This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the first edition of the Arabic version of Dimitrie Cantemir s "The Divan or the Sage s Dispute with the World," achieved in 1705 by Athanasios Dabb s, Patriarch of the Antiochian Church.".

The interreligious dialogue is not a new theme in the history of Christianity, the possibility of its realization being analyzed from the early centuries. Nowadays, the way that other religions are viewed has changed essentially, the religious, political, economic and social realities, being completely different than in the beginning. However, a correct handling of interreligious dialogue cannot disregard the past, more than that, the ideas from the works of the Holy Fathers, church writers, theologians and old thinkers remain valid and (...) are used as themes in the current discussions of the interreligious dialog. Among them, an important place takes Cantemir, the Prince of Moldavia, who lived for a long time in Constantinople. His works, which deals with the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic doctrine, have their basis in the personal experience and in the depth knowledge of the main Islamic sources that helped him to give to posterity the representative works for the knowledge of the Muslim religion and relations between Christianity and Islam during the development and decay of the Ottoman Empire. The way he presents the relation between Christianity and Islam, approaches him to the other Christian writers of his time which are addressing the same topic, highlighting the sadness of an era in which the great Christian empire fell under Ottoman rule and also the hopes of the Orthodox worldwide Christians to release the Christianity, having central the idea of approaching the apocalyptic time when Christianity will triumph. (shrink)

At the turn of the 17th century, in Romanian philosophy the nobility of spirit is seen as a certain but intermediate value, to be cherished while man waits for his divine reward, which is everlasting life, as presented in Divanul [The Divan] by Dimitrie Cantemir. Two hundred and fifty years later, man is regarded as having evolved from the animal forms of life in Mihai Ralea’s systematic presentation Explicarea omului [An Explanation of Man], and the sole meaning of (...) nobility is the revolutionary one, the heroic one, that is the ethical one. From a totally different point of view, during the interwar period, Constantin Micu Stavilă developed a general theory of man and society thus compellingly arguing against the claims of all ideologists of the natural genesis of human spirituality. In this theory the nobility of spirit was said to come from work and creation. By presenting these examples, my intention is to rediscover this spiritual, moral and socio-cultural ideal in order to find its place, role and profile in designing a new view of human nature, for a more decent human world. (shrink)

In his 1995 book Colour vision (New York: Routledge), Evan Thompson proposes a new approach to the ontology of color according to which it is tied to the ecological dispositions-affordances described by J.J. Gibson and his followers. Thompson claims that a relational account of color is necessary in order to avoid the problems that go along with the dispute between subjectivists and objectivists about color, but he claims that the received view of perception does not allow a satisfactory relational account (...) of color. Hence to avoid the problems of the subjectivist/objectivist dispute one must abandon the received view of perception. I describe an account which is similar to Thompson's, but which invokes instead the physical dispositional properties described by the received view. All of the distinguishing characteristics that Thompson claims separate his ecological dispositions from physical dispositions are in fact found in the physical dispositions appealed to by my proposed theory. Because my proposed theory is similar to subjectivism, Thompson's departure from the received view is not as radical as he claims. In a final section I describe the a posteriori manner in which a substantive departure from the received view must be carried out by describing an example of ecological experimentation. (shrink)

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the other (...) social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

While Orthodox Christianity does not find explicit statements about the morality of prolonging life in the usual doctrinal sources, the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church, there are elements in Tradition which bear upon the issue. These include Orthodox spirituality's emphasis on the “wholeness” of the human person, its liturgical and synergistic view of human life, and its understanding of our moral ambiguity as fallen human beings in a fallen world. This last point, in particular, means that we do (...) not usually have a clear choice between right and wrong, and that we cannot always trust ourselves to know which choice is the right, or even the better one. Therefore, we must always approach decisions about death and dying with humility and in a spirit of repentance, aware of the imperfection of all we do and trusting in the mercy of God. (shrink)

Based on an analysis of double hermeneutics in the human sciences, a distinction between a weak and a strong rhetorical analysis of human-scientific research is introduced, taking account of the self-reflective character of hermeneutic interpretation. The paper argues that there are three hermeneutic topics in the research process for human-scientific experience, which are associated with applying specific rhetorical tools. The three topics are described under the following rubrics: (a) bridging the gap between experience-near and experience-distant concepts; (b) achieving integrity of (...) the cultural objects dispersed in different interpretive strategies; and (c) taking into consideration that an important task of hermeneutic interpretation in human-scientific research is to give an account of the object's immanent narrative coherence. The paper is written in the conviction that a kind of re-methodologization of philosophical hermeneutics which does not rehabilitate epistemological foundationalism can provide a new philosophical identity to the human sciences. (shrink)

_ _In __The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism__, Dimitri Ginev draws on devel-opments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those (...) who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature. Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research. (shrink)

