In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REDISCOVERING VIRTUE* SERVAIS PINCK.AERS, 0.P. L!universite de Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE ABOUT VIRTUE VIRTUE is back. Especially in the United States, a widespread discussion about its role in moral theology has been initiated, a discussion modeled on Aristotle's Ethics, particularly as Aristotle's thought was developed in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas. Accompanying this rediscovery of virtue is a criticism of modern ethical theories. These theories, having (...) broken with Aristotelian tradition, have led to a burgeoning of contradictory systems: a morality of obligation on the Kantian model; utilitarian morality; and a radical critique of morality by Nietzsche. Because of such divergences any discussion between moralists, especially where the foundations and principles of morality are involved, has up to the present seemed doomed to failure.1 •Translated by Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. 1 The author who has contributed most to this discussion of virtue is undoubtedly Alasdair Macintyre in his three principal books: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; second edition, 1984); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1988); Three Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and 1radition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1990). The Italian edition of the last book, Enciclopedia, Genealogia e 1radizione (Milan, 1993), includes a special introduction on Macintyre and a biography. I should also like to mention the article by Martha Nussbaum, "Virtue Revived," Times Literary Supplement 4657 Ouly 3, 1992): 9-11. See also a recent book by Andre Comte-Sponville, Petit traite des grands vertus (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). This work is very interesting because it proposes to a wide readership a moral system drawn from Aristotle that is at the same time based entirely on modern philosophy. In my opinion the author unintentionally confirms the thesis of the incompatibility of modern ethical systems of obligation and the 361 362 SERVAIS PINCKAERS, O.P. In view of this ethical pluralism, certain philosophers have undertaken to set up ethical norms through reflection on justice, using the methods of discussion and decision prevalent in our democratic societies. The initiative has been designated as procedural ethics.2 In this rather chaotic situation, other writers have thought a return to Aristotelian ethics opportune-a move that would enable us to reconnect with the long tradition of virtue-based morality represented therein, while bringing it up to date. In fact, the introduction of the concept of virtue offers many opportunities for the shaping of a morality that takes the human person into account. Virtue is a dynamic human quality acquired through education and personal effort. It forms character and assures continuity in action. Furthermore, it is set within the framework of community and a strong tradition, to whose development it contributes. Teaching on virtue would seem to be a good corrective for excessive individualism. This is what the socalled "communitarian" trend has emphasized.3 The debate on virtue has also surfaced within traditional Catholic teaching. Since the first half of this century, under the inspiration of St. Thomas, several authors of moral theology textbooks have undertaken to reorganize special morality on the basis of the virtues rather than the ten commandments, as had been done since the seventeenth century.4 Admittedly, the change Aristotelian construct of the virtues held by Macintyre. With the moderns he rejects a natural foundation for morality, within man, and thus robs the virtues he treats of their deep roots. Virtue is not spontaneous; it remains voluntaristic. 2 To mention a few titles: K. 0. Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1981); Apel, Ethique de la discussion (Paris, 1994); J.M. Ferry, Philosophie de la communication (Paris, 1994); Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handeln, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1981); Habermas, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikativer Handeln (Frankfurt, 1983); John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Harvard, 1971). 3 See, for example: J. H. Joder, Jesus et le politique: La radicalite ethique de la croix (Lausanne, 1984); S. Hauerwas, The Peacable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, 1983); W. Reese-Schafer, Was ist Kommunitarismus? (Frankfurt, 1994); Charles Taylor, The Sources ofthe Self: The Making ofthe Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:382 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the spiritual effort of all mankind. Many so-called historic events, he was convinced, will in the end be "as written in water," but the work of the human "spirit," however limited at any given time, is accumulative and helps prepare a better future. It seems fitting to close this review with the concluding words of high commendation addressed to him by the Argentinian Society of (...) Writers on the occasion of the appearance of the Theory of Man: "Se premia a un hombre, a una obra, a una conducta." (We are paying homage to a man, a work, a noble conduct.) COR~ELI~:S KRUS~ Wesleyan University The Knowledge o] Man. Selected Essays. By Martin Buber. Edited with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman. Translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, TB 135H. Pp. 186. $1.45.) The present volume contains the English translations, previously published, of six anthropological essays of Martin Buber, which had appeared originally in German. They are: Distance and Relation (1950), Elements of the Interhuman (1954), What is Common to All (1956), The Word that is Spoken (1960), Guilt and Guilt Feelings (1957), Man and his Image-Work (1955). As an Appendix has been added the unpublished text of a discussion between the late Martin Buber and the psychologist Carl R. Rogers, in April 1957. An introductory Essay by Maurice S. Friedman intends to set these essays in the context of Buber's philosophy of dialogue and "to show their interrelations and their significance for other fields of thought" (p. 7). Both the Introductory Essay and the translated texts had been seen by Buber before going to the press. Broadly speaking, these essays concern the distinctive features of man, and the reality of the dazwischen (p. 12), translated as "there in-between," "the between" or "betweenness" (p. 107): between man and reality (art), and between man and man (the interhuman in dialogue, word and language, guilt and psychotherapy). No specific texts on religion and knowledge have been included in this collection, its purpose being to present Buber's "philosophical anthropology" (p. 7). One may speak of a synthesis of Buber's view of man, as it comes out in this volume. Man is constituting "a special category of being" (60), by being capable of entering into living relations; this happens in the sphere of "the between," in particular the interhuman, the unfolding of which is "the dialogicaI" (p. 75). Here the "spokenness" of the word has its place (p. 112), here are found the different forms of encounter from which the human "selves" emerge after "a bold swinging...into the life of the other" (p. 81) and making each other "present" through "imagining" the real in each other (p. 70). There is the permanent "temptation to... take refuge in the pseudo security of the world of It, the world of ordered objectivity and private subjectivity" (Friedman, p. 23). But there is also the "common world" (cosmos) as built by "common speech-with-meaning" (logos) (Friedman, p. 40); this is the world of the We (pp. 107-108). Buber dismisses the annihilation of the human person in the dream and sleep of the East (pp. 91-96), the "situationless" and "uncommunal" chemical holidays of Aldous Huxley (p. 100), the solipsism and panpsychism of C. G. Jung (p. 124-125) : by all of these "the pure duty and responsibility of waking togetherness" (p. 91) has been forsaken. Of particular interest are Friedman's pages concerning Buber's view of the unconscious (pp. 32-38): they replace an essay which Buber had intended to write on the subject. In this connection the essay on existential guilt to oneself and to others is illuminating ; this guilt is "as something of an ontic character" (p. 123), and only a--"for the man of our age" (p. 138)--difficult self-illumination can hereby give insight and open the door into "the identity of the human person as such with himself" (p. 147). Also, the discussion on psychotherapy should be mentioned, where Buber puts his finger on "this dialogue bounded by tragedy" (p. 174) in which "You are not equals and cannot... (shrink)

