Reconciliation in South Africa is often taken to mean the creation of culturally diverse communities. In reality, though, the multicultural often turns out to be multiracial only with People of Colour being included in White-dominated spaces. Likewise, socio-economic transformation means raising people’s chances to attain a living standard more equal to that of the bulk of the White population. In both cases, the strong position of White people in sociocultural and socio-economic terms remains largely untouched. Hence the calls for decolonisation (...) which seem to render the reconciliation discourse dispensable. Vulnerability by White South Africans is proposed as an alternative response to ongoing inequalities which – it is suggested – could contribute to both decolonisation and reconciliation on an interpersonal level. Likely objections to such a proposal are considered before making a case for vulnerability as an appropriate Christian way of living, particularly in the context of former settler colonialism. (shrink)

1 Cognitive Architectures 2 Multilayer Perceptrons 3 Relations between Variables 4 Structured Representations 5 Individuals 6 Where does the Machinery of Symbol Manipulation Come From? 7 Conclusions.

Marcus Giaquinto presents an investigation into the different kinds of visual thinking involved in mathematical thought, drawing on work in cognitive psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. He argues that mental images and physical diagrams are rarely just superfluous aids: they are often a means of discovery, understanding, and even proof.

Kant’s revolutionary new approach to philosophy was accompanied by the introduction of a largely novel terminology. With the Kant-Lexikon, a lexical reference gives the modern reader access to his work on the basis of present-day editions and takes into account 20th century and contemporary research and advances in lexicology. The Kant-Lexikon includes 2395 entries authored by 221 scholars.

Marcus Giaquinto traces the story of the search for firm foundations for mathematics. The nineteenth century saw a movement to make higher mathematics rigorous; this seemed to be on the brink of success when it was thrown into confusion by the discovery of the class paradoxes. That initiated a period of intense research into the foundations of mathematics, and with it the birth of mathematical logic and a new, sharper debate in the philosophy of mathematics. The Search for Certainty (...) focuses mainly on two major twentieth-century programmes: Russell's logicism and Hilbert's finitism. Giaquinto examines their philosophical underpinnings and their outcomes, asking how successful they were, and how successful they could be, in placing mathematics on a sound footing. He sets these questions in the context of a clear, non-technical exposition and assessment of the most important discoveries in mathematical logic, above all Gödel's underivability theorems.More than six decades after those discoveries Giaquinto asks what our present perspective should be on the question of certainty in mathematics. Taking recent developments into account, he gives reasons for a surprisingly positive response. (shrink)

This collection of Marcus's non-technical essays include her earlier ground-breaking axiomatizations of quantified modal logic, and explore such topics as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the interplay of possibility and existence, and others viewed as iconoclastic when Marcus first addressed them, but now long incorporated into current discussion.

This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions—the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite conflict or compromise—launch path-dependent processes that help determine when, and if, either strategic conflict or resource (...) wealth contribute to, or impede, institutional development. The argument is tested in the comparative analysis of the state-building process in two Andean neighbors, both of which are situated in similar strategic and natural resource environments but which produced qualitatively different outcomes in terms of state capacity or “strength.”. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

Four questions are raised about the semantics of Quantified Modal Logic. Does QML admit possible objects, i.e. possibilia? Is it plausible to admit them? Can sense be made of such objects? Is QML committed to the existence of possibilia? The conclusions are that QML, generalized as in Kripke, would seem to accommodate possibilia, but they are rejected on philosophical and semantical grounds. Things must be encounterable, directly nameable and a part of the actual order before they may plausibly enter into (...) the identity relation. QML is not committed to possibilia in that the range of variables may be restricted to actual objects. Support of the conclusions requires some discussion of substitution puzzles; also, the semantical distinction between proper names which are directly referring, and descriptions even where the latter are "rigid designators". Views of W.V. Quine, B. Russell, K. Donnellan, D. Kaplan as well as S. Kripke are invoked or evaluated in conjunction with these issues. (shrink)

This book includes detailed critical analysis of a wide variety of versions of the indispensability argument, as well as a novel approach to traditional views about mathematics.

