A collection of essays written by arts and humanities scholars across disciplines, this book argues that higher education has been compromised by its uncritical acceptance of our culture's standards of productivity, busyness, and speed. Inspired by the Slow Movement, contributors explain how and why university culture has come to value productivity over contemplation and rapidity over slowness. Chapter authors argue that the arts and humanities offer a cogent critique of fast culture in higher education, and reframe the discussion of the (...) value of their fields by emphasizing the dialectic between speed and slowness. (shrink)

Introduction The bioethics literature reflects significant interest in and concern with the use of genetic and genomic information in various settings. Because psychiatric treatment and research raises unique ethical, legal, and social issues, we conducted a scoping review of the biomedical, bioethics, and psychology literature regarding the application of genetic and genomic tools to psychiatric disorders (as listed in the DSM-5) and two associated behaviors or symptoms to provide a more detailed overview of the state of the field. Objectives The (...) primary objective was to examine the available bioethics, biomedical, and psychology literature on applying genetic and genomic tools to psychiatric disorders (other than neurodevelopmental disorders) and two behaviors or symptoms sometimes associated with them (aggression or violence and suicidality) to identify the disorders to which these tools have been applied, the contexts in or purposes for which they have been applied, the ethical, legal, or social concerns associated with those uses, and proposed recommendations for mitigating those concerns. Methods We used Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review framework: (1) identify the research question; (2) identify relevant studies; (3) select studies; (4) chart the data; and (5) collate, summarize, and report results (2005). We relied on Levac et al. to inform our application of the framework (2010). The PRISMA extension for scoping reviews checklist informed our reporting (2018). We searched three electronic databases MEDLINE (PubMed), Embase, and PsycInfo (EbscoHost) for peer-reviewed journal articles in English to identify relevant literature. One author screened the initial results and additional screening was done in consultation with other authors. A data extraction form using DSM-5 diagnostic categories (excluding neurodevelopmental disorders) was developed and two authors independently each reviewed approximately half of the articles. Inter-rater reliability was ensured by double-coding approximately 10% of the papers. An additional author independently coded 10% of the articles to audit the data. Results In 365 coded publications, we identified 15 DSM-5 diagnostic categories in addition to the two pre-selected behaviors or symptoms (aggression or violence and suicidality) to which genetic or genomic tools have been applied. We identified 11 settings in or purposes for which these tools were applied. Twenty-two types of ethical, legal, or social concerns associated with the application of genetic or genomic tools to these disorders or behaviors/symptoms were identified along with 13 practices or policies that could mitigate these concerns. Conclusion Genetic and genomic tools have been applied to a wide range of psychiatric disorders. These raise a range of ethical, legal, and social concerns. Additional research is warranted to better understand the concerns and effective ways to address them. Advancing the literature to identify relevant ethical, legal, or social concerns and solutions to those problems likely requires greater attention to specific applications of genetic or genomic tools to particular psychiatric disorders and associated behaviors/symptoms as well as broad stakeholder engagement. (shrink)

The specific heat of hydrogen gas at low temperatures was first measured in 1912 by Arnold Eucken in Walther Nernst’s laboratory in Berlin, and provided one of the earliest experimental supports for the new quantum theory. Even earlier, Nernst had developed a quantum theory of rotating diatomic gas molecules that figured in the discussions at the first Solvay conference in late 1911. Between 1913 and 1925, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Max Planck, Fritz Reiche, and Erwin Schrödinger, among many others, attempted (...) theoretical descriptions of the rotational specific heat of hydrogen, with only limited success. Quantum theory also was central to the study of molecular spectra, where initially it was more successful. Moreover, the two problems interacted in sometimes surprising ways. Not until 1927, following Werner Heisenberg’s discovery of the behavior of indistinguishable particles in modern quantum mechanics, did American theorist David Dennison find a successful theory of the specific heat of hydrogen. (shrink)