본 논문에서는 율곡의 ‘학문’관을 바탕으로 하여 ‘입지’론을 구체적으로 분석하였다. 여기에서 율곡이 ‘학문’을 단순히 지식을 추구하고 쌓아 나아가는 것이 아니라, 사람세상의 일원으로 참여하며 함께 살아갈 수 있는 사람 됨됨이를 갖추게 하는 것이라고 함을 논하였다. 이렇게 보면, 율곡에게서 학문 · 배움은 사(私)의 영역에 있는 것이 아니라 공(公)의 차원에 설정되어 있는 것이라 할 수 있다. 이를 율곡이 ‘입지’의 네 절목으로서 들고 있는 ‘횡거사구(橫渠四句)’를 통해 확인하였다. 같은 맥락에서 송유(宋儒)들에게서 비롯된 ‘희성(希聖)’관이 율곡의 ‘입지’론의 근거임을 밝혔고 율곡이 말하는 공부(工夫)의 요체에 대해서도 논했다. 이렇게 함으로써 필자는 율곡 (...) ‘입지’론의 논리적 근거를 확실히 하고 그 실현가능성을 담보하였다고 본다.BR 나아가 필자가 본 논문에서 한국병의 하나로서 지목한 ‘사교육의 만연’에 ‘입신양명(立身揚名)’이라는 이념[ideology]이 병인(病因)으로서 자리 잡고 있음을 밝혔다. 한국인들이 이를 위해 매진하다보니 사교육에 의존하게 되는데, 이 사교육이 한국인들을 평생에 걸쳐 옭죄는 족쇄로서 작용하고, 그 결과 한국인들이 행복할 수 없는 삶으로 점철함을 논하였다.BR 필자는 여기에서 이 ‘입신양명’이 우리 국가공동체의 구성원들로 하여금 철저하게 사(私)의 차원에서 문제를 해결하도록 하는 데 특성이 있음을 지적하였다. 따라서 학문과 배움을 공(公)의 차원에 설정하고 있는 율곡의 ‘입지’론이 그 대척점에 있는 것으로서, 이념으로서의 ‘입신양명’을 극복할 수 있는 대안임을 논하였다. 필자는 율곡의 이러한 ‘입지’론에서라면 사교육이 싹틀 수 있는 여지자체가 없으며, 그 토양 자체가 원천적으로 배제되어 있음을 이러한 근거에서 논하였다. 아울러 그의 ‘입지’론과 궤를 같이하는 ‘군자’론이, ‘입신양명’에서 배제된 삶을 사는 사람들에게 열패감을 주지 않고 오히려 행복으로 이끌 수 있는 것임을 논의하였다. (shrink)

