Views from one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin.

Lies are typically defined as believed falsehoods asserted with the intention of deceiving the hearer. A particularly problematic case for this definition is that of false implicatures. These are prototypically cases where the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance is true, yet an implicature conveyed by this proposition in context is false. However, implicature is a diverse category and whether a blanket statement such as “false implicatures are lies,” as some have argued can account for all of them is open (...) to investigation. We present an experimental investigation of whether naïve participants define different types of implicatures as lies. Our results show that only a couple of types of implicatures were strongly rated as lies by participants. These results suggest that participants distinguish between different types of communicated meanings on linguistic grounds, contributing both to the literature on lying, as well as to theoretical discussions of how different types of meaning are communicated. (shrink)

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory (...) as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.--. (shrink)

Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change takes a practical approach to environmental ethics with a focus on its transformative potential for students, professionals, policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens. Proposed solutions to issues such as climate change, resource depletion and accelerating extinctions have included technological fixes, national and international regulation and social marketing. This volume examines the ethical features of a range of communication strategies and technological, political and economic methods for promoting ecologically responsible practice in the face of these crises. (...) The central concern of the book is environmental behaviour change: inspiring, informing and catalysing reflective change in the reader, and in their ability to influence others. By making clear the forms of environmental ethics that exist, and what each implies in terms of individual and social change, the reader will be better able to formulate, commit to, articulate and promote a coherent position on how to understand and engage with environmental issues. (shrink)

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced (...) by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to examine and clarify the truth theory of American pragmatism. Three central ideas of this truth theory will be considered in light of Whitehead's metaphysics: a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, a defense of fallibilism, and a recognition of the temporality of truth.

In this paper the centrality of concepts for intellectual history is stressed. Naturally, this focus on concepts requires an account of what concepts are. More contentiously, an account of how concepts are best approached by intellectual historians also requires taking a stand vis-à-vis some prevailing notions of concepts. In particular, I will direct attention to the weaknesses of the historicist theory of concepts derived from the later Wittgenstein. By contrast, I will put forward an account of conceptual innovation and change (...) in intellectual history based on a notion of concept loosely inspired by Frege. The first three parts of the paper lay out a framework for what I call “analytic contextualism,” which is then briefly illustrated with an example from the history of political thought in the fourth part. I argue that this framework should be attractive to intellectual historians for two reasons: First, Fregean concepts, due to their relative independence from context, explain long-term conceptual stability and change better than competing notions of concepts. Second, a Fregean notion of concept is better suited than its competitors to explain how concepts and conceptual innovation sometimes manage to have causal effect on institutions and social reality. To demonstrate the latter point, it will be shown that my account of concepts is consistent with, and well placed to exploit, recent philosophical advances in social ontology. (shrink)

Slowly, we are gaining a deeper understanding of the persisting psychological trauma experienced by students at colonial universities, and beginning to recognize that the Eurocentric curricula and pedagogies must change if students such as the “born-frees” in post-Apartheid South Africa are to flourish. In this article, I present a sub-Saharan African concept of “the ethical teacher,” and use this to ground a “ubiquitous action-reaction” teaching model. I use these concepts to develop a decolonized pedagogy – a teaching methodology that avoids (...) a number of harmful colonial teaching practices in philosophy. I suggest a number of novel ways of accommodating a “decolonized education” with a view to inspiring teachers of philosophy in colonial countries globally. I propose a new, malleable pedagogical model that is particularly useful in the colonial context, since its uniqueness lies in the African ethical framework that grounds it. However, I contend that philosophy educators globally will benefit from taking the principles proposed in this article seriously. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict the existence (...) of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)

A speaker’s retraction of her own previous testimony serves to defeat the reason for belief provided by her testimony in a distinctive way. In telling an addressee that p, the speaker purports to settle for the addressee the question whether p. In retracting her testimony, the speaker then revokes her settling of this question for the addressee, cancelling the addressee’s entitlement to pass the epistemic buck back to her should the content of her belief be challenged, and this entitlement is (...) cancelled even if the addressee has good reason to believe that the speaker’s retraction is misguided or mistaken. Deferentially believing a speaker and allowing them to settle a theoretical question thus has a distinctive temporal and interpersonal character, requiring the addressee to assume that both she herself and the speaker will continue to do their part in the joint activity that is the addressee’s holding p true. (shrink)

The peak-end rule predicts that retrospective evaluations of affective events heavily depend on their most intense and last moment and imply duration neglect. It was originally proposed for negativ...