The prospect of using cell-based interventions to treat neurological conditions raises several important ethical and policy questions. In this target article, we focus on issues related to the unique constellation of traits that characterize CBIs targeted at the central nervous system. In particular, there is at least a theoretical prospect that these cells will alter the recipients' cognition, mood, and behavior—brain functions that are central to our concept of the self. The potential for such changes, although perhaps remote, is cause (...) for concern and careful ethical analysis. Both to enable better informed consent in the future and as an end in itself, we argue that early human trials of CBIs for neurological conditions must monitor subjects for changes in cognition, mood, and behavior; further, we recommend concrete steps for that monitoring. Such steps will help better characterize the potential risks and benefits of CBIs as they are tested and potentially used for treatment. (shrink)

Most computational theories of cognition lack a representation of physiology. Understanding the cognitive effects of compounds present in the environment is important for explaining and predicting changes in cognition and behavior given exposure to toxins, pharmaceuticals, or the deprivation of critical compounds like oxygen. This research integrates physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model predictions of caffeine concentrations in blood and tissues with ACT-R's fatigue module to predict the effects of caffeine on fatigue. Mapping between the PBPK model parameters and ACT-R model (...) parameters is informed by the neurophysiological literature and established associations between ACT-R modules and brain regions. The results from three such parameter mappings are explored to explain observed data from sleep-deprived participants performing the psychomotor vigilance test with and without caffeine. Predicted caffeine concentrations in the brain are used to modulate procedural parameters in the fatigue module to explain caffeine's effects on multiple performance metrics. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Three experiments explored how hypocrisy affects attributions of criminal guilt and the desire to punish hypocritical criminals. Study 1 established that via perceived hypocrisy, a hypocritical criminal was seen as more culpable and was punished more than a non-hypocritical criminal who committed an identical crime. Study 2 expanded on this, showing that negative moral emotions (anger and disgust) mediated the relationships between perceived hypocrisy, criminal guilt, and punishment. Study 3 replicated the emotion finding from Study 2 using new scenarios where (...) group agents were clearly aware of the hypocrisy of their actions, yet acted anyway. Again, perceived hypocrisy worked through moral emotions to affect criminal guilt and punishment. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating hypocrisy and moral transgressions to moral emotions, also informing the literature on the role of moral emotions in moral reasoning and legal decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.1 (2002) 95-102 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway Some Initial Reflections on NBAC Eric M. Meslin and Harold T. Shapiro On 3 October 2001, Executive Order 12975 expired, and with it so too did the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC). Established by President Bill Clinton in 1995, NBAC was the fifth national committee since 1974 created to advise the U.S. government (...) on bioethics policy. In the long political tradition in this country that national bioethics policy advice should use temporary rather than permanent bodies, NBAC followed in the footsteps of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1974-78); the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1980-83); the Ethics Advisory Board (1978-80); and the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee (1988-89). Arguably, other distinguished panels could lay claim to recognition as a "national bioethics committee" including the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) (1994-95); the Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel (1988); the Human Embryo Research Panel (1994); and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), which continues to function.These committees and commissions form a kind of a continuum, albeit occasionally interrupted by periods during which no such bodies existed. Each arose from a particular confluence of events and circumstances. NBAC was no different; its history can be traced both to a series of discussions within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy beginning in 1993 (NBAC 1998a, p. 3), and to a specific recommendation from ACHRE that called for a national committee to address ethical issues in human subjects research (ACHRE 1995, p. 817). Nbac's Impact In his useful comparison of the accomplishments of the National Commission and the President's Commission, Brad Gray concluded that seven lessons were learned, the sixth of which was that "nothing substitutes for having a perceptible impact on either policy or practice" (Gray 1995, p. 304). Assessing NBAC's [End Page 95] impact on "policy or practice" is difficult, particularly given the fact that it so recently completed its work. More time may be needed before a full assessment can be undertaken of the impact of its six reports (and their total of 120 recommendations). Instead, in this essay we offer some reflections on NBAC's initial impact, using some specific examples of how bioethics gets done Inside the Beltway. Eliciting Reaction If immediate reaction by the White House is any measure of impact, then Cloning Human Beings (NBAC 1997) had a significant one. The day after he received this report in a Rose Garden ceremony, President Clinton submitted a bill to Congress that would have extended the moratorium on federal funding to create a child using somatic cell nuclear transfer. This bill never passed, nor has any other bill emerged that has enjoyed the support of the House and the Senate. Five states have enacted legislation to date, but these vary in their permissibility from bans on all forms of cloning to bans similar to the one proposed by NBAC, which recommended a time-limited prohibition only on somatic cell transfer to create a child (reproductive cloning).If the Cloning report elicited speedy action from the White House, this paled in comparison to the reaction that led to and, in turn, was created by Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research (NBAC 1999a). Those who believe that government moves slowly need only be reminded of the events of 8-14 November 1998 (and, as we shall mention below, the further events of 14 July 1999). Some will recall that early in the second week of November 1998, James Thomson and his colleagues published in Nature and John Gearhart and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had isolated and cultured human primordial stem cells and germ cells respectively. Within days of these remarkable reports, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced via an article written by Nicholas Wade in the... (shrink)

