Paradoxically, loss is the only unconditional possession possible in elegy. A deep understanding of this phenomenon is to be found in long prose forms and lyricism of contemporary Australian writers. Turning the history of literature – from the Medieval to the contemporary – into a body of work more relevant to our ecological plight, in Kinsella’s corpus genres are consequences of textual events operating within an organic totality. This totality deconstructs the reference point for elegy: loss as the condition of (...) thought and experience. Sidestepping while matrixially reconfiguring traditional and experimental forms of writing, Kinsella’s engagement with genre exemplifies not only the undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a text; it is an implicit critique of speech acts that tend to “fix” life into static nouns, reflecting our culture’s ideology of appropriation of nature. Within a critical counterpoint to appropriation, Australian writing can be read as both urging readers to remain alert to pastoral precedents yet avoid projecting genre onto texts. To some extent, elegy has been decolonised in Australian pastoral. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work considers one of the central themes of archaeology, time, which until recently has been taken for granted. It considers how time is used and perceived by archaeology and also how time influences the construction of identities. The book presents case studies, eg, transition from hunter gather to farming in early Neolithic, to examine temporality and identity. Drawing upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Thomas develops a way of writing about the past in which time is seenm (...) as central to the emergence of the identities of peoples and things. He questions the modern western distinction between nature and culture, mind and body, object and subject, and argues that in some senses the temporal structure of human beings, artefacts and places are similar. (shrink)

Each volume in this series of companions to major philosophers contains specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimidation such readers often feel when faced with the work of a difficult and challenging thinker. John Duns Scotus was one of the three principal figures in medieval philosophy and theology, with an influence on modern (...) thought arguably even greater than that of Aquinas. The essays in this volume systematically survey the full range of Scotus' thought. They take care to explain the technical details of his writing in lucid terms and demonstrate the relevance of his work to contemporary philosophical debate. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Scotus currently available. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the history of European thought. Although interest in his life and work has grown enomrously in recent years, this is the first complete edition of his correspondence. The texts of the letters are richly supplemented with explanatory notes and full biographical and bibliographical information. This landmark publication sheds new light in abundance on the intellectual life of a major thinker.

In _Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – A Propaedeutic_, Thomas Sören Hoffmann invites the philosophically interested reader to converse with, to work with, and to think with the “master philosopher of German Idealism,” the last great system builder of European philosophy.

Thomas C. Vinci argues that Kant's Deductions demonstrate Kant's idealist doctrines and have the structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains. With the Deduction of the Categories the correlated domains are intellectual conditions and non-geometrical laws of the empirical world. With the Deduction of the Concepts of Space, the correlated domains are the geometry of pure objects of intuition and the geometry of empirical objects.

In this paper, I will to lay down what I call an expressivist account of the pragmatics of jokes, through which I wish to shed light on the function of offensive jokes in particular. I will focus specifically on jokes, not humor more generally. Jokes are particular sorts of speech-acts; and although many may be issued in the form of declarative or interrogative sentences, they are not reducible to them. I suggest here that their analysis must be understood in terms (...) of the unique pragmatic roles that they play. Following this I turn to offensive jokes in particular, describing some of the conditions relevant to their uptake. I will argue that there is a degree of entitlement to certain jokes, and set of commitments that follow from a given joke—both of which are necessary to understand the difference between a context in which a joke is offensive and one in which a similar joke may be merely not funny. I conclude by outlining how on my account we can understand the role of offensive humor as a mode of social criticism. (shrink)

Thomas Richardson and Peter Spirtes. Parameterizing and Scoring Mixed Ancestral Graphs.

This book analyzes iconic British children's literature through the lens of formal educational theory, policy, and practice. Examining themes like growth mindset and project-based learning alongside educational philosophers like Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, the author sheds new light on children’s classics from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter.

In this paper, we try to confront Robert Audis moral epistemology, namely his intuitionism, based on the concept of a self-evident moral proposition, with two main problems: disagreement and dogmatism within moral discourse. Although Audi can meet those classical objections in his theory, we think that some problems remain. We proceed – after an introduction – in five sections in order to pursue this end. After a short introductory section, we first reconstruct the classical intuitionist moral epistemology. We then discuss (...) the dogmatism and the disagreement objection and, in doing so, introduce Audi’s own version of a moral epistemology. After having proposed that the disagreement objection concerns an explanatory problem, we discuss a second version, namely disagreement as a problem of rationality. In the fourth section we present a third version, disagreement as a problem of moral discourse, understood as an intersubjective enterprise. In the fifth section we propose a solution to disagreement situations of this kind. (shrink)