It should be clear that Lyell's scientific contemporaries would hardly have agreed with Robert Munro's remark that Antiquity of Man created a full-fledged discipline. Only later historians have judged the work a synthesis; those closer to the discoveries and events saw it as a compilation — perhaps a “capital compilation,”95 but a compilation none the less. Its heterogeneity made it difficult to judge as a unity, and most reviewers, like Forbes, concentrated on the first part of Lyell's trilogy. The chapters (...) on glaciation were admired by Lyell's friends but had relatively little appeal to more general readers. His discussion of the species question hedged far too much to please those who accepted the cogency of Darwin's evidence and arguments. This last section of the book blatantly lacks originality or commitment and certainly has no claim to classical status in anthropology.We are left, then, with the first twelve chapters, for it was this portion that dictated the book's title and that amassed the available evidence favoring the antiquity of the human species. Did it do anything more than marshall the evidence that others had discovered? I think not. Lyell could write with style and verve. Principles of Geology is a remarkably readable book. But Antiquity is the work of a geologist, not of a systematic student of man. Despite its occasional touches of power, it never captures the freshness and immediacy of Lubbock's Pre-historic Times nor the theoretical brilliance of E. B. Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865).96 Antiquity utilizes little of the comparative method whereby Lyell's contemporaries used data from modern “savagery” to elaborate the possible social functions of the prehistoric remains being uncovered. It contains little social theory and has virtually no integrated framework. Even the first twelve chapters do not really hang together. As Hooker, commenting to Darwin on Lubbock's review, sadly wrote: “Lubbock in [the] N[atural] H[istory] Review, had in a note called attention to Lyell's ... ‘doing injustice’ to Prestwich & Falconer. I modified this expression ‘injustice’ in Lubbock's paper (which was friendly and apologetic). I am deeply sorry for it, but what can one do? I do think Lyell's first XII chapters a complete mess.”97 In another letter to Darwin, Hooker described this first portion of Antiquity as “confused and confusing.”98Part of the problem, of course, lay in the subject's novelty for Lyell and for most of his contemporaries. At a deeper level, however, I believe that the book accurately reflects Lyell's uncertainties about Darwin's work and its implications for man.99 Leonard Wilson's edition of Lyell's Scientific Journals provides a unique insight into Lyell's mind during the years just before he began to write Antiquity.100 Preoccupied with the human implications of evolutionary biology, Lyell was not clear how many of those implications were compatible with his deep convictions about the dignity of man's place in the cosmos. With a certain naiveté, Lyell complained in 1873 that many of his readers had failed to see the “natural connections” among the three portions of Antiquity.101 Connections could indeed be drawn between man's antiquity and his evolutionary origins; Lyell's private Scientific Journals movingly demonstrate that he was well aware of this fact. But he never fully made the connections in his published writings. Antiquity of Man is more appropriately seen as the last gasp of the heroic period in British geology than as the opening salvo in a new, post-Darwinian anthropological synthesis. Between the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and the middle of the nineteenth century, geology was recognized as one of the most exciting and innovative scientific fields in Britain.102 Lyell himself had contributed much to that drama, and by the 1860's he was a public figure of venerable proportions. More then any other man he represented a geology that had extended the boundaries of process, time, and life. The fundamental achievements of Lyell and his colleagues had been assimilated into the wider Victorian consciousness, yet the earlier public debates about “genesis and geology” had left untouched in its essentials the concept of Man as a moral, responsible, created being.103Lyell never abandoned this view of his own species, and in 1863 it was a completely responsible creature which, under the weight of empirical evidence, Lyell admitted had lived on earth far longer than had previously been thought. Certainly this more generous allowance for human existence was constitutive to what Burrow calls the evolutionary social theory of midcentury Britain.104 Unlike Lyell, the younger representatives of this anthropology quietly accepted both man's antiquity and his aboriginal animality. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), as well as the other volumes of his grand Synthetic Philosophy, presented as part of the cosmic process the development of human from prehuman beings.105 Tylor's discussion of what in his Researches (1865) he called the “gesture-language” presupposed the gradual and de novo origin of language in early human populations.106 Lubbock's young and polished mind was untroubled by the human implications of Darwin's work, and he cast his Prehistoric Times into such a perfect mold that it and its companionpiece (On the Origin of Civilization, 1870) went through seven editions each between 1865 and World War I, with their original theoretical structures intact. In a way that Lyell could not grasp, Lubbock was intrigued by questions concerning the origins of moral and religious beliefs and did not flinch at the thought of an amoral, atheistic creature as an ancestor.107 Indeed, as the German naturalist Carl Vogt pointed out in his Lectures on Man, translated into English the year after Antiquity, both Darwin's theories and the primitive flint knives of the Stone Age bore witness to a time beyond that imaginable from the condition of the lowest present-day “savage”:From such a low condition [little better than anthropomorphous apes], compared to which that of the so-called savages of the old and new world is a refined civilisation, has the human species gradually extricated itself, in a bitter struggle for existence, which it was well able to maintain, by being gifted with a larger amount of brain and intelligence than that possessed by the surrounding animal world.108The easy integration of biological and social themes was perhaps the distinguishing hallmark of Victorian anthropology of the 1850's and 1860's. After his fashion, Lyell got both themes into Antiquity, but he carefully separated them with a seven-chapter wall of glacial ice. Lyell's anthropology was not that of a thoroughgoing evolutionist like Lubbock, Tylor, or Spencer. For Lyell prehistoric man was not a product of biological evolution. Rude and superstitious he may have been, but he possessed ritual and a belief in a future state, and thus deserved “the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race: as Nature first made man/when wild in woods the noble savage ran.”109As a systematic argument, Lyell's book was at best a significant failure. As a popularization, it was a success — largely because of the personal stature of its author and the particular moment of its appearance. It helped establish the fact of man's antiquity with a wider Victorian audience, in itself no mean achievement. But Lyell was unable to exploit the fuller implications of his material in the service of a secular science of man. Ironically, he exploited only his colleagues' discoveries. Though the aging Lyell, with failing eyesight but unfailing mental powers, can still be seen as a man of considerable importance, his Antiquity belongs to the carefully circumscribed world of British geology rather than to the less disciplined world of Victorian anthropology. (shrink)