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they _must_ involve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, _cannot_. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature without also imagining the consciousness it may or may not (...) possess. (shrink)

Recently, there has been some discussion about the relationship between Kant's conception of right (the sphere of juridical rights and duties) and his moral theory (with the Categorical Imperative as its fundamental norm). In section 1, I briefly survey some recent contributions to this debate and distinguish between two different questions. First, does Kant's moral theory (as developed in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason ) imply , or validate, a Kantian conception of right (as developed in the (...) first part of the Metaphysics of Morals , the Doctrine of Right)? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative sufficient to show that the fundamental principles of right are normatively valid? Second, does Kant's conception of right presuppose his moral theory? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative necessary to show that the basic principles of right are normatively valid? In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with defending a negative answer to the first of these questions. In section 2, I will discuss Paul Guyer's attempt to vindicate a positive answer to the same question. In section 3, reasons will be given why any attempt to derive Kant's conception of right from the Categorical Imperative must fail because of the analytic connection between right and coercion. (shrink)

This is the first complete English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, with introduction and annotation. The importance of Frege's ideas within contemporary philosophy would be hard to exaggerate. He was, to all intents and purposes, the inventor of mathematical logic, and the influence exerted on modern philosophy of language and logic, and indeed on general epistemology, by the philosophical framework.

This papers gives a survey of recent results about simulations of one class of modal logics by another class and of the transfer of properties of modal logics under extensions of the underlying modal language. We discuss: the transfer from normal polymodal logics to their fusions, the transfer from normal modal logics to their extensions by adding the universal modality, and the transfer from normal monomodal logics to minimal tense extensions. Likewise, we discuss simulations of normal polymodal logics by normal (...) monomodal logics, of nominals and the difference operator by normal operators, of monotonic monomodal logics by normal bimodal logics, of polyadic normal modal logics by polymodal normal modal logics, and of intuitionistic modal logics by normal bimodal logics. (shrink)

This article introduces a new, performative framework for analysing intellectuals and intellectual interventions. It elaborates on the strengths of this theoretical perspective vis-à-vis rival approaches and develops this frame of reference by exploring key constituent concepts, including positioning, script and staging. The article then exemplifies the framework and demonstrates its applicability by exploring a public intellectual performance by Jean-Paul Sartre. To conclude, the article reflects on recent shifts in public intellectual performances, especially changes that are relatively durable and connected to (...) the rise of new media. (shrink)

In this article I explore ways to argue about punishment of personal representations in virtual reality. I will defend the idea that such punishing might sometimes be morally required. I offer four different lines of argument: one consequentialistic, one appealing to an idea of appropriateness, one using the notion of organic wholes, and one starting from a supposed inability to determine the limits of the extension of the moral agent. I conclude that all four approaches could, in some cases, justify (...) punishing a virtual reality representation; an avatar. As a consequence of my conclusion, I suggest that our institutionalized criminal justice system must be broadened in scope and punitive measures, in order to cover the new and difficult cases arising in virtual reality. (shrink)

The leader integrity literature has described how professional behavior influences perceptions of integrity, yet behavior in leaders’ personal lives potentially affects those perceptions. The present paper examined how personal life behavior affects leaders. We assessed high profile political sex scandals to explore the research questions of how indiscretions in personal life affect leaders and how leaders recover from public revelations of sexual indiscretions. The results revealed that whether politicians survived the scandal depended on the degree to which the indiscretion deviated (...) from accepted norms, the degree to which the behavior departed from the politician’s expressed values, the leader’s political power, and whether the leader fully engaged in atonement under conditions when denying the allegations is not possible. These components were inter-related such that atonement was possible if the behavior was neither too extreme nor out of character and the leader had sufficient political power. The model was then tested with a sample of business executives engaged in sex scandals, finding support for its elements. (shrink)

