What value is this scholarly debate about the origins of Jaspers' phenomenology to psychiatric clinicians? For one thing, it might help kindle enough interest among scholars and clinicians in Jaspers' General Psychopathology to warrant its reprinting. This would expand the psychiatrist's appreciation of the relevance of philosophy to medical thinking and patient care. In the GP, Jaspers quotes Kant's opinion that "the psychiatrist's competence is really commensurate with how far his education and knowledge would qualify him to belong to the (...) philosophic faculty". (shrink)

Dan Marshall and Josh Parsons note, correctly. that the property of being either a cube or accompanied by a cube is incorrectly classified as intrinsic under the definition we have given unless it turns out to be disjunctive. Whether it is disjunctive, under the definition we gave, turns on certain judgements of the relative naturalness of properties. They doubt the judgements of relative naturalness that would classify their property as disjunctive. We disagree. They also suggest that the whole idea of (...) judging relative naturalness is a dubious business. We reply that, like them or not, such judgements cannot easily be avoided. (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from ‘cloud’ and (...) ‘concrete’ to ‘wave’ and ‘wood’, serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole. (shrink)

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It examines (...) the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time. (shrink)

The introductory chapter, entitled 'The Subject, Method and Scope of this Enquiry,' details how anthropology is to be pursued as a science and advocates the method of participant observation.

In this article the author argues that we need not just to ‘decolonize’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularize’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the author starts to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit and use this to speak of both the (...) ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. He suggests that what might once have been distinct territorialized ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system. (shrink)

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of (...) one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics. (shrink)

The Self of the Homeric man can be called a weak one. Men depicted in the Iliad and in the Odyssey are determined by fate, gods’ plans and interventions, and their own emotional impulses perceived as independent forces. Hermann Schmitz links this weakness of the Self with the character of the Homeric man’s experience of the body. According to Schmitz the perception of the body as directly experienced, i.e. as Leib, constitutes the Homeric idea of man. This article stresses the (...) point that the Homeric man cannot be considered as being directed only by the external forces and that the notion of Leib, however helpful, does not suffice to describe him. Being directed and being leiblich the Homeric man is also independent. He is able to master the impulses of his emotions, his actions seem to originate from himself, he can be regarded as a unity coordinated by his Self. The independence of the Homeric man is unstable: it can be said that it appears and disappears. This status of the human position seems to pose problems for a reader who is accustomed to modern notions of personal freedom, free will or choice. May that be a chance for us in our attempts to understand ourselves? (shrink)

We are concerned with formal models of reasoning under uncertainty. Many approaches to this problem are known in the literature e.g. Dempster-Shafer theory [29], [42], bayesian-based reasoning [21], [29], belief networks [29], many-valued logics and fuzzy logics [6], non-monotonic logics [29], neural network logics [14]. We propose rough mereology developed by the last two authors [22-25] as a foundation for approximate reasoning about complex objects. Our notion of a complex object includes, among others, proofs understood as schemes constructed in order (...) to support within our knowledge assertions/hypotheses about reality described by our knowledge incompletely. (shrink)

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current (...) ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility. (shrink)

Notice --- Hobbes and Adams as Thucydideans --- Ancient Greece --- Alternative Concepts of the Human Condition --- Medieval Monarchy --- Renaissance Republics --- Founding Fathers --- The Moral Recuperation of Self-Interest --- Other Human Worlds --- Now is the Whimper of Our Self-Contempt --- Culture is the Human Nature.

Phenomenology of management seeks to grasp the essence of manager's work – its core is the analysis of leadership. Phenomenology of leadership is an approach that makes the idea “to be someone – to do something” becomes the guiding principle of of management. Max Scheler’s “moral flight” phenomenology is one of the most important inspiration in the analysis of leadership. His anthropology reveals that being a man is in fact a continuing task that is impossible to take, and the result (...) depends on the man himself. Scheler’s phenomenology is a good way to discover the essence of leadership (eidos) in the process of culture change. This article presents a case study: Ricardo Semler’s inner transformation, who might overcome the technocratic attitude and make the “moral flight”. The main inspiration for him was a metaphor “builder of cathedrals”. As a result of his own inner transformation has become a “builder of cathedrals”, such as a leader, who serves – it was a condition for conversion of others in the “cathedral builders”. As a result of the Semler's “moral flight” their company was transformed in “cathedral builders” guild – community of work. (shrink)

This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a (...) ‘mesoscale’ intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of ‘repetition’ and ‘mediation’, to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal ‘metapattern’ of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales. (shrink)

This book brings together contributions from scholars across the humanities. A wide-ranging exploration of the interface between performance and nature. Examines the use and usefulness of ideas of ‘performance’ for understanding human-nature relationships. Draws on different disciplines and intellectual traditions and on different conceptions of ‘performance’ and ‘nature’. Contributions are rooted in real-world contexts and problems, explored through detailed ethnographic work. Explores domains as diverse as allotments and bioinvasion, fox hunting and green politics. Makes a distinctive contribution to the ‘cultural (...) turn’ in environmental research. (shrink)

The article presents an analysis with the method of phenomenological praxeology of two concepts of entrepreneurship: the nineteenth-century concept of Leon Harmel and that of J.-Robert Ouimet. The ontological-ontic coherence functions as the main practical directive of phenomenological praxeology, according to which it is necessary to preserve the ontological-ontic coherence of management in order to ensure the high efficiency of an enterprise and high level of ethics in its command structures. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Harmel’s and Ouimet’s (...) concepts, based on promoting dignity and servant leadership, ensure the ontological--ontic coherence of management and can be seen as a model (as a paradigm) of ethical entrepreneurship. (shrink)

The article presents the view that the introduction of the personalistic paradigm into entrepreneurship will enable integral economic growth and remove the causes of today’s crisis, that is economism and instrumental rationality. Personalism, which recognizes man as a conscious person experiencing self and others, has special qualities for application. This is the most useful approach to philosophical and ethical analysis of the modern enterprise. In this article the focus is on a company managed according to personalistic ethics. Entrepreneurship in the (...) personalistic approach is the art of management, which increases the area of common good. (shrink)