Frémissement de la conscience est un essai philosophique qui servira beaucoup pour le changement des mentalités au sein de nos communautés et pour l'accouchement d'un nouvel Homme sur terre. Il n'a pas manqué d'explorer des themes tres importants dans ce monde en mutations comme la liberté, la démocratie, la bonne gouvernance, que bon nombre de dirigeants africains et de l'élite intellectuelle tardent a s'approprier et a appliquer dans la testion de leurs pays. L'auteur est a son premier ouvrage édité.--Back cover.

This paper examines what agents should do when others fail to comply with their responsibilities to prevent dangerous climate change. It distinguishes between six different possible responses to noncompliance. These include what I term (1) 'target modification' (watering down the extent to which we seek to prevent climate change), (2) ‘responsibility reallocation’ (reassigning responsibilities to other duty bearers), (3) ‘burden shifting I’ (allowing duty bearers to implement policies which impose unjust burdens on others, (4) 'burden shifting II’ (allowing some to (...) protect peoples rights in ways which impose otherwise unjustified burdens on the duty bearers, (5) 'compromising moral ideals' (permitting agents to compromise non-justice ideals that they are otherwise bound by); and (6) ‘promoting compliance (implementing policies and creating institutions which reduce noncompliance). It concludes by outlining a methodological framework for evaluating these options, and by setting out my tentative and provisional evaluation of which responses are the least bad. (shrink)

Positive mental health involves not the absence of mental disorder but rather the presence of certain mental goods. Institutions, practitioners, and theorists often identify positive mental health with well‐being. There are strong reasons, however, to keep the concepts of well‐being and positive mental health separate. Someone with high positive mental health can have low well‐being, someone with high well‐being can have low positive mental health, and well‐being and positive mental health sometimes conflict. But, while positive mental health and well‐being are (...) not identical, there is an informative conceptual connection between them. Positive mental health usually contributes instrumentally to the living of a good human life, where a good human life includes (but is not limited to) well‐being. (shrink)

Simon Glendinning explains the mysteries of phenomenology.

Empirical research on human–robot interaction has demonstrated how humans tend to react to social robots with empathic responses and moral behavior. How should we ethically evaluate such responses to robots? Are people wrong to treat non-sentient artefacts as moral patients since this rests on anthropomorphism and ‘over-identification’ —or correct since spontaneous moral intuition and behavior toward nonhumans is indicative for moral patienthood, such that social robots become our ‘Others’?. In this research paper, I weave extant HRI studies that demonstrate empathic (...) responses toward robots with the recent debate on moral status for robots, on which the ethical evaluation of moral behavior toward them is dependent. Patienthood for robots has standardly been thought to obtain on some intrinsic ground, such as being sentient, conscious, or having interest. But since these attempts neglect moral experience and are curbed by epistemic difficulties, I take inspiration from Coeckelbergh and Gunkel’s ‘relational approach’ to explore an alternative way of accounting for robot patienthood based on extrinsic premises. Based on the ethics of Danish theologian K. E. Løgstrup I argue that empathic responses can be interpreted as sovereign expressions of life and that these expressions benefit human subjects—even if they emerge from social interaction afforded by robots we have anthropomorphized. I ultimately develop an argument in defense of treating robots as moral patients. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

A heuristic comparison is made of relativistic and non-relativistic quantum theory. To this end the Segal approach is described for the non-specialist. The significance of antimatter to the local and microcausal properties of the fields is laid bare. The fundamental difference between relativistic and non-relativistic (complex) fields is traced to the existence of two kinds of complex numbers in the relativistic case. Their relation to covariant and Newton-Wigner locality is formulated.

Many philosophers hold that moral agency is defined by an agent’s capacity for rational reflection and self-governance. It is only through the exercise of such capacities, these philosophers contend, that one’s actions can be judged to be of distinctively moral value. The moral phenomenology of the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup, currently enjoying a revival of interest amongst Anglo-American moral philosophers, is an exception to this view. Under the auspices of his signature theory of the ‘sovereign expressions of (...) life,’ Løgstrup provides a rich moral phenomenology aimed at establishing the ethical value of ‘spontaneous,’ non-deliberative actions, such as those exemplified in the showing of trust and acts of mercy. In this thesis, my aim is to investigate what mode of moral agency, if any, is compatible with Løgstrup’s phenomenology of the sovereign expressions of life. I argue that Løgstrup’s moral phenomenology is compatible with a distinctive medio-passive mode of agency. According to this conception of moral agency, the subject’s agency is constituted not through her capacity to stand back and make a judgment on how to act, but rather in the way the subject comports herself in relation to situations and encounters that are experienced first-personally as overwhelming and encompassing. I will proceed by providing detailed analyses of the core aspects of Løgstrup’s moral phenomenology and his theory of the sovereign expressions of life. In the process, I will elucidate the decisive influence that thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard had on Løgstrup’s way of thinking about ethics. Thus, in this thesis my aim is to contribute both to Løgstrup scholarship and to central on-going debates in moral philosophy and the philosophy of action. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on (...) the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

. Genuine Reality is recommended reading for all soul-searchers."—George Gurley, Chicago Tribune "Ms. Simon . . . has provided an ideal pathway for James's striding. . . . [Y]ou become engaged in his struggles as if they were your own. ...

We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency. It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder. Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.