Biologists often hypothesize mechanisms to explai phenomena. Our interest is how their understanding of the phenomena and mechanisms develops as they construct diagrams to communicate their claims. We present two case studies in which scientists integrate various data to create a single diagram to communicate their major conclusions in a research publication. In both cases, the history of revisions suggests that scientists' initial drafts encode biases and oversights that are only gradually overcome through prolonged, reflective re-design. To account for this, (...) we suggest that scientists only develop a unitary understanding of their results through their attempts to communicate them. (shrink)

Roman property law and Roman contract law as well as the property centered Roman ethics put forth by Cicero in several of his works were the traditions Grotius drew upon in developing his natural rights system. While both the medieval just war tradition and Grotius's immediate political context deserve scholarly attention and constitute important influences on Grotius's natural law tenets, it is a Roman tradition of subjective legal remedies and of just war which lays claim to a foundational role with (...) regard to his conception of subjective natural rights. Grotius made use of Roman law and Roman ethics in order to submit a normative case for a rights-based just war in the East Indies. His conception of a law of nature was originally conceived to apply a theory of compensatory justice to the high seas of Southeast Asia, envisaged as a natural state lacking political authority. Eventually, however, this argument was to reveal its anti-absolutist implications, and contributed—by virtue of its applicability to individuals, private entities and commonwealths alike—to the emergence of a rights-based constitutionalism. This article discusses Grotius's early treatise De iure praedae commentarius and its offshoot Mare liberum, which already contained an inchoate version of subjective natural rights, as well as the elaborate natural rights doctrine which can be found in Grotius's early Theses LVI and in the Defensio capitis quinti maris liberi, a defense of the fifth chapter of Mare liberum, written around 1615 and directed against the Scottish jurist William Welwod's attack on Mare liberum. (shrink)

The modern state is often taken as the only legitimate claimant to the division of the globe. Political theorists offer many theories of territorial rights but tend to agree that the state remains the proper institutional bearer of such rights. This article examines how states became the exclusive bearers of territorial rights by returning to the international theory of the eighteenth-century Prussian jurist Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who wrote in a moment when sovereign states were not the heirs apparent to the (...) globe but competed with other claimants to territorial rights. Despite proposing a radically pluralistic and anti-imperial account of land ownership, Wolff nonetheless paved the way for the state to become the sole bearer of territorial rights. Wolff’s international thought is an illustration of how building a state-centric international order was a double-edged sword: it criticized imperial overreach while also closing the international arena to nonstate forms of collective life. In this process, he offered two distinct ideas of political space: the territorial space of states, and the land ownership tracts of nonstate peoples, including pastoralists and nomads. To Wolff, only states were entitled to full and permanent territorial rights, while nonstate peoples were shut out of the international system, made both de facto and de jure stateless. (shrink)

Abstract The debate in the philosophy of perception between direct realists and representationalists should influence the debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification. If direct realists are correct, there are more consciously accessible justifiers for internalists to exploit than externalists think. Internalists can retain their distinctive internalist identity while accepting this widened conception of internalistic justification: even if they welcome the possibility of cognitive access to external facts, their position is still quite distinct from the typical externalist position. (...) To demonstrate this, Alvin Goldman’s critique of internalism is shown to ignore important lessons from the case for direct realism about perception. In particular, it unjustifiably assumes that internalism entails that only facts simultaneous with the justification of a belief can justify the belief. Goldman’s definition of a “justifier” is also inconsistent with the overall guidance conception of epistemology he takes for granted in his critique of internalism. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-26 DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0146-4 Authors Benjamin Bayer, Department of Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Box 046, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150. (shrink)

The susceptible-transmissible-removed (STR) model is a deterministic compartment model, based on the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) prototype. The STR replaces 2 SIR assumptions. SIR assumes that the emigration rate (due to death or recovery) is directly proportional to the infected compartment’s size. The STR replaces this assumption with the biologically appropriate assumption that the emigration rate is the same as the immigration rate one infected period ago. This results in a unique delay differential equation epidemic model with the delay equal to the (...) infected period. Hamer’s mass action law for epidemiology is modified to resemble its chemistry precursor—the law of mass action. Constructing the model for an isolated population that exists on a surface bounded by the extent of the population’s movements permits compartment density to replace compartment size. The STR reduces to a SIR model in a timescale that negates the delay—the transmissible timescale. This establishes that the SIR model applies to an isolated population in the disease’s transmissible timescale. Cyclical social interactions will define a rhythmic timescale. It is demonstrated that the geometric mean maps transmissible timescale properties to their rhythmic timescale equivalents. This mapping defines the hybrid incidence (HI). The model validation demonstrates that the HI-STR can be constructed directly from the disease’s transmission dynamics. The basic reproduction number (R0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{R}}_0$$\end{document}) is an epidemic impact property. The HI-STR model predicts that R0∝ρnB\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{R}}_0 \propto \root \mathfrak{B} \of {\rho_n}$$\end{document} where ρn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\rho_n$$\end{document} is the population density, and B\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathfrak{B}}$$\end{document} is the ratio of time increments in the transmissible- and rhythmic timescales. The model is validated by experimentally verifying the relationship. R0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{R}}_0$$\end{document}’s dependence on ρn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\rho_n$$\end{document} is demonstrated for droplet-spread SARS in Asian cities, aerosol-spread measles in Europe and non-airborne Ebola in Africa. (shrink)