The fifth volume of Richard Rorty's "Philosophical papers" published by Cambridge University Press, consists of the works which American philosopher wrote at the very dawn of his career in 1960s and early 1970s. In these essays Rorty addresses issues of transcendental argumentation, the internalism/externalism controversy, mind-body dualism and psychophysical monism, semantic truth, reference and justification. Supplemented by Daniel Dennett's Foreword, the book gives an excellent idea of Rorty's «analytical» writings and his evolution from eliminative materialism to pragmatism.

The study of Kant’s anthropology, proposed by Viktor Kozlovskyi in its original and thorough monograph, is an entirely new interpretation of Kant’s answer to the fundamental question “What is man?”. On the basis of the philosopher’s heritage and taking into account the large body of research lit-erature, Kozlovskyi reconstructs five conceptual “human models” in Kant’s anthropological discourse. However, this study contains a number of problematic statements and conclusions. I argue first, that there is some inconsistency between Kant’s understanding of the (...) concept of “anthropology” and Ko-zlovskyi’s explanation. Second, the model of man as intelligible being, made explicit through the con-cepts of “freedom” and “spontaneity”, is a justified construction within the limits of criticism, but not quite correct with regard to the place and function of “anthropology” in it. Third, we can see a disso-nance between Kozlovskyi’s explanation of the constellations as “chronotopes-events” and interpreta-tion of this concept by Dieter Henrich’s school, where the methodology of “research constellations” was used to elucidate the early phase of German idealism. However, this leads to the cardinal question of how far this methodology is applicable for the analysis of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper describes an agent that shows advices for supporting mediator on our online mediation support system. The purpose of the advice is an education of mediator, and the agent presents it instead of the teacher. In this research, at first, we defined a mediation model that is an argumentation model between 3 people. Then, we defined some advice models based on the mediation model. The advice models create advice elements. The adviser agent monitors the mediation, gathers advice elements referring (...) to advice models, and creates advice from elements according to the mediation scene. As a result, it becomes possible that is advising instead of the teacher according to the situation, education purpose and learner's level. We inspected the effectiveness of the advice by the experiment of moot mediation. (shrink)

The article continues the series of works devoted to the problem of methodological substantiation of the subject of philosophical anthropology, and thereby its substantiation as a strict science. The conversation is based on search materials carried out in the German classics of the ХХ century. The first article was devoted to the experience of E. Husserl. This article is devoted to the M. Scheler’s search. The author thus relies not so much on the published and very fragmentary works of M. (...) Scheler as on the drafts of the philosopher, his diaries, lying without the application for a long time. It turns out that M. Scheler did not so much build philosophical anthropology as a positive science, but rather understood it more as a methodological science, that is, as reflexive, in which a certain search method is built, precisely because a person acts not so much as an object or subject but as constantly open problem, the one that overcomes itself, its own measure. (shrink)