There has been much written in recent years about whether a pair of subjects could have visual experiences that represented the colors of objects in their environment in precisely the same way, despite differing significantly in what it was like to undergo them, differing that is, in their qualitative character. The possibility of spectrum inversion has been so much debated1 in large part because of the threat that it would pose to the more general doctrine of Intentionalism, according to which (...) the representational content of an experience fixes what it. (shrink)

In the 1980s, leading philosophers at Oxford, Chicago and UCLA undertook a controversial reassessment of Marxism using the techniques of analytical philosophy. The aim of these so-called "Non-Bullshit" Marxists was no less than the complete reconstruction of Marxist theory, recasting it on a logical and rigorous basis, free from all metaphysical jargon and sentimentality. Marcus Roberts's study serves as a lucid survey of the Analytical Marxists' contributions to the understanding of historical materialism, exploitation, class structure, method, politics and ethics—a (...) panoramic tour de force which he brings up to date with considerations on John Roemer's recent work on models of socialism. Roberts charts the sinuous progress of the growth, development and ultimate dilution or disintegration of the bold theses originally put forward by such figures as Gerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer. For Roberts, the Analytical Marxist project, for all its elegance and richness, failed on its own terms, and in terms of Marxism more generally. However, as this book so persuasively demonstrates, along its winding route, the project raised questions of fundamental importance for social and political theory—questions that anyone interested in emancipation cannot avoid taking seriously. (shrink)

This article aims to summarize the current ethical issues in the field of clinical and counseling psychology and the process of developing professional ethical standards in China. First, through a review of the history of counseling and psychotherapy in China, general background information is provided. Important ethical issues are then discussed based on the results from several empirical studies. Finally, the process of developing the new edition of the Chinese Psychological Society Code of Ethics for Clinical and Counseling Psychology, the (...) main contents as well as the considerations taken into account in the development of this code are presented. (shrink)

The book approaches law from the legal-linguistic perspective. Its aim is to clarify the processes in which the meaning of law emerges in legal discourses. In order to enable the understanding of law as a discursive practice, professional and non-professional discourses are analyzed. With this aim in mind, the author focuses on the epistemological consequences of the discursiveness of law. Other relevant legal-linguistic operations such as legal interpretation or legal translation are scrutinized in terms of their theoretical prerequisites and their (...) practical consequences. Their analysis also shows the potential and the limits of law as a social and as a linguistic phenomenon that is determined by its discursiveness. Finally, the book demonstrates how the discursiveness as the distinctive feature of law establishes the connection between the science of law and other social sciences. (shrink)

This article uses differing interpretations of a thread of narrative taken from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard to exploring the connection between philosophical truth and political liberalism. It argues that while no positive connection exists between realist truth and political liberalism, minimal negative connections do exist between Rorty’s humanistic account of truth and a basic commitment to democratic and liberal frameworks. It sees these minimal connections as limiting in their failure to provide a politics that moves beyond an exclusive (...) concern with liberty and democracy to more substantive political issues of equality and justice. However, it also sees them as reassuring in showing how acceptance of Rorty’s humanistic account of truth in no way necessitates adopting his own ethnocentric political stance. (shrink)

To better understand how to solve large-scale social dilemmas such as common-pool resource management, this paper provides a interdisciplinary critical analysis of scholarship to reveal the vicious cycle we are currently mired in. It proposes that current approaches to promote pro-environmental behaviour will be limited in their efficacy without a preliminary change in the level of trust among individuals and the systems that purport to support them. It then advances a new focus on large-scale trust building, suggesting paths for future (...) research and a new direction for successful outcomes. (shrink)

The technological singularity refers to a hypothetical scenario in which technological advances virtually explode. The most popular scenario is the creation of super-intelligent algorithms that recursively create ever higher intelligences. It took many decades for these ideas to spread from science fiction to popular science magazines and finally to attract the attention of serious philosophers. David Chalmers' (JCS 2010) article is the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the singularity in a respected philosophy journal. The motivation of my article is to (...) augment Chalmers' and to discuss some issues not addressed by him, in particular what it could mean for intelligence to explode. In this course, I will (have to) provide a more careful treatment of what intelligence actually is, separate speed from intelligence explosion, compare what super-intelligent participants and classical human observers might experience and do, discuss immediate implications for the diversity and value of life, consider possible bounds on intelligence, and contemplate intelligences right at the singularity. (shrink)