Definition of the problem: Recent progress in the pharmacological sciences provides a first glimpse of the development of an individual, genotype-based drug therapy in order to improve the efficiency of drug utilization. Genotyping of genetic polymorphisms in genes involved in drug response promises to optimize drug therapy fundamentally by identifying patients for whom a pharmaceutical agent may be effective and safe or contraindicated because of expected adverse drug reactions. Arguments: The new pharmacogenomic treatment strategies raise complex bioethical issues, because genetic (...) screening for drug therapy may identify asymptomatic patients who are at risk for a particular adverse outcome. Thus, pharmacogenomics will affect the relationship between the treating physician and the patient which is traditionally based on privacy, confidentiality, beneficience and non-maleficience. Conclusion: In the article presented some ethical aspects of these new pharmacogenomic approaches concerning the physician-patient relationship are discussed. (shrink)

Both Socrates and the pseudonymous author of Either/Or II hold that we should never allow ourselves to be motivated by anything other than doing what is ethical. For both of them the reason why we must be radically committed to ethics is that we need to keep our souls under control. They think that our passion for an object of desire creates a predisposition to desire the same sort object in the future — the greater the passion, the stronger the (...) predisposition. Thus if we are not careful about what we allow ourselves to feel passion, we risk living our lives for the sake of meaningless things. (shrink)

translation of Aquinas's various sets of disputed questions on virtue, with introduction.

Anglo-American theories of criminal responsibility require scholars to grapple with, inter alia, the relationship between the formal rule of law and the powers of the lay jury as well as two inherent ideas of freedom: freedom of the will and political liberty. Here, by way of canvassing my past work and prefiguring future work, I sketch some elements of the history of the Anglo-American jury and offer some glimpses of commentary on the interplay between the jury—particularly its application of conventional (...) morality to criminal judgments—and the formal rule of law of the state. My central intent is to pose questions for further study regarding the historical behavior of the jury, the jury’s role in reinforcing notions of political liberty and free will, and, primarily, how scholarly conceptions of the jury’s role and behavior have informed elite theory regarding the justifications for imposing criminal responsibility. (shrink)

L’article part du constat paradoxal que Spinoza est présenté parfois comme le philosophe anhistorique par excellence, alors que son Traité théologico-politique est un authentique travail d’historien. Est alors développée l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’historiographie, telle que Spinoza la pratique, est une tâche d’éthique politique, analogue à celle que l’on trouve dans la première section de la cinquième partie de l’Éthique. Contrairement à ce que des commentateurs comme Vittorio Morfino ont soutenu à la suite d’Althusser, la connaissance historique ne relève pas du (...) troisième genre de connaissance, mais du deuxième. (shrink)

" En écrivant son Traité de l'Interprétation, Aristote a trempé sa plume à l'encre de son esprit! " L'antique remarque de Cassiodore vaut encore aujourd'hui tant la matière étudiée est complexe et le style ramassé. Aristote démonte les mécanismes du langage philosophique, aux confins de la linguistique et de la métaphysique. Il offre à cette occasion des développements fondateurs sur la formulation de la vérité, les règles de mise en contradiction, les propositions universelles, la contingence des jugements sur le futur, (...) ou encore les redoutables énonciations modales. S'appuyant sur ses prédécesseurs, Thomas d'Aquin en rédige un commentaire hautement structuré, reconnu comme l'un des plus explicites. Demeuré cependant inachevé, il est complété par Thomas de Vio, dit Cajetan, un des premiers grands thomistes et maître logicien. C'est de l'ensemble de ces deux parties de commentaires que nous proposons la traduction ; la seconde pour la première fois en langue française. (shrink)

Let Λ denote the semiring of isols. We characterize existential completeness for Nerode subsemirings of Λ, by means of a purely isol-theoretic “Σ1 separation property”. Our characterization is purely isol-theoretic in that it is formulated entirely in terms of the extensions to Λ of the Σ1 subsets of the natural numbers. Advantage is taken of a special kind of isol first conjectured to exist by Ellentuck and first proven to exist by Barback . In addition, we strengthen the negative part (...) of [13] by showing that existential completeness is not secured, for a given Nerode semiring, by either a certain “functional closure” property for the extensions of partial recursive functions or the property of “pulling in” some portion of each partial recursive fiber; these latter results are perhaps a little surprising. (shrink)