The book is divided into two parts. Each part is about eighty pages, followed by nearly fifty pages of notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Morality is reappraised in Part 1 and reaffirmed in Part 2. The aim of Part 1 is to articulate a conception of morality and moral theory that combines elements from act-based and virtue-based approaches, with the latter taking the lead. Part 2 defends moral theory against the criticisms of "antitheorists," a diverse group that includes (...) Annette Baier, Stanley Fish, Cheryl Noble, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Walzer. In both parts most of the historical attention is devoted to Aristotle and Kant. Louden contends that neither Aristotle nor Kant were as exclusive in their approaches to morality as they are usually portrayed. Aristotle, it is argued, had a use for a specifically moral ought; Kant had a keen interest in the cultivation of virtue. Both are largely innocent of the crimes of which they stand accused by the antitheorists. What are those crimes? They are the errors of thinking that correct moral judgments are deducible from universal principles; that moral values are commensurable; that all moral conflicts are rationally resolvable; that the role of moral theory is to enable one to deduce the correct answer to moral questions; that moral theory is purely normative, not descriptive or explanatory; and that moral problems are solved best by moral experts. Louden agrees with the antitheorists that all of these are false, but he maintains that few moral theories entail them. Thus, he charges that the antitheorists are attacking a straw man. It is of some interest here that Louden dismisses utilitarianism--one of the main targets of the antitheorists--in a few paragraphs for committing the sin of reductionism. There is no significant discussion of more sophisticated consequentialists such as Sedgwick, Moore, and Brandt. In many ways Aristotle is an easy case for Louden to defend, and indeed some of the authors in the antitheory group, such as Nussbaum, approve of Aristotle. The case for Kant is much harder and involves stressing Kant's appreciation of the role of non-rule-governed judgments in making moral choices. Louden says little about the categorical imperative in his treatment of Kant, though he does argue that there are genuine moral dilemmas in which neither "Do A" nor "Do not do A" can be willed to be universal law. (shrink)