Summary In this paper some claims of Professor Ricoeur are challenged. It is pointed out on historical grounds that counter to Professor Ricoeur's claim, most past philosophies are displaced, or ignored. The surviving canon is small and very selective. There is, therefore, substantial agreement on the large corpus which is rejected. It is also argued that Professor Ricoeur's contrast between philosophy and the sciences is too sharp since in the history of modern sciences there are always conflicting theories existing in (...) parallel. However, it is the case that in philosophy standards of “acceptability” are looser and not the rigorous ones of science. A philosophical theory may be appreciated for the problems it discloses, the richness and subtlety of its arguments, its strategies and the like despite acknowledged failings. Appreciation of incompatible theories is not irrational. The claim is rejected that the seeming irrationality is resolved by viewing each system as wholly autonomous. The apparent restriction of philosophy by Professor Ricoeur to global systems is also questioned.RésuméL'auteur conteste quelques affirmations du prof. Ricoeur. Elle montre, sur des bases historiques, que beaucoup de philosophies passées sont écartées ou ignorées. Le canon retenu est petit et très sélectif. Il y a donc un accord substantiel quant au vaste corpus qui est rejeté. Elle montre aussi que le contraste que le professeur Ricoeur établit entre philosophie et sciences est trop abrupt, puisqu'il y a toujours eu, dans l'histoire de la science moderne, des théories opposées qui coexistaient. Toutefois, il est vrai qu'en philosophie, les standards d' »acceptabilité« sont plus lǎches et diffèrent de ceux, plus rigoureux, de la science. Une philosophie peut ětre appréciée pour les problèmes qu'elle pose, pour la richesse et la subtilité de ses arguments, ses stratégies ou d'autres choses semblables et ceci en dépit de ses insuffisances notoires. Il n'est pas irrationnel d'apprécier des théories incompatibles. Elle rejette la thèse selon laquelle le fait de considérer chaque système comme totalement autonome supprime l'irrationalité. Elle conteste enfin la restriction — apparemment faite par le professeur Ricoeur — de la philosophie à des systèmes globaux.ZusammenfassungEs werden einige Behauptungen von Professor Ricoeur in Frage gestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass aus historischen Gründen entgegen Ricoeurs Behauptung die meisten vergangenen Philosophien tatsächlich verdrängt oder ignoriert werden. Der überlebende Kanon ist gering und selektiv. Deshalb gibt es eine wichtige Übereinstimmung hinsichtlich des grossen Korpus', der verworfen wird. Es wird argumentiert, dass Ricoeur den Kontrast zwischen der Philosophie und den Wissenschaften zu extrem sieht, da in der Geschichte der modernen Wissenschaften immer rivalisierende Theorien nebeneinander existiert haben. Es stimmt allerdings, dass die Massstäbe für Akzeptierbarkeit in der Philosophie lockerer sind als die strengen der Wisschenschaft. Eine philosophische Theorie mag wegen der Probleme, die sie entwickelt, wegen des Reichtums und der Subtilität ihrer Argumente, ihrer Strategien etc. gewürdigt werden, obschon sie anerkanntermassen versagt hat. Die Würdigung unvereinbarer Theorien ist nicht irrational. Die scheinbare Irrationalität kann nicht dadurch aufgelöst werden, dass jedes System als völlig autonom betrachtet wird. Es wird ebenfalls Ricoeurs Einschränkung der Philosophie auf globale Systeme in Frage gestellt. (shrink)

A biography of the Spanish-born Jewish philosopher, rabbi, and physician of the Middle Ages who spent a good deal of his life in Egypt and whose works influenced the thinking of Jews, Christians, and Moslems.