In this essay, we draw on John Haugeland’s work in order to argue that Burge is wrong to think that exercises of perceptual constancy mechanisms suffice for perceptual representation. Although Haugeland did not live to read or respond to Burge’s Origins of Objectivity, we think that his work contains resources that can be developed into a critique of the very foundation of Burge’s approach. Specifically, we identify two related problems for Burge. First, if (what Burge calls) mere sensory responses are (...) not representational, then neither are exercises of constancy mechanisms, since the differences between them do not suffice to imply that one is representational and the other is not. Second, taken by themselves, exercises of constancy mechanisms are only derivatively representational, so merely understanding how they work is not sufficient for understanding what is required for something, in itself, to be representational (and thereby provide a full solution to the problem of perceptual representation). (shrink)

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy's conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind—suggesting that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland's determination to expand philosophy's array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that (...) may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Martin Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland's two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. -/- This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland's work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland's work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland's outline of Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” -/- Contributors Zed Adams, William Blattner, Jacob Browning, Steven Crowell, John Haugeland, Bennett W. Helm, Rebecca Kukla, John Kulvicki, Mark Lance, Danielle Macbeth, Chauncey Maher, John McDowell, Joseph Rouse. (shrink)

This paper argues that many of our most important theories of retributivism are unwittingly committed to the radical thesis that prepunishment—punishment before an offense—is morally permissible. From the perspective of diachronic justice on which these theories crucially depend, the timing of retribution is, ceteris paribus, irrelevant. But retributivism’s counterintuitive support does not stop there: there are conditions under which pre-offense apprehension and punishment guarantees a higher probability of justice being done. Under these conditions, the popular retributive theories I have in (...) mind do not just permit, but require, prepunishment. (shrink)

Limited communitarianism is presented as an alternative to classical communitarianism in African philosophy. Bernard Matolino, the proponent of this view, argues that personhood can be attained with the constitutive features of the self leading the process, as against the historical, classical communitarian view that prioritises the sociality of the self. He posits that it is a personhood conceived through such view as limited communitarianism that can guarantee individual rights and prioritises the claims of the individual in African philosophy. Matolino’s claim (...) is grounded on the view that Afro-communitarianism, as presented in the classical account such as the radical and moderate communitarianism of Menkiti and Gyekye, respectively, emphasises community essence in African philosophy and hinders the expression of rights. The claim of the classical view informs the nudge to question the relevance and compatibility of Afro- communitarianism with the complex, multicultural modern African societies. As a result, limited communitarianism rejects the mechanism of Afrocommunitarianism – essentialism. While limited communitarianism appears a rejection of what is known as Afro- communitarianism, which has earned it noncommunitarian labels such as being liberal and individualist, I argue that it is simply a well- argued form of moderate communitarianism that avoids the conundrum of community. (shrink)

n 1902, 70 million years after it tripped lightly through the Mesozoic forests in search of meat, the skeleton of a 20-foothightyrannosaurus was dynamited out of a sandstone bluff near Hell Creek, Mont. Wrapped in burlap and plaster and shipped back to New York, the bones were painstakingly reassembled by fossil curator Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History. It was there, one day in 1947, that they happened to scare the bejesus out of 5-year-old Stephen Jay Gould. (...) With a mouthful of teeth as big as bananas, the great reptile gaped down at the little mammal who had usurped its place at the head of the food chain and set him scurrying for the safety of his daddy's pant leg. It was a sublime epiphany. Long after Gould could stare with equanimity at the skull of tyrannosaurus, he was left with the essential mystery that still motivates him as perhaps America's foremost writer and thinker on evolution: why should dinosaurs have ended up in human museums instead of—as one among an infinite number of evolutionary possibilities—the other way around? (shrink)

