The place of the written Constitution in our constitutional practice is defined secondarily, from outside the text, not commanded by the text. Like moral readers of our constitutional practice, originalists of all stripes have to argue from outside the text. This makes the new originalist turn to the theory of language come too early; the place of such theory is necessarily subordinate to a convincing moral account of our practice as a whole. To lament the existence of constitutional provisions that (...) do not provide legible descriptions of encompassing states of affairs —as the new originalists implicitly do— is to badly misunderstand a morally salient element of our constitutional practice. The non-encompassing provisions of the Constitution are not incomplete, and hence failed instructions; rather they are complete, successful delegations of authority to constitutionally responsible officials. A delegatory constitutional instruction hands off responsibility and authority; in order to do that, it must be non-encompassing. This is a virtue, not a liability of the written Constitution. The purpose of our constitutional practice is justice-seeking. It aims at better aligning our institutions, policies, laws and the political community as a whole, with the requirements of justice. It aims, that is, at our making moral progress as a political community. Delegations of constitutional authority and responsibility invite the partnership of contemporary constitutional actors, in the justice-seeking enterprise, including and especially courts. Our constitutional courts are common law courts; they are, that is, reason-giving and precedent- drawn, features that make them worthy partners in that enterprise. (shrink)

An ideal view is sketched of the relationship between the facts established in science and the values of ethics and politics, and of the distinction between them. Some necessary qualifications are drawn, which do not essentially undermine the ideal. Then two cases of scientific work are considered in which considerations of value may in different ways be playing a more intimate role in the science than the ideal would suggest. These are Darwin’s theory of evolution and the current consensus (...) on climate change. Are any general lessons to be drawn from these cases? (shrink)

The first part of the study is devoted to a comparative analysis of the concepts of the Ethics of War and Peace in Russian philosophy and its influence on the world practice of nonviolence. The second part of the study is devoted to analyzing the impact of changes in legislation and law enforcement practice on the moral state of society concerning the Armed Forces and military operations after the collapse of the USSR. In conclusion, a summary of the research is (...) given. The relevance of the ideas of Russian thinkers about the need for a clear definition of the concepts with which we describe reality, the relevance of non-violent conflict resolution, the priority of preserving and developing human-oriented culture, law and morality for the formation of a healthy society with the conditions of the Noosphere are drawn. (shrink)

The moral commonly drawn from Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream is that there is no distinction between the subjectivity of the dreamer and the awake. It is, however, tenuous to incorporate this insight into an overall view of Zhuangzi, whether as a perspectival relativist, a mystic, or an anti-rationalist, just to name the more popular positions. The parable, despite its brevity and clarity, is difficult because the assertion about metaphysical distinction in the last two lines does not cohere with the preceding (...) text about knowledge. To cope with this problem, there are recent interpretations that advocate textual revision or adumbrate a non-skeptical Zhuangzi. In this article, I shall evaluate these strategies and explain the discrepancy in understanding the butterfly dream. Besides employing the concept of self-locating belief to account for the paradox of waking and not-knowing, I shall also argue for an epistemic grounding of the metaphysical distinction. (shrink)

The conclusion to be drawn from the preceding observations and theorizing should be that we must be very much aware of what has been called “technological functionalism” (Pieper, 1986:11). While functionalism as such is not bad, the moment it succumbs to mere structural technicality, the functions stop functioning: forced “adaptivity” takes the place of “adaptable” interaction.That this problem is not due to a primordial blame, to be attached to the computer, becomes clear when one compares the computerized environment to (...) other surroundings, such as, for example, the psychiatric treatment. In the psychiatric interview, as Davis (1986, 1988) has shown, the interest of the therapist is often limited to establishing a “contract” for treatment: for the therapist to function properly, there must be a therapy-defined (or therapy-definable) problem for him/her to attack, using the skills and experiences of the profession of which he/she is a representative and for which he/she has been properly trained.This function, however, may not coincide with the patient's needs: it may well be the case that the problem which originally caused the patient to approach the therapist for treatment, in the end turns out not to be the problem that both agree on as the objective of the therapeutic treatment. “Re-formulating” the patients' problem in terms suitable to the available resources and techniques is thus typically a case of adapting the human to the system: again, we're faced with technological functionalism in the shape of what has been called “forced adaptivity” (see Mey, 1986).We need to think seriously about the way we handle our computerized structures and their functions, and in particular about the design of supportive systems such as large databases, computer conferencing, or even simple electronic mail services. While adaptivity always is a case of manipulation, by which humans are tooled to the needs and strictures of the computer, adaptability, by contrast, allows such manipulation only inasmuch as those needs and strictures reflect, and are imposed by, the users' needs. The blind, mechanical force that makes us adapt ourselves to the machine should be replaced by the enlightened, humanizing force of the adaptable computer. (shrink)

This chapter was written in 2013 and was posted in the Semantics Archive in January 2014. The preprint of the published version has been in the Semantics Archive since 2016. The Semantics Archive is an electronic preprint archive hosted by the Linguistics Society of America. -/- The chapter looks at indicative conditionals embedded under quantifiers, with a special emphasis on ‘one-case’, episodic, conditionals as in "No query was answered if it came from a doubtful address." It agrees with earlier assessments (...) that a complete conditional (with antecedent and consequent) is embedded under a quantifier in those constructions, but then proceeds to create a dilemma by showing that we can’t always find the right interpretation for that conditional. Contrary to earlier assessments, Stalnaker’s conditional won’t always do. The paper concludes that the embedded conditional in the sentence above is a material implication, but the "if"-clause also plays a pragmatic role in restricting the domain of the embedding quantifier. That an appeal to pragmatics should be necessary at all goes with Edgington’s verdict that “we do not have a satisfactory general account of sentences with conditional constituents.” -/- One of the conclusions drawn at the end of the chapter is that the English modal "will" should be given a Stalnaker selection function analysis. The idea is implemented by attaching to "will" an accessibility function variable that receives its value from the context of use and can be dynamically updated by preceding "if"-clauses, as proposed in von Fintel (1994). The argument for a Stalnaker selection function analysis of "will" provided by the paper is that, together with the restrictor analysis of "if"-clauses, it yields the correct truth-conditions for "will"-conditionals (as opposed to episodic, 'one case', conditionals) embedded under quantifiers. The proposal that the English modal "will" should be given a Stalnaker selection function analysis has since been taken up and elaborated considerably in Cariani & Santorio's (2018) paper on "will" in Mind, and is a central idea in Cariani's (2021) book The Modal Future. (shrink)

Accounts of mechanistic explanation, especially as applied to biology and sometimes going under the heading of “new mechanism,” provided an attractive alternative to nomological accounts that preceded them. These accounts were motivated by selected examples, drawn primarily from cell and molecular biology and neuroscience. However, the range of examples that scientists take to be mechanistic explanations is far broader. We focus on examples that differ from those traditionally recruited by Mechanists. Our contention is that attention to additional examples will (...) lead to a richer conception of mechanistic explanation, prompting a shift from what we refer to as Mechanism 1.0 to Mechanism 2.0. (shrink)

Images are objects of work in the laboratory. On its face, this work is achieved through talk Yet the talk attached to these images makes reference to other images, which are drawn from varcous environments. In this article, four such environments are