offered for theunfortunateness of impairments and the tragicfate of families with disabled children are notconvincing. Other morally problematic outcomesof genetics, such as discrimination againstindividuals with impairments, and limiting freeparental (...) decision making, are alsoconsidered. (shrink)