Though much is written about animal suffering, little is said about the nature of suffering itself. Without any clarity about its conceptual nature, discussions concerning detection, prevention and reduction of suffering are seriously hampered. This paper considers – and rejects – some of the more usual understandings of suffering. Instead, an alternative understanding of suffering is proposed, namely that suffering is the experiencing of one's life as going badly. This notion is tied to the loss of individuals' central life projects. (...) It is suggested that non-human animals' central projects are their evolved survival skills. This alternative view of suffering has major implications for animal welfare. (shrink)

Tevhid İslam inancının özünü oluşturan temel ilkedir. Yaratılışla beraber bütün peygamberlerin Allah adına ortaya koydukları akidedir. Bu inanç tek ilah çevresinde oluşan düşünme biçimini, hayat tarzını ifade eder. Bu bağlamda inanç, ibadet ve muamelat unsurlarının birbirleriyle anlamlı birlikteliğinin sonucudur. Tevhid sadece Allah’ın zatına yönelik söylemler olmayıp Allah-kâinat kilişkisinin nasıl işlediğini belirleyen sistemdir. Bu ilişkide Allah ile kâinat arasına etkin kuvvetler sokuşturmak mümkün değildir. Allah’ın, yaratıklarıyla özelde ise insanla olan ilişkisi esnasında O’nu pasif konumda bırakacak her türlü inanç ve düşünce tevhidin (...) karşısında yer almaktadır. Bu çalışmada İslam inancının temel doktrini olan tevhid inancının inşa süreci, bu bağlamda şirke yöneltilen eleştiriler Kur’ani perspektiften incelenecektir. Özellikle tevhidi anlatımların yoğunlaştığı alanlar belirlenecektir. Söz konusu anlatımların vahiy sürecindeki anlaşılma şekli ön plana çıkarılmaya çalışılacaktır. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to critically assess the ‘three-world theory’ as it is presented—with some slight but decisive differences—by Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper. This theory presents the philosophy of science with a conceptual and material problem, insofar as it claims that science has no single access to all aspects of the world. Although I will try to demonstrate advantages of Popper’s idea of ‘the third world’ of ideas, the shortcomings of his ontological stance become visible from the (...) pragmatic point of view in Habermas’s theory of communicative acts. With regard to the critique that the three-world theory has met in both its pragmatic and ontological versions, I will take a closer look at John Searle’s naturalistic counter-position. By teasing out some problematic implications in his theory of causation, I aim to show that Searle’s approach is, in fact, much closer to Popper’s than he might think. Finally, while condoning Habermas’s distinction between the natural world and the lifeworld, I will opt for a pragmatically differentiated view of ‘the real’, rather than speaking of different worlds. (shrink)

“Even in its accepted modern meaning, which converts scandal into a mere matter of representation, the notion of the scandalous cannot be defined univocally.” “I recognize in scandal a rigorous definition of the mimetic process.” Not all rigorous definitions are univocal. But a reader of Girard’s works may be forgiven for thinking that the New Testament, or at least the Gospels, contain a uniform teaching on scandal. As Girard writes in Things Hidden: “A whole group of texts in the Gospels (...) centers on the notion of scandal, and in others it makes a significant appearance. Bring all these together, and you will reach a definite conclusion, even though the texts are quite heterogeneous” (416). .. (shrink)

We construct a machine that knows its own code, at the price of not knowing its own factivity.

History and Decision in Heidegger’s Private Writings: The animal historicum and the Da-sein In this paper, we aim to reconstruct Heidegger’s critique of the modern conception of subjectivity, history and freedom, as it appears in his posthumous writings and in the Black Notebooks of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In order to do so, we will examine the meaning of decision ( Entscheidung ) and its links with the history of Be-ing ( Geschichte des Seyns ). Our first section will be (...) devoted to a critical reconstruction of Machenschaft as a symbol of our modern times. According to Heidegger, the Machenschaft represents a place in history where no new historical decisions can be made in any conceivable way, and humanity becomes an animal historicum. In spite of that, the way of a new beginning and a new decision concerning ourselves remains difficult but possible, a phenomenon that we analyze in our second section: how the essence of humanity can be transformed in Da-sein, but only if we think anew our relationship with being. (shrink)