We give anecdotal accounts from our own experience of scientific theories which have been generally accepted as the ruling opinion long after sufficient evidence has been collected for their disproof. This has led us to the opinion that the normal scientific process, of working hypothesis followed by experimental test aimed at disproof, is being replaced by the ruling opinion followed by experiment aimed at confirmation. The apparently widespread adoption of this procedure may be postulated to arise in part from the (...) need for workers entering a new field of study to obtain grants and to get their results published. (shrink)

The recent production of major treatises devoted to elaborating normative ethical theories and the eruption of lively debates concerning the merits of opposed normative systems have been greeted with applause. This reaction is an historical about-face, since for forty or fifty years “ethical” treatises had been attacking the pretensions of traditional moral philosophy, calling for its demise or at the least severely limiting its claims. These skeptical attacks had succeeded in seriously undermining the academic status of moral philosophy and consequently (...) moral philosophy was transformed into “metaethics,” a highly abstract and technical discipline considered much less necessary to the general education of students than what it replaced and with a diminished role in the curriculum. The recent resurgence of interest in normative ethics has generally been lauded as a sign that philosophy has rededicated itself to its proper and time-honored tasks. There is a widespread feeling that the overblown claims of twentieth century skepticism have been whittled down to innocuous proportions and thus that nothing stands in the way of proceeding to construct ethical theories. The study of normative ethical theory now enjoys such respectability and popularity that it is difficult to raise once more the uncomfortable ideas that the ideal of normative ethical theory is a false one, that vanquishing the spectre of noncognitivism is not sufficient for legitimizing it, and that the popular new justifications for the enterprise fail in mischievous ways. (shrink)

In developing his theory of aether in De Caelo 1, Aristotle argues, in DC 1.4, that one circular motion cannot be contrary to another. In this paper, I discuss how Aristotle can maintain this position and accept the existence of celestial spheres that rotate in contrary directions, as he does in his revision of the Eudoxan theory in Metaphysics 12.8.

The Language of Symmetry is a re-assessment of the structure and reach of symmetry, by an interdisciplinary group of specialists from the arts, humanities, and sciences at Oxford University. It explores, amongst other topics order and chaos in the formation of planetary systems entropy and symmetry in particle physics group theory, fractals and self-similarity symmetrical structures in western classical music, and how biological systems harness disorder to create order. This book aims to open up the scope of interdisciplinary work (...) in the study of symmetry and is intended for scholars of any background - whether it be science, arts or philosophy. (shrink)

In Confucianism, the subject of learning is one of the most important concerns. For centuries, Confucian thinkers have been devoted to seeking answers to questions such as, how to be a morally noble and decent human being?, how to be a true and moral human being—a noble man? and how to learn to be a junzi? A ‘junzi’ can be described as ‘an ideal person’. For Confucian thinkers, the concept of learning is not only an epistemological problem but (...) also, or perhaps more importantly, an ethical one. Confucian learning can be defined as a particular process of obtaining a certain knowledge in order to become a junzi. The aim of this article is to first introduce the Confucian hierarchy of learning and knowledge. Next, the typology of Confucian knowledge and learners is considered. The author makes a critical enquiry into the Confucian epistemology, and by doing so, attempts to reveal implied limitations and weaknesses. In the final section, the author argues that the Confucian classical text Li Ji revises, in part, the Confucius’ hierarchical view of learner and knowledge. (shrink)

