This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book (...) begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose. They establish an alternative to the standard growth models that use an aggregate production function and then introduce the concept of GPTs, complete with a study of how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis. The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They build non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium models of GPT-driven growth that incorporate a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important but which are excluded from other GPT models in the interests of analytical tractability. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach. (shrink)

The twelfth edition of this classic text has built upon the success of previous editions and has been thoroughly updated and revised to give students a deeper understanding and appreciation of the core principles of Economics. Suitable for beginners, Economics is accessible but has a rigour that will stretch readers to achieve their full potential. In-depth explanations of key theoretical concepts are balanced with a wide range of real-world examples to help students understand and apply their knowledge. Online Resource Centre (...) For students: - Self-test questions - Economics in the news - Interactive chapters - Web links - Flashcard glossary - Authors' blog For lecturers: - Animated PowerPoint slides - Instructor's manual - Test bank - Figures from the text. (shrink)

From a master biographer and longtime Gurdjieff practitioner, a brilliant new exploration of the quintessential Western esoteric teacher of the twentieth-century. The Greek-Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff was one of the most original and provocative spiritual teachers in the twentieth-century West. Whereas much work on Gurdjieff has been either fawning or blindly critical, acclaimed scholar and writer Roger Lipsey balances sympathic interest in Gurdjieff and his "Fourth Way" teachings with a historian's sense of context and a biographer's feel for personality (...) and relationships. Using a wide-range of published and unpublished sources, Lipsey explores Gurdjieff's formative travels in Central Asia, his famed teaching institution in France, the development of the Gurdjieff Movements and music, and, above all, Gurdjieff's fascinating continuous evolution as a teacher. Published on the 70th anniversary of Gurdjieff's death, Gurdjieff Reconsidered delves deeply into Gurdjieff's writings and those of his most important students, including P. D. Ouspensky and Jeanne de Salzmann. Lipsey's comprehensive approach and unerring sense of the subject make this a must-read for anyone with a serious intention to explore Gurdjieff's life, teachings, and reputation. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to develop a systematic taxonomy of cognitive artifacts, i.e., human-made, physical objects that functionally contribute to performing a cognitive task. First, I identify the target domain by conceptualizing the category of cognitive artifacts as a functional kind: a kind of artifact that is defined purely by its function. Next, on the basis of their informational properties, I develop a set of related subcategories in which cognitive artifacts with similar properties can be grouped. In this (...) taxonomy, I distinguish between three taxa, those of family, genus, and species. The family includes all cognitive artifacts without further specifying their informational properties. Two genera are then distinguished: representational and non-representational (or ecological) cognitive artifacts. These genera are further divided into species. In case of representational artifacts, these species are iconic, indexical, or symbolic. In case of ecological artifacts, these species are spatial or structural. Within species, token artifacts are identified. The proposed taxonomy is an important first step towards a better understanding of the range and variety of cognitive artifacts and is a helpful point of departure, both for conceptualizing how different artifacts augment or impair cognitive performance and how they transform and are integrated into our cognitive system and practices. (shrink)

Some theorists who accept the existence of global justice duties to alleviate the condition of distant needy strangers hold that these duties are significantly constrained by special ties to fellow countrymen. The patriotic priority thesis holds that morality requires the members of each nation-state to give priority to helping needy fellow compatriots over more needy distant strangers. Three arguments for constraint and patriotic priority are examined in this essay: an argument from fair play, one from coercion, another from coercion and (...) autonomy. Under scrutiny, none of these arguments qualifies as successful. (shrink)

Abstract: I argue that for psychological and social reasons, the traditional “Conflict Model” of science and religion interactions has such a strong hold on the nonexpert imagination that counterexamples and claims that interactions are simply more complex than the model allows are inadequate to undermine its power. Taxonomies, such as those of Ian Barbour and John Haught, which characterize conflict as only one among several possible relationships, help. But these taxonomies, by themselves, fail to offer an account of why different (...) relationships prevail among different communities and how they succeed one another within particular communities—that is, they contain no dynamic elements. To undermine the power of the “Conflict Model,” we should be seeking to offer alternative models for science and religion interactions that can both incorporate the range of stances articulated by scholars like Barbour and which can offer an account of the process by which differing attitudes succeed one another. As a step toward this goal, I propose a general “interacting subcultures model” and illustrate its applicability in a small number of mini-case studies from Early Modern Britain and France and with glances toward contemporary America. (shrink)

We want to become those we are—Menschen who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists [Physiker, i.e., natural scientists] in order to be able to be creators in this sense—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics [Physik, i.e., natural science] or were constructed so as to (...) contradict it. Therefore, up with physics [Hoch die Physik]! And even more so [höher noch] that which compels us to it [das was uns zu ihr zwingt]—our intellectual integrity [Redlichkeit]!Nietzsche is quite relentless in his .. (shrink)

This essay describes modern American legal pragmatism. Its origins in pragmatist philosophy are traced, and it is compared with the law and economics movement in American law and the formalist style of Continental legal theory. The essay argues that the inevitability of legal pragmatism in America, and its dispensability in Europe, reflect fundamental institutional and cultural differences rather than mere accidents of history or legal thought.