A central question of environmental ethics remains one of how best to account for the intuitions generated by the Last Man scenarios; that is, it is a question of how to explain our experience of value in nature and, more importantly, whether that experience is justified. Seeking an alternative to extrinsic views, according to which nonhuman entities possess normative features that obligate us, I turn to constitutive views, which make value or whatever other limits nonhuman nature places on action dependent (...) on features intrinsic to human beings and constitutive of them or their obligations. After examining two kinds of constitutive views—environmental virtue ethics and Korsgaard’s Kantianism—I suggest an alternative that takes up the strengths of both while avoiding their shortcomings. On this view, we have an indirect obligation to experience nature as obligating us, although we have direct obligations only to human beings. (shrink)

Legal translation is viewed as “a category in its own right” (Weston in An English reader’s guide to the French legal system. Berg, Oxford, (1991, p. 2). It is a kind of translation of the language used for specific purposes (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:28, 2000). Legal translation requires accuracy in relaying the substance of the message, while respecting the form thereof as well as the genius of the target language (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:19, 2000; Sarcevic in (...) New approach to legal translation. Kluwer Law International, Hague, 1997, p. 52). As generally accepted worldwide, precision is deemed of paramount importance in legal translation. With this in mind, the present paper deals chiefly with the concept of how legal translation can correctly be tested in order to ensure precision and validity for application and implementation. The paper will argue that the main goal of legal translation and the major criterion against which the precision of legal translation should be tested is to reproduce the same legal effect in the target text as that conveyed in the source text regardless of the method(s) used in the translation process. (shrink)

It is argued that the analysis by which the gene are differentiated in the dialogue is an exercise in studied ambiguities informed by an Eleatic logic of strict dichotomy that was the underpinning of the Sophist's method of division. By this dialectical drill, Plato shows that the metaphysics underlying the Visitor's method fails to adequately distinguish what it means to have a character from what it means to be a character, and therefore remains inadequate to track down the sophist or (...) to distinguish him from the philosopher: Eleaticism, as critically examined by Plato, proves to be means to disguise, not to discover the sophist. (shrink)

This essay discusses Peirce’s appeal to logical machines as an argument against psychologism. It also contends that some of Peirce’s anti-psychologistic remarks on logic contain interesting premonitions arising from his perception of the asymmetry of proof complexity in monadic and relational logical calculi that were only given full formulation and explication in the early twentieth century through Church’s Theorem and Hilbert’s broad-ranging Entscheidungsproblem.

L’accueil dans les services de soin de personnes issues de la migration est un enjeu de santé mentale et éthique et relève d’une réflexion sur la prise en compte de leur vulnérabilité, a fortiori quand des enjeux de parentalité s’en mêlent. Cet article est un témoignage de l’équipe de pédopsychiatrie de Caen qui a adapté ses dispositifs de soins pour mieux accueillir ces publics spécifiques que sont les familles migrantes. Après un rappel sur les notions de migration, de culture et (...) de périnatalité en contexte migratoire, les deux dispositifs seront présentés et explicités au regard de leur fondation théorique qu’est la clinique transculturelle. (shrink)