In al-Sirr al-Maktūm, a magisterial work on astral magic, the twelfth century Persian philosopher-theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī formulated one of the most sophisticated theories of talismanic action at a distance ever produced in the Islamic world. Al-Rāzī deployed Avicennan psychology to explain how a practitioner’s soul might connect with the celestial spheres, the principles of sublunary change, and ‘blend’ their forces into a talismanic metal idol; then, performing a ritual mimetic of his intended effect, could direct these forces to bring (...) about his objective, from a distance, altering sublunary phenomena in accordance with his will. In constructing this theory, Rāzī drew on the psychologizing Avicennan accounts of thaumaturgy and veridical dreams, foregrounding what was common to both: the internal sense known as the wahm. (shrink)

For the mature Leibniz, a living being is a created substance composed of an infinitely complex organic body and a simple, immaterial soul. Soul and body do not interact directly, but rather their states correspond according to a harmony preestablished by God. I show that Leibniz’s theory faces challenges with respect to the question of whether substances need to possess knowledge of how they bring about their effects, and I argue that, to address these challenges, Leibniz turns to a (...) concept of “divine preformation” that he attributes to both soul and body. Insofar as divine preformation provides Leibniz with an explanation for how soul and body can both act without possessing explicit knowledge of what they are doing, it serves as a key tool for justifying the theory of preestablished harmony. (shrink)

This article explores the role of photography in the global work of justice by way of a case study. It focuses on the publication, in December 2001, of a set of photographs by the Mexican newsweekly Proceso, depicting events that occurred in Mexico City on 2 October 1968. Taken at the culmination of a summer of student activism, when the military opened fire on student demonstrators and bystanders, the published photographs showed previously hidden scenes of detention and torture. Locating the (...) publication of these photographs in relation to the historical processes of democratic reform in Mexico, the article aims to contribute to debates regarding the agency of photographic images in the visual politics of humanitarianism, shifting the emphasis away from questions of whether photographs work, to explore instead how they work. In particular, it focuses on the circumstances that authorized the simultaneous entry of the photographs of 1968 into the Mexican and international media spheres, and seeks to illuminate broader questions regarding their specifically photographic mode of address and the intersection between the national settings in which human rights abuses take place and testimonial appeals addressed to a global imagined community. (shrink)

The late medieval discussion of 'nobility' (= nobilitas, dignitas) defined in philosophical terms (as opposed to other social notions like 'aristocracy'), produced a large number of writings, many of which are still unedited. Nevertheless, modern philosophical historiography (developed throughout the seventeenth century and reaching its first apogee with Hegel) has neglected the conceptual debates on nobility. Perhaps having assumed it to be a dead relic of the 'pre-illuminist' past, historians and philosophers understood 'nobility' as a non-philosophical issue and so it (...) still appears in contemporary scholarship. The first aim of this essay is to draw attention to this issue by presenting a sort of preliminary catalogue of the different types of conceptualizations of 'mobility'. By exploring the meanings and philosophical employment of the expressions 'bene nasci' and 'bene natus', this article also reveals a new aspect of the Aristotelian notion of magnanimity. (shrink)

The correct locus (or loci) of binding theory has been a matter of much discussion. Theories can be seen as varying along at least two dimensions. The rst is whether binding theory is con gurationally determined (that is, the theory exploits the geometry of a phrase marker, appealing to such purely structural notions as c-command and government) or whether the theory depends rather on examining the relations between items selected by a predicate (where by selection I (...) am intending to cover everything from semantic dependencies to syntactic subcategorization). The second is the level of grammar on which binding is de ned. Attempting to roughly equate levels across di erent theories, suggestions have included the semantics/lexical conceptual structure (Jackendo 1992), thematic structure (Jackendo 1972, Wilkins 1988), argument structure/D-structure/initial grammatical relations (Manning 1994, Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Perlmutter 1984), surface syntax/grammatical relations, logical form, linear order, pragmatics (Levinson 1991), and discourse (Iida 1992). The data is su ciently varied and complex that many theories end up as mixtures, variously employing a combination of elements along both dimensions (for instance, Chomsky (1986) relies purely on con gurational notions for the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent, but uses concepts from selection in the de nition of the binding domain of an anaphor). LFG has always rejected a con gurational account of binding. For instancError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMape, Simpson (1991) argues that a con gurational theory of binding in Warlpiri cannot be maintained, among other reasons because nite clauses lack a VP.. (shrink)

Most texts on argumentation theory stress the importance of formal logic for the study of arguments. This paper raises some doubts about the usefulness of logic for the study of argumentation. In fact\ the basic analogy between logical proofs ana arguments in natural language does not seem to hold. There seems to be a basic circularity in everday arguments which cannot be reconstructed by the standard logical tools. Therefore we habe to look for some non-logical forms of representation. Some (...) hints for this new type of argument representation are given. (shrink)

This three-part paper presents Gordon Pask’s conversation theory (CT) and interaction of actors theory (IA) and outlines ways to apply these cybernetic approaches to designing technologies and scenarios for both formal and informal learning. The first part of the paper covers concepts central to CT and IA, explaining the relationship between conceptual and mechanical operators, and machines mediating informal and formal learning. The second part of the paper applies visual representations of CT and IA to understanding the use (...) of Pask’s course assembly systems (CASTE and THOUGHTSTICKER), created between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and the ThoughtShuffler search interface, created in the 2010s. The third part proposes two pathways for design based on CT and IA: firstly, the potential for designers and observers to reformulate the qualities of tools and learning scenarios to augment human thinking and collective action; and secondly, the possibility to create tools with malleable interfaces that allow users to become intermediaries rather than consumers of knowledge. (shrink)

Drawing on social information processing theory and a career development perspective, we examined the effect of transformational leadership on the perceived overqualification via career growth opportunities, and how the supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and perceived overqualification. We tested this proposal using three waves of lagged data collected from 351 company employees in the Yangtze River Delta region in China. The results revealed that transformational leadership had an indirect effect on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities, (...) and supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderated the positive association between transformational leadership and career growth opportunities. In addition, the mediating effect of transformational leadership on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities was stronger when the level of supervisor–subordinate guanxi was high and weaker when it was low. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for reducing employees’ perceptions of overqualification in the organizational context. (shrink)

This article utilises Luhmann's functional analysis to investigate the role played by legal argumentation within the legal system. Luhmann's sociological observations on this subject suggest an alternative to jurisprudential approaches that understand legal arguments and consequent decisions in terms of the relative strengths of the justifications offered in their support. His account examines the role played by legal argumentation in allowing the legal system to evolve in response to society's increasing complexity. The concepts he employs to analyse this evolutionary capacity (...) of law, developed from their origins in information theory, are redundancy and variety. Beginning with the work of Dworkin the article opens up Luhmann's analysis to consider how legal argumentation operates both as a grounded form of communication, capable of identifying weak or unsustainable interpretations of legal texts, and a mechanism for evolving law in the direction of increasing complexity. (shrink)

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

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English‐learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2‐year‐old children’s knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English‐learning children have verb‐general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced‐choice pointing paradigm. The results (...) suggest that young 2‐year‐olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a (...) wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the foundations of Plotinus’ innovative theory that prime matter is unaffectable. I begin by showing that Plotinus’ main arguments for this thesis (in Ennead 3.6) all rely upon the controversial assumption that the properties prime matter underlies are not properties of prime matter itself. It is then argued that prime matter’s privation of sensible qualities has its conceptual basis in an idiosyncratic understanding of form-matter composition generally, and its primary doctrinal basis in Aristotle’s critical (...) reports on the Platonists’ substratum in Physics 1.9. While Plotinus finds Platonic authority for unaffectible matter in the Receptacle passage of the Timaeus, it is Aristotle’s testimony that provides the crucial impetus for reading that text in this way. On this basis, Plotinus develops a Platonist conception of form’s inherence in matter with distinctively non-Aristotelian features. (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a machine at the disposal (...) of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on “The (...) Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)