Adorno unquestionably loved opera music as much as he hated opera as a cultural institution. His take on opera in the twentieth century led him to write its socio‐political obituary, while recognizing at the same time that opera continued to attract a steady stream of would‐be onlooker‐auditors. Paradoxically for Adorno, opera continued to appeal to audiences, and – from his dialectical reckoning – characteristically for precisely the wrong reasons. His opera analyses address the sociology of musical theater, performance hermeneutics, and (...) the direct consideration of music itself (though given his typical writing mode this writing is perhaps best characterized as criticism rather than analysis, as the latter term is commonly employed within musicology). Adorno's interests principally revolve around modern opera (Schoenberg, Berg, Strauss, Weill, especially) but also, if to a lesser extent, canonic works from Mozart to Verdi. Wagner, Wagnerian music drama, and cultural Wagnerism more generally were special cases for Adorno, and subjects he returned to repeatedly throughout his adult life, coinciding with the rise and fall of National Socialism and the Wagner cult, which in the 1930s and 1940s war years comfortably accommodated fascist proclivities. Adorno recognized the socio‐cultural agency of opera as a still‐prestigious cultural leftover of nineteenth‐century bourgeois triumphalism, which he vigorously opposed. In its place, he labored to promote what he regarded as a more socially responsible musico‐operatic practice to supplant the aesthetic and social complacency of the established order, ideas that after his death have found considerable currency, nowhere more evident than in late‐modern opera productions throughout the world. (shrink)

In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler ’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler ’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics, euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

The book is aimed at students and scholars of law, politics and philosophy. Of unprecedented breadth, it offers both a survey of, and an original contribution to, the field by some the world's leading scholars of constitutional theory.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 1-20.

Cet article porte sur le cours de philosophie de la religion donné par Tillich à Berlin en 1920. Il retrace le parcours qui conduit Tillich à l’affirmation que Dieu vient à l’existence dans tout acte religieux. Le point de départ est la critique des preuves de Dieu; elle se poursuit dans une critique de l’objectivation religieuse qui fait de Dieu un être existant au-dessus des autres. Contre cette conception de l’existence de Dieu, Tillich soutient la thèse d’une réalisation du divin, (...) d’une venue de Dieu à l’existence, dans l’acte religieux lui-même. C’est dans l’autotranscendance de l’acte religieux que le mystère de l’être fait irruption à travers les formes de la conscience. (shrink)

Erdelyi's version of repression is no longer recognizably Freudian. Erdelyi fails to cite directed forgetting experiments involving psychiatric patients that indicate that the motivation to forget threatening material seldom translates into an ability to do so. The early Freud of the seduction theory of hysteria did inspire the recovered memory fiasco.

[Richard Wollheim] Any experiential view of pictorial meaning will assign to each painting an appropriate experience through which its mean can be recovered. When the meaning is representational, what is the nature of the appropriate experience? If there is agreement that the experience is to be described as seeing-in, disagreement breaks out about how seeing-in is to be understood. This paper challenges two recent interpretations: one in terms of perceived resemblance, the other in terms of imagining seeing. Neither view (...) gives a correct account of how the spectator distributes his attention between the marked surface and the represented object. /// [Robert Hopkins] I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's argument that the notion (...) of the ‘second‐personal’ marks a divide between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

RESUMEN En el libro X de la Metafísica se trazan las líneas generales de una henología. La reconstrucción de la argumentación debe hacerse desde dos pilares fundamentales: (a) la guía de problemas o aporías que proporciona el libro iii y (b) el proyecto ontológico anunciado en el libro iv, donde se señala la relación entre ontología y henología. El rasgo fundamental de dicha henología sería su subordinación a la ontología. El artículo argumenta que para Aristóteles el rol de la henología (...) es ante todo destructivo, pues con dicha doctrina se pretende establecer -ante todo- la imposibilidad de considerar al "uno" (τὸ ἓν) como principio de los entes. ABSTRACT In the Metaphysics, especially in Book X, are drawn the general lines of a henology. For the proper understanding of this doctrine it is necessary to reconstruct its argumentation from two fundamental basis: (a) the guide of puzzles or aporias that book iii provides and (b) the ontological project announced in book IV where the relationship between ontology and henology is indicated. Once the explanations of Book X are framed a theory about unity (τὸ ἓν) can be systematically assembled, whose fundamental feature would be the following: henology as a science is a subordinate part of ontology. The role of henology is for Aristotle primarily destructive, that is, with this doctrine it is intended to establish the impossibility of considering the 'one' (τὸ ἓν) as a principle of the entities. (shrink)

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker (...) and observer. (shrink)

Demonstrating Richard Rorty's breadth of scholarship and his influence on diverse issues across the social sciences and humanities, this comprehensive bibliography contains 1,165 citations. A unique reference work on neo-pragmatism, this bibliography is essential for anyone researching Rorty's work and its impact on philosophy, literature, the arts, religion, the social sciences, politics, and education.

Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at length—and over a long period of time—on matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine began as his staunch admirer but diverged from him increasingly over questions in the analysis of meaning and the justification of belief. That they (...) remained close, relishing their differences through years of correspondence, shows their stature both as thinkers and as friends. The letters are presented here, in full, for the first time. The substantial introduction by Richard Creath offers a lively overview of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, allowing the nonspecialist to see their writings in historical and intellectual perspective. Creath also provides a judicious analysis of the philosophical divide between them, showing how deep the issues cut into the discipline, and how to a large extent they remain unresolved. (shrink)