From Oedipus to Moses and beyond, Freud's last book has been read with singular obstinacy as addressing a Jewish (or anti-Semitic) question, or as renewing a religious (or antireligious) agenda. Between Athens and Jerusalem, from Judaism to a more general “monotheistic religion,” and from Oedipus (the son) to Moses (the father), scholars have explored or refuted numerous traces the primal murder left and many among the founding fathers, the substitutes to which it gave rise. Yet it is easy to see (...) that the reception of Freud has been fairly consistent in skipping over not so much the general religious (monotheistic, or even civilizational and universal) import of Freud's work, but rather the exorbitant centrality in it of Jesus Christ, the acutely singular question of Christianity and its founder. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, primary matter is not a positive constituent which must be added to the form in order to have a substance. Primary matter is merely a way to express the negation of some further perfection. It does not have a positive ontological status and merely indicates the limitation or imperfection of a substance. To be sure, Leibniz is less than explicit on this point, and in many texts he writes as if (...) primary matter were a positive constituent of a substance. It seems to me, however, that the view most in keeping with the thrust of his mature philosophical system is that captured by a striking remark of 1695: “Materia rerum est nihilum: id est limitatio [The matter of things is nothing: that is, limitation].” This becomes especially apparent in texts showing that Leibniz’s conception of primary matter corresponds to his conception of creaturely limitation. I start by discussing the notion of primary matter in the scholastic tradition. I then show that although Leibniz places the scholastic terminology of primary matter at a crucial juncture of his metaphysics, he thinks of primary matter in a way which significantly deviates from earlier scholastic views. I conclude that despite his adoption of distinctive terminology of Aristotelian scholasticism, instead of holding a broadly Aristotelian concept of primary matter as the ultimate subject of inherence, Leibniz thinks of primary matter according to a Neoplatonic blue-print in which matter is non-being, privation, mere absence of perfection. (shrink)

Les auteurs présentent les pratiques des collectifs d’architectes, designers, artistes et citoyens qui occupent le devant de la scène depuis la fin des années 1990 dans les espaces urbains, en formulant l’hypothèse qu’ils s’inspirent (de façon plus ou moins consciente et explicite) des écrits et des expérimentations menées par les représentants de la mouvance architecturale dite « radicale » qui les a précédés dans les années 1970. Dans cette perspective, ils analysent en particulier l’héritage de la notion d’« utopie réalisable (...) » développée par l’architecte Yona Friedman. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology, as Helmuth Plessner has explored it, vindicates its relative priority towards ethics, because it can set out the anthropological prerequisites for considering the moral subject as the embodied person. This claim, however, is still an open question. Walter Schulz has argued that the prevalence of science in contemporary life brings ethics to the fore and forces philosophical anthropology to an auxiliary exploration of ‘leading figures of thehuman’. Jürgen Habermas endorses Plessner’s exploration of the issue of the body, in (...) order to oppose biotechnological naturalism. Thus, he enlarges his discourse on ethics through the ethics of the human species by defining the moral agent as the embodied person. Nevertheless, philosophical anthropology is a broader theoretical endeavour that cannot be reduced to ethics. (shrink)

A Philosophy of Mitzvot by Rabbi Dr. Gersion Appel sets forth the Hinnukh's objectives and his approach to revealing the religious and ethical meaning of the mitzvot. In his wide-ranging study, the author presents a comprehensive view of Jewish philosophy as developed by the Hinnukh and the classical Jewish philosophers. The Hinnukh emerges in this study as a great educator and moral and religious guide, and his classic work as a treasure-trove of Jewish knowledge, religious inspiration, and brilliant insight in (...) the molding of human character. (shrink)

This paper offers a Kantian reading of Wittgenstein’s later conception of rules. Building on the continuity of Wittgenstein’s comparison between a sentence and a musical theme, the paper argues that central elements of the Kantianism one may find in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy carry over to his mature conception of grammar. Moreover, this Kantian reading offers a novel perspective on the puzzle about the normativity of Wittgenstein’s later notion of rules. It is argued that the normativity of an aesthetic judgement, understood (...) in a specifically Kantian sense, offers a good model for construing the necessity of rule-following in his later philosophy. In analogy with the necessity of Kantian aesthetic judgements, the necessity of rule-following, while less than objective from a transcendental point of view, may be treated as objective for the members of the linguistic community under the assumption of a shared form of life. (shrink)

Using Steel's recent result that assuming AD, in L[R] below Θ, κ is regular $\operatorname{iff} \kappa$ is measurable, we mimic below Θ certain earlier results of Gitik. In particular, we construct via forcing a model in which all uncountable cardinals below Θ are singular and a model in which the only regular uncountable cardinal below Θ is ℵ 1.