Philosophers and economists write about collective action from distinct but related points of view. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives. Economists have been concerned with rationality in a strategic context. There, problems posed by “coordination games” seem to point to a form of rational action, “team thinking,” which is not individualistic. Philosophers’ analyses of collective intention, however, sometimes reduce collective action to a set of individually instrumental actions. They do not, therefore, capture the first person plural perspective characteristic of (...) team thinking. Other analyses, problematically, depict intentions ranging over others’ actions. I offer an analysis of collective intention which avoids these problems. A collective intention aims only at causing an individual action, but its propositional content stipulates its mirroring in other minds. (shrink)

Neste artigo, interessamo-‑nos pelo neologismo «perverformatif» [«performativo»] usado por Jacques Derrida em La Carte postale e em Marx & Sons. Se Derrida é um outro «mestre do performativo», título que ele reservava ao «Plato» de La Carte Postale não é por negar a Lei ou a sua «verdade», mas porque tem necessidade delas para assegurar a incidência de um desafio. O que performativamente se põe em obra e em abismo nos «Envios» passa assim por um desejo «perverso» de fazer advir (...) esta lei e de a desviar. A nossa hipótese é a de que é precisamente o que se performa no idioma daquele que não tem senão uma língua que não é a sua e para quem as palavras «contêm a sua própria perversidade». Interrogaremos, pois, os rastros deste vocábulo, a sua virtualidade a operar e o seu alcance – linguístico, mas também ético e político – no pensamento de Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

We give some information about the action of Aut on M, where M is a countable arithmetically saturated model of Peano Arithmetic. We concentrate on analogues of moving gaps and covering gaps inside M.

The article urges a negative answer to the question if values merely lie ‘‘in the eyes of the beholder’’. It argues the objectivity of values via their status as tertiary properties that are neither on dispositionally inherent in their objects nor yet affective (dispositionally evoked in the interaction between objects and sense–observers), but rather reflective in being dispositionally evoked in suitably competent minds considering the matters involved.

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes (such as Futurism and the (...) work of Stelarc) for their apparent eugenicist and fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes (such as Impressionism) resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...

IS THE REAL RATIONAL? Can we ever manage to explain the nature of reality—the make-up of the universe as a whole? Is there not an insuperable obstacle here—an infeasibility that was discerned already by Immanuel Kant who argued roughly as follows.

In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny (...) writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy. (shrink)

Investigates the question of Russian identity, spanning a territory, centuries, and a variety of political, social, and economic structures. This book places emphases on the struggle against the steppe peoples, Orthodox Christianity, autocratic monarchy, and Westernization.

Orientalism in Louis XIV's France presents a history of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century France, mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India.

Few philosophical issues have had as long and elaborate a history as the problem of free will, which has been contested at every stage of the history of the subject. The present work practices an extensive bibliography of this elaborate literature, listing some five thousand items ranging from classical antiquity to the present.

While philosophers from Plato to Kant and beyond have discussed the mission and methodology of philosophy, this area of deliberation has only recently been acknowledged as a distinctive branch of philosophy as such, duly entitled metaphilosophy. There are, as yet, very few books on the subject so that the present volume joins a rather select group. Professor Rescher has published in the field for some thirty years and this book gathers together a representative sampling of his contributions. Taken together these (...) pieces convey an instructive overview of the field, as well as vividly conveying their author's take on the key issues that constitute its problem domain. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)