The Gibbs Paradox is essentially a set of open questions as to how sameness of gases or fluids are to be treated in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. They have a variety of answers, some restricted to quantum theory, some to classical theory. The solution offered here applies to both in equal measure, and is based on the concept of particle indistinguishability. Correctly understood, it is the elimination of sequence position as a labelling device, where sequences enter at the level of (...) the tensor product of one-particle state spaces. In both cases it amounts to passing to the quotient space under permutations. ‘Distinguishability’, in the sense in which it is usually used in classical statistical mechanics, is a mathematically convenient, but physically muddled, fiction. (shrink)

The American public university is losing status vis-à-vis the Ivy League private sector. In mass education it is challenged by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Declining state financing is symptomatic of the evacuation of public values inside and outside the university. This has proceeded furthest in the USA. Other university systems are affected by national/local as well as global/American factors. Nevertheless, most public universities are on the defensive. Intensified status competition, locking neatly into neo-liberal government, is reconstituting (...) the field of higher education (Bourdieu, 1988) as a competitive market in private status goods. This, not a structural transformation consequent on changes in scale, is decisive. Universities have a capacity for bounded diversity and an underutilized potential in public discourse that enables them to combine openness with research and academic excellence, but not with high student selectivity and social exclusivity. The article comments on the implications of Craig Calhoun’s essay for reinventing the public university, focusing on two theorizations that provide resources for this: Samuelson (1954) on public and private goods, and Habermas (1989) on the public sphere. However, neither fully encompasses the university’s role in learning, scholarship, identity formation and self-alteration. (shrink)

How can we equalize opportunities while respecting people’s freedom? According to a view that I call libertarian resourcism, people’s fair shares of resources should normally take the form of uncon...

This article aims to bring together post-Marxist discourse theory and the critique of political economy in the context of the debate on the Marxian theory of value. Although Laclau and Mouffe criticized Marxism for its economic reductionism, they did not connect this to a comprehensive critique of Marx's writings on value and labor. The merit of considering the theory of value in more detail is underscored by discourse theory's relative silence on the capitalist economy. By drawing on the work of (...) Postone and Elson, it will become clear that there are largely two ways to interpret Marx's theory of value: either as an essentialist theory of price and exploitation, or as a historically specific theory of the constitution of social labor relations in capitalist society. By teasing out Laclau's implicit understanding of Marx's value theory, the article argues that it is in fact his essentialist interpretation of the labor theory of value that constitutes an obstacle toward grasping the social relations of labor and commodity production from a discourse-theoretical perspective. This clears the ground toward approaching Marx's value theory from a post-Marxist perspective, which would grasp the social relations of abstract labor as a hegemonic formation. (shrink)

First published in 1962, this classic study examines the relationship between authority and justice, life, truth, and order. Simon, himself a passionate proponent of liberty, defends authority as an essential concomitant of liberty.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

That hostility to the Reformation was a feature of the Oxford Movements outlook is a truism, but Tractarians’ anti-Reformation sentiments went much further than the purely theological. Tractarians consistently held that in its repudiation of antiquity and elevation of sola scriptura, the Reformation had launched a wider rationalism whose socio-economic as well as religious consequences they abhorred. If a Tractarian paternalism – which mourned the welfare consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries, and the rise of capitalism and its bourgeoisie,– (...) had much in common with other nineteenth-century social criticism, a crucial difference emerged at the point of prescription. Their uncompromising advocacy of the church as the sole agency of amelioration, and promotion of such schemes as sisterhoods, sharply distinguished Tractarians,from advocates of legislative intervention or ethical socialism. Tractarians therefore looked not forward, to the ideal of a welfare state, but back, to the ideal of a welfare church. (shrink)

Computational modeling should play a central role in philosophy. In this introduction to our topical collection, we propose a small topology of computational modeling in philosophy in general, and show how the various contributions to our topical collection ft into this overall picture. On this basis, we describe some of the ways in which computational models from other disciplines have found their way into philosophy, and how the principles one found here still underlie current trends in the feld. Moreover, we (...) argue that philosophers contribute to computational modeling not only by building their own models, but also by thinking about the various applications of the method in philosophy and the sciences. In this context, we note that models in philosophy are usually simple, while models in the sciences are often more complex and empirically grounded. Bridging certain methodological gaps that arise from this discrepancy may prove to be challenging and fruitful for the further development of computational modeling in philosophy and beyond. (shrink)

Simon Lohse addresses the issue of the autonomy of social phenomena. He discusses the most important ontological arguments that have been mounted against methodological individualism in the social sciences. The author thereby attempts to contribute to a better understanding of a core ontological problem in the philosophy of the social sciences and to clarify the theoretical debate within the social sciences.

A growing trend toward knowledge workers and more highly educated employees has made effective human resource management a key metric separating the corporate wheat from the chaff. Studies confirm that the way people are managed and developed delivers a higher return on investment than new technology, R&D, competitive strategy or quality initiatives. In this book, the authors contend that the broader management models of Management by Instructions and Management by Objectives fail to position organizations for competitive success. What is needed (...) is a strategic leadership tool whose practical application will mine market potential through its relevance to individual organizational members. With a step by step guide to implementation, Managing by Values is just such a tool. (shrink)

This article publishes the minutes of a conference held on February 26th, 1934 by prominent members of the German Lutheran churches. August Marahrens, Ernst Sommerlath, Werner Elert, Paul Fleisch, and others are discussing how to maintain the Lutheran position on conditions of the Third Reich and the Reichskirche.

A temporal account of the mental capacities for processing information may not be relevant in a context where the goal is to search for storage capacity expressed in chunks. However, if mental capacity and information processing is the question, the time issue can be rehabilitated. A very different temporal viewpoint on capacity limit is proposed in this commentary.