The paper presents a variation of the EMAIL Game, originally proposed byRubinstein (American Economic Review, 1989), in which coordination ofthe more rewarding-risky joint course of actions is shown to obtain, evenwhen the relevant game is, at most, ``mutual knowledge.'' In the exampleproposed, a mediator is introduced in such a way that two individualsare symmetrically informed, rather than asymmetrically as in Rubinstein,about the game chosen by nature. As long as the message failure probabilityis sufficiently low, with the upper bound being a (...) function of the gamepayoffs, conditional beliefs in the opponent's actions can allow playersto choose a more rewarding-risky action. The result suggests that, forefficient coordination to obtain, the length of interactive knowledge onthe game, possibly up to ``almost common knowledge,'' does not seem to bea major conceptual issue and that emphasis should be focused instead onthe communication protocol and an appropriate relationship between thereliability of communication channels and the payoffs at stake. (shrink)

The paper does not suggest an outline of a comprehensive theory of existential spatiality. Its aim is much moderate – to reveal those aspects of the constitution of meaning within the totality of being in the world which delineate the scope of the problematic under investigation. Since these aspects are addressed by various kinds of constitutional analysis of meaning, a special effort is devoted to overcoming discrepancies among three basic phenomenological discourses – hermeneutic phenomenology, existential psychiatry, and phenomenology of corporeity.

This paper explores the way that Elizabeth Presa's artworks respond to Jacques Derrida's thought. By examining how the particularity (the beside) and its supplements (the besides) operate in Presa's works, it is shown how this movement between beside and besides is also central to Derrida's thought.

In the literature on the nature and role of cognitive representation, three positions are taken across the conceptual landscape: robust realism, primitivism, and eliminativism. Recently, a fourth alternative that tries to avoid the shortcomings of traditional views has been proposed: content pragmatism. My aim is to defend pragmatism about content against some recent objections moved against the view. According to these objections, content pragmatism fails to capture the role played by representation in the cognitive sciences; and/or is an unstable view (...) that ends up collapsing into one of the traditional alternatives. I argue that those arguments fail. I show that content pragmatism has as much claim to descriptive adequacy as the traditional theories. Moreover, I defend the robustness of the view by arguing that it does not collapse into any of the traditional positions. Content pragmatism therefore offers a valid and coherent account of the nature of representational content. (shrink)

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final (...) chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. (shrink)

In a stimulating paper, Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) argued how a decision maker could undertake dynamically inconsistent choices when, in an extensive form decision problem, she has a particular type of imperfect recall named absentmindedness. Such memory limitation obtains whenever information sets include decision histories along the same decision path. Starting from work focusing on the absentminded driver example, and independently developed by Segal (2000) and Dimitri (1999), the main theorem of this article provides a general result of dynamically consistent (...) choices, valid for a large class of finite extensive form decision problems without nature. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

The author reflects on the future of Catholic health care by looking at the essays in this volume by Dennis Brodeur, Clarke E. Cochran, and Christopher J. Kauffman. The author argues that (1) Roman Catholic teaching on the Trinity is defective, yielding an inadequate model of society, (2) Roman Catholic teaching on the Incarnation is defective, yielding an impoverished understanding of the “sacramental,” and (3) the institutional orientation of Roman Catholicism combined with the lack of true sacramental vision makes it (...) nearly impossible for Roman Catholic theory to criticize the current structure of health care financing. (shrink)