Hospitals long ago shed their role as alms houses for the poor. What vestiges remain of the early American hospital are the tax-exempt, nonprofit hospital form and a general perception that hospitals, as charitable institutions, owe a duty to their communities. The appropriateness of the nonprofit hospital tax exemption has long been debated, and many theories have been advanced to justify the tax exemption of nonprofit hospitals. In a growing number of jurisdictions, however, state and local authorities have gone beyond (...) the theoretical debate and are challenging the tax exemption of their nonprofit hospitals. For various reasons, efforts are afoot to capture greater community benefit from nonprofit hospitals.At the heart of such challenges is the debate over the nature and extent of the duty charitable institutions owe to their communities. A demand is growing for nonprofit hospitals to earn their tax exemptions by benefiting their communities in concrete ways. Some have been stripped of their tax-exempt status by local authorities or pressured to make payments in lieu of taxes. A number of states have recently implemented initiatives in an attempt to make hospitals more accountable for their community benefits. Many hospitals are responding to this heightened scrutiny in a proactive way, by voluntarily documenting community benefits. A number of nonprofit hospitals and hospital associations are cooperating with—or even sponsoring—state legislation in this area. (shrink)

Was it mere encyclopedism that motivated Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, one of the most influential Islamic theologians of the twelfth century, to theorize on astral magic – or was there a deeper purpose? One of his earliest works was The Hidden Secret, a magisterial study of the ‘craft’ which harnessed spiritual discipline and natural philosophy to establish noetic connection with the celestial souls to work wonders here on earth. The initiate’s preceptor is a personal celestial spirit, ‘the perfect nature’ which represents (...) the ontological origin of his soul. This volume will be the first study of The Hidden Secret and its theory of astral magic, which synthesized the naturalistic account of prophethood constructed by Avicenna, with the perfect nature doctrine as conceived by Abū’l-Barakāt. Shedding light on one of the most complex thinkers of the post-Avicennan period, it will show how al-Rāzī’s early theorizing on the craft contributed to his formulation of prophethood with which his career culminated. Representing the nexus between philosophy, theology and magic, it will be of interest to all those interested in Islamic intellectual history and occultism. (shrink)

The purpose of the following text is to give readers a general introduction to Gordon Pask’s conversation theory, which is considered here to be a cybernetic and epistemological account of concept-forming and concept-sharing through conversational discourse and practice. While Pask devoted three lengthy tomes to articulate the theory and its applications, I believe it is necessary to give readers who are interested in conversation theory a general introduction to what I believe are the key features of his (...) work in this area. I argue that conversation theory should be considered an inferential account of the theory of concepts rather than a representational account, by virtue of Pask’s argument that a concept must be a process that involves many other concepts. (shrink)

The prevailing interpretation of ren (humanness) in the Analects is ethical. One consequence of this interpretation is the one-dimensional image of the Confucian junzi (noble man) as a rigid moralist, a fastidious observer of li (ritual). But there are numerous passages in the Analects that resist such a one-sided representation of the junzi, especially Confucius's remarks related to the (Book of) Songs and music. My basic thesis is that Confucius's concept of junji is aesthetic. This is implied by his (...) notion of junji ru (noble scholar) as opposed to xiaoren ru (common scholar). The noble man is one awakened to the beauty of humanness. It is because of this awareness that he 'sets his mind on the Way, depends on virtue, relies on ren and enjoys the arts.' Confucius included the Songs and music in his curriculum precisely for the purpose of cultivating in his pupils this aesthetic sensibility. (shrink)

This paper discusses the concept of social affordances in relation to social theory. Our point of departure is the growing literature which posits, in one way or another, that affordances may be seen as social, or cultural or similar. Across the literature on social affordances, it is thus emphasized how perception is shaped within human econiches, how it is fundamentally social, historical, and cultural, but limited direct engagement with decades of scholarship within the social sciences on many of these (...) same topics. This paper thus discusses three key themes for theories of social affordances, exploring sociological perspectives on meaning, place and power, arguing that there may be a difficult, yet fruitful, potential for not just an ecological psychology, but an ecological social science. (shrink)

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in (...) two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable. (shrink)