The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 404, June 2012.

This essay wants to provide a preliminary introduction to, and initial contextualization of the sermons of the seventeenth-century Capuchin preacher Geminianus von Mainz. To my knowledge, his literary production has never been a subject of exhaustive scholarship, even though it has been portrayed by some as a typical example of Bavarian baroque preaching from the later seventeenth century.1 More recently, his metaphorical approach to marriage has been commented upon in passing by Ulrike Strasser and Merry Wiesner-Hanks,2 whereas (...) several culinary remarks in his sermons drew the attention of the late German gastrosopher Christoph Wagner, as can be read in the chapter on 'Barocke... (shrink)

Ce livre destiné aux étudiants des universités anglaises ou américaines constitue le 41e volume d’une série consacrée à l’histoire européenne. La série s’ouvre depuis une décennie aux spécialistes de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, puisqu’elle a publié dès 2000 la deuxième édition du livre de Merry Wiesner sur l’époque moderne et, plus récemment, les travaux de Rachel Fuchs sur le genre et la pauvreté au xixe siècle, ainsi que ceux de Katherine Crawford sur les sexualités européennes entre...

Professor Merrie Bergmann presents an accessible introduction to the subject of many-valued and fuzzy logic designed for use on undergraduate and graduate courses in non-classical logic. Bergmann discusses the philosophical issues that give rise to fuzzy logic - problems arising from vague language - and returns to those issues as logical systems are presented. For historical and pedagogical reasons, three-valued logical systems are presented as useful intermediate systems for studying the principles and theory behind fuzzy logic. The major fuzzy logical (...) systems - Lukasiewicz, Gödel, and product logics - are then presented as generalisations of three-valued systems that successfully address the problems of vagueness. A clear presentation of technical concepts, this book includes exercises throughout the text that pose straightforward problems, that ask students to continue proofs begun in the text, and that engage students in the comparison of logical systems. (shrink)

There are many things that can be done to educate young people about controversial topics - including historical monuments - in schools. At the same time, however, we argue that there is little warrant for optimism concerning the educational potential of classroom instruction given the interpretative frame of the state-approved history curriculum; the onerous institutional constraints under which school teachers must labour; the unusual constellation of talents history teachers must possess; the frequent absence of marginalized voices in these conversations; and (...) finally, the not unlikely indifference - if not outright hostility - expressed by far too many members of the dominant group. For these reasons, we think it best to expand the scope of educational possibilities one is willing to consider. (shrink)

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agendas, let alone to their many internal contradictions. Accordingly, in this book I examine the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. As I proceed, I do not neglect the historical, comparative international context so essential to better understanding (...) where we are, as well as what is attainable in terms of educational justice. I argue that we must constructively critique some of our most cherished beliefs about education if we are to save the hope of real justice from the rhetoric of imagined justice. (shrink)

Complexity is heterogenous, involving nonlinearity, self-organisation, diversity, adaptive behaviour, among other things. It is therefore obviously worth asking whether purported measures of complexity measure aggregate phenomena, or individual aspects of complexity and if so which. This paper uses a recently developed rigorous framework for understanding complexity to answer this question about measurement. The approach is two-fold: find measures of individual aspects of complexity on the one hand, and explain measures of complexity on the other. We illustrate the conceptual framework of (...) complexity science and how it links the foundations to the practised science with examples from different scientific fields and of various aspects of complexity. Furthermore, we analyse a selection of purported measures of complexity that have found wide application and explain why and how they measure aspects of complexity. This work gives the reader a tool to take any existing measure of complexity and analyse it, and to take any feature of complexity and find the right measure for it. (shrink)

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its action-oriented offspring Corporate Citizenship (CC) currently trigger an intensifying debate on ethics, role and behavior of companies within civil society. For companies, CSR raises the question of what may be the "good reason(s)" for acting responsible towards its members, customers or society. In order to answer this question, we face the debate on CSR and its strategic engagement drivers on the levels of corporate culture, social innovation, and civil society. In this article, we provide (...) a conceptual framework based on the analytic distinction of legitimation and sensemaking. The conceptual framework developed in this article can serve as a basis to develop a company's CSR strategy. It provides measures and instruments to make complex CSR processes more visible and manageable. (shrink)

Po svoji uèinkovitosti pri spodbujanju éustev glede pripadnosti oz. nepripadnosti je morda edino religija sposobna tekmovati z domoljubjem. Morda tudi samo religija lahko tekmuje z domoljubjem v svoji sposobnosti, da spodbuja in neguje pripadnost milijonov, da bi dosegla niz ciljev povezanih z zvestobo. Vendar paje, kotje opazil John Kleinig (2014: 5), 'domoljubna in verska zvestoba, kljub vsem svojim vznemirjujoèim lastnostim, pogosto pristranska, izkljuóujoéa in celo teroristiéna'. Ince se posamezniki nekritiéno identificirajo z narodom, njegovimi ideali, zgodovino, institucijami in voditelji, ima domoljub (...) nagnjenost delovati, braniti, napadati in celo imeti tujce za manjvredne. (shrink)

Many parents cite intimacy as one of their reasons for deciding to educate at home. It seems intuitively obvious that home education is conducive to intimacy because of the increased time families spend together. Yet what is not clear is whether intimacy can provide justification for one’s decision to home educate. To see whether this is so, we introduce the concept of ‘attentive parenting’, which encompasses a set of family characteristics, and we examine whether and under what conditions attentive parents (...) risk loss of intimacy by sending their children to school; or, alternatively, whether they can avoid this risk by educating children at home. What we will determine is whether families who exhibit the specified characteristics are prima facie justified in educating their children at home under the conditions of interest. We argue that, for attentive parents, home education not only promotes greater intimacy, but also provides insurance against the loss of intimacy that may occur under certain conditions when children attend schools. (shrink)

In 1913 Wittgenstein raised an objection to Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment that eventually led Russell to abandon his theory. As he put it in the Tractatus, the objection was that “the correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement,” (5.5422). This objection has been widely interpreted to concern type restrictions on the (...) constituents of judgment. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken and that Wittgenstein’s objection is in fact a form of the problem of the unity of the proposition. (shrink)

This article positions ‘safety’ and ‘risk’ as key public health problems in mental health. I demonstrate that discourse about safety occurs extensively in relation to mental health, but it does not occur in a way where the mental health system gets any safer for the key actors involved. Ongoing unproductive discourse occurs because the different actors involved are speaking at cross purposes and about different things against the background of a ‘public’ discourse focused on safety crises. I map the general (...) interests of the main set of actors to demonstrate the conflicted and complex nature of discourse around mental health safety. In response I outline a dialogical approach to safety and risk based on the work of Habermas and values of recovery. This is presented as a framework from which to assess whether discourse is occurring effectively to develop shared meanings. Shared understandings of safety will mean that the safety needs of relevant actors can be understood and negotiated rather than giving way to an actuarial process which does not take into consideration the context of a person’s life. (shrink)

A first-person proposition is a proposition that only a single subject can assert or believe. When I assert ‘I am on fire’ I assert a first-person proposition that only I have access to, in the sense that no one else can assert or believe this proposition. This is in contrast to third-person propositions, which can be asserted or believed by anyone.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that moral disagreement and widespread moral bias pose a serious problem for moral intuitionism. Seneca’s view that we just recognise the good could be criticised using a similar argument. His approach to argumentation offers a way out, one that may serve as a model for a revisionary intuitionism.

Merrie Bergmann Philosophical Review 100 :112-115Taking into account pragmatic considerations and recent linguistic and psychological studies, the author forges a new understanding of the relation between metaphoric and literal meaning. The argument is illustrated with analysis of metaphors from literature, philosophy, science, and everyday language.

The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

The seventeenth-century Spanish Dominican Cosme de Lerma authored numerous philosophical works, some ofwhich were posthumously reorganised into a Cursus philosophicus, intended as an arts course for the Dominican studia in Italy. Lerma’s philosophical project consisted in developing the doctrines proposed a century earlier by his fellow Dominican friar Domingo de Soto. Through analysing Lerma’s Compendium and Disputationes based on Soto’s Summulae and Lerma’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Logic, this paper explores three issues: first, Lerma’s axiomatic theory of inference, including the development (...) of Soto’s project of relevance logic (relating to the analysis of the paradoxes of implication); second, the question whether there are different degrees of validity (answered negatively by Lerma); third, Lerma’s psychology of inference, which offers an interpretation of human inferential behaviour and its limitations in terms of the scholastic theories of causation and natural agency. (shrink)

I. Since the appearance in 1902 of Benedetto Croce's L'estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale, the problem of the ontology of the work of art or aesthetic object - what kind of thing it is and what its mode of being is - has come to occupy a central place in the philosophy of art. Moreover, a particular conception of the identity of art objects is at present a driving force in some quarters of the art world itself. (...) As Harold Rosenberg so well points out, Minimalist or Reductive Art has attempted, sometimes quite self-consciously, to establish the autonomous physical reality of the work of art by empty ing it of all expressive and representational content. ! What is the ontological problem? One rather crude way of stating it is to ask where the work of art or object of aesthetic contemplation 2 exists. Is it, to pick some examples, to be identified with the material product of the artist's labors which exists spatially "outside of" and independently of artist and beholder? Or does it exist only "in the mind" of the beholder or the artist? Is it either one perception of a beholder or a series of his perceptions? Or is it the class of all percep tions of either all spectators or all "qualified" spectators? Put another way, it would be a question of whether and to what such purported names as 'Beethoven's Fifth Symphony' refer. (shrink)

Refiguring Critical Theory offers some thoughts about the nature of democracy and the possibilities of individual and collective self-determination. The text traces theories of the relationship between being and consciousness from Marx through Lukacs and the Frankfurt School to Habermas' recent work The Theory of Communicative Action.

Further development of the research on the fourteenth-century logic of iterated modalities leads to further exploration in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian scholasticism, in particular, the contributions of Paul of Venice and his followers. The research confirms the well-established notion of “British logic in Italy”, as the major logical strategies used in the analysed works can be traced back to earlier British authors. Logically speaking, the problem of iterated epistemic modalities was framed as debate on the consistency of the hypothesis that (...) an agent doubts whether she knows φ and the hypothesis that an agent knows φ and doubts whether she knows φ, in which the principles of positive and negative introspection play a major part. Philosophically speaking, the debate on the possibility of doubting one’s own knowledge utilised theories of evidence and scientific proof and philosophy of the mind. (shrink)

The so-called “Trinitarian paralogisms” are apparently legitimate instances of syllogistic inference-schemes with premises and conclusions containing expressions of the language of the Trinity doctrine, which fail to be truth- or acceptability-preserving. The logical problem of the Trinity splits into two levels of analysis. First, the technical aspects of Trinitarian paralogisms are analysed in terms of logical innovations in theories of “suppositio” and “distributio”. Second, the philosophical aspect of Trinitarian paralogisms translates into the question of formality as general applicability of logic. (...) The sixteenth century tradition can be reconstructed as a reaction to the fourteenth century nominalist logical analysis. As opposed to post-medieval scholasticism developing the medieval approach, humanism and reformation criticise scholastic logic in terms of diff erent specifi c anthropological theories. (shrink)