Computational perspectivalism has been recently proposed as an alternative to mainstream accounts of physical computation, and especially to the teleologically-based mechanistic view. It takes physical computation to be partly dependent on explanatory perspectives and eschews appeal to teleology in helping individuate computational systems. I assess several varieties of computational perspectivalism, showing that they either collapse into existing non-perspectival views or end up with unsatisfactory or implausible accounts of physical computation. Computational perspectivalism fails, therefore, to be a compelling alternative to perspective-independent (...) theories of computation in physical systems. I conclude that a teleologically-based, non-perspectival mechanistic account of physical computation is to be preferred. 1Introduction 2The Mechanistic View of Computation 2.1Teleological functions and meeting the desiderata 3Varieties of Perspectivalism 4Computational Perspectivalism 4.1Computational perspectivalism and pancomputationalism 4.2Computational perspectivalism and miscomputation 5The Varieties of Computational Perspectivalism Assessed 5.1Innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2Non-innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2.1Computational instrumentalism 5.2.2Ontic perspectivalism 6Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the argumentative basis on which the prevention of migration is justified and hatred politics is institutionalised in three Mediterranean settings, namely Greece, Malta, and Italy, that were at the centre of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015–2017. Following the rubric of corpus-assisted Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), we trace (a) the main meaningful patterns, and (b) discursive and argumentation strategies (topoi) in three balanced corpora of mainstream news portals aligned with centre-right and (...) centre-left political views. Among our main findings, the mobilisation of migrant populations is construed as an extremely polarised issue both in national and EU contexts and claims in favour of its prevention are justified on topoi of danger/threat, numbers and burdening/weighing down. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to present further information about Avicenna's work on Eastern philosophy, supplementing what was written in the author's Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, pp. 115-30. In view of the prevalent but unfounded notions among some students of Avicenna that the Eastern philosophy is mystical or illuminationist, an initial section traces the history of the development of these tendentious ideas first to Ibn T[dotu]ufayl and then to the followers of his interpretation in the West in the (...) nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further sections discuss the title of the book, list its contents insofar as they can be reconstructed from Avicenna's statements and the extant portions, and provide additional information about its manuscripts and transmission. The style of the work is then analyzed and compared with that of the šifā' in order to verify Avicenna's claim in the Preface to the latter work that the difference between the two was merely stylistic. A final section gives a table of concordance between the contents of the extant part on physics and the corresponding sections in the šifā', establishing the direct relationship and verbal congruity between the two works. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s view of philosophical explanation. Some commentators stress his indebtedness to the transcendental tradition, but this influence does not extend to his view of explanation. I argue that Merleau-Ponty gives up on the transcendental ideal of explanatory completeness, shared by Husserl and Kant. Motivated by a distinctive understanding of transcendental expression, he argues that phenomenological reflection, and the explanations that issue from it, must both have a circular structure if they are to provide a (...) persuasive account of experience. This circular view of phenomenological methodology is further developed in later texts, which stress the openness and incompleteness of both reflection and explanation. Merleau-Ponty’s reliance on the concept of circularity testifies to the increasing importance of Hegel for his view of phenomenological explanation and philosophical methodology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

O século XX trouxe uma ciência impossível: a ciência da mente. Esta ciência ignora os problemas semiológico, nosológico e sociocultural a ela inerentes e que a inviabilizam. Como resultado, observamos a criação de uma pandemia global de transtornos mentais, majoritariamente administrados através de psicofármacos. Em contraponto, o pensamento filosófico desafia esta logica desde Canguilhem, passando por Michel Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, dentre tantos outros. E da Éticaespinosana dos afetos e afecções, nasceu a Heterogênese Urbana (HU), que tem como objeto original (...) a revitalização criativa das potências humanas através do contato entre subjetividades diversas. Etimologicamente, “criação a partir e com a diversidade”. Com a circulação dos afetos, dos desejos, das ideias nos espaços públicos, a HU promove, fenomenologicamente, a expressão daquilo que, antes permanecia invisível e indizível face o silêncio da vida da cidade. Os campos de afetações intersubjetivo e intercorpóreo entre vidas tão distintas desloca e descola o olhar fundado na psicopatologia clássica para atravessar a vida da cidade pelas potências que cada indivíduo é capaz nas experiências coletivas.A HU denuncia a multicomplexidade do conceito “produção de saúde”, que apenas inicia-se nas práticas biomédicas, compreendendo todos os saberes para a construção do cidadão autônomo e afetivo. (shrink)

Die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status theoretischer Objekte fordert eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Doktrinen des semantischen Realismus, des wissenschaftlichen Realismus und des konstruktiven Empirizismus. Die epistemologische These der potentiellen Veranschaulichung theoretischer Objekte beruht auf hermeneutischen Voraussetzungen, aus deren Explikation sich eine ontologische Auffassung der angesprochenen Objekte ergibt. Die Interpretation theoretischer Objekte auf der Grundlage eines kognitiven Existenzialismus ermöglicht eine hermeneutische Erweiterung des Komplementaritätsprinzips. Zwei Fassungen dieses Prinzips werden in Termini des kognitiven Existentialismus formuliert.

According to some representationalists (M. Tye, Ten problems of consciousness, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA, 1995; W.G. Lycan, Consciousness and experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1996; F. Dretske, Naturalising the mind, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA 1995), qualia are identical to external environmental states or features. When one perceives a red rose for instance, one is visually representing the actual redness of the rose. The represented redness of the rose is the actual redness of the rose itself. Thus redness is not (...) a property of one’s experience but an externally constituted property of the perceived physical object. In this sense, qualia are out there, in the external world. Here, I argue that the main representationalist arguments to this effect, if successful, establish no more than a symmetrical supervenience relation between representational content and qualia, and that a supervenience relation alone (albeit symmetrical) doesn’t suffice for identity. This supervenience thesis between qualia and representational content leaves open the question as to the essential nature of qualia. (shrink)

The subject of this article is comparative philosophy—its goals and methods—as discussed in the work of Wilhelm Halbfass, a prominent German scholar of Indian philosophy. Halbfass' classical works, such as India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding,1 Tradition and Reflection, On Being and What There Is, and Karma und Wiedergeburt im indischen Denken have left a lasting influence on a generation of scholars and students of Indian philosophy. The appreciation of his work and a testimony to its impact can be (...) seen, for instance, in the voluminous study Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and Its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies edited by Eli Franco... (shrink)

Le Politique est généralement conçu comme un dialogue décousu et manquant d'unité, au mieux comme une succession de méthodes et de voies de recherche différentes (division dichotomique, mythe, paradigme) visant chacune à définir le politique. Le présent article vise au contraire à montrer que l'unité du dialogue est coextensive au développement d'une unique diaíresis, et ce en soulignant, à partir de ce que le texte dit lui-même, que le mythe, la méthode par paradigme et l'analyse des constitutions existantes ne sont (...) que des moyens permettant à la division de tracer le sentier qui mène au politique tel qu'il devrait être. L'ensemble des passages méthodologiques du dialogue permet ainsi d'expliquer comment le Politique explore les possibilités et souligne les limites de la méthode diairétique. Plato's Statesman is usually read as a tedious and carelessly written exercise in dialectic, or, more charitably, as a patchwork of loosely connected applications of different methods of definition of statesmanship (division, myth and paradigm). In this paper, I argue that this much disputed problem of the unity of the dialogue can be solved, provided one reads the whole dialogue as what it claims to be, i.e. the developpment of a single diaíresis. It can be shown that the Eleatic Visitor makes use of the myth, of the analysis of paradigms and of the treatment of non-ideal constitutions as means to following a single path, throughout the whole dialogue, that leads to the definition of statesmanship as it should be. The Statesman emerges as Plato's most profound reflection on the possibilities and the limits of the diairetic method. (shrink)

This paper discusses a version of the hermeneutic philosophy of science. Special focus is placed on the ways of reading theoretical objects in scientific inquiry. In implementing readable technologies, this reading succeeds in contextually visualizing the theoretical objects by means of various sorts of signs. A configuration of readable technology accomplishes a further step. The configuration textualizes the contextually produced signs. Textualizing the reading of theoretical objects interlaces the meaningful articulation and objectification of scientific domains. The horizon of possibilities for (...) textualizing is constantly shifting in the process of normal-scientific inquiry, and the shifting horizon plays the role of a hermeneutic fore-structuring of the outcomes of textualizing. The paper explores the importance of “material hermeneutics” for the contextual reading of theoretical objects. The conclusion is drawn that the hermeneutic study of the entanglement of technological artifacts with the outcomes from reading-as-textualizing requires the introduction of ontic-ontological difference. (shrink)

The Univalent Foundations of mathematics take the point of view that all of mathematics can be encoded in terms of spatial notions like "point" and "path". We will argue that this new point of view has important implications for philosophy, and especially for those parts of analytic philosophy that take set theory and first-order logic as their benchmark of rigor. To do so, we will explore the connection between foundations and philosophy, outline what is distinctive about the logic of the (...) Univalent Foundations, and then describe new philosophical theses one can express in terms of this new logic. (shrink)

Ginev works out a conception of the constitution of scientific objects in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology. Recently there has been a revival of interest in hermeneutic theories of scientific inquiry. The present study is furthering this interest by shifting the focus from interpretive methods and procedures to the kinds of reflexivity operating in scientific conceptualization. According to the book's central thesis, a reflexive conceptualization enables one to take into consideartion the role which the ontic-ontological difference plays in the constitution of (...) scientific objects. The book argues for this thesis by analyzing the formation of objects of inquiry in a range of scientific domains stretching from highly formalized domains where the quest for objects' identities is carried out in terms of objects' emancipation from structures to linguistic and historiographic programs that avoid procedural objectification in their modes of conceptualization. The book sets up a new strategy for the dialogue between scientifc inquiry and hermeneutic phenomenology. (shrink)

In Constituent Power, Violence, and the State, Dimitri Vouros examines the question of political violence by placing the thought of Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in conversation with contemporary theories of sovereignty and constituent power. Vouros argues that the violence sustaining the modern state inhibits institutional accountability and derails constituent power. The paradox of modern law-which is both the expression of the people's will but also alienated from them-sets the stage for political contestation. For Vouros, the multitude's potentiality (...) is actualized through either organized or spontaneous acts of resistance against state force. Antagonism is therefore a key element of the political and must be included in any theory of political agonism. A strong notion of constituent power ensures the integrity of the public sphere and the expansion of citizens' political agency. Bringing all these ideas together is unique for this field of investigation. Accessible and engagingly written, Constituent Power, Violence, and the State is a must read for researchers in political theory and political philosophy. Critical legal studies scholars and social theorists will also profit from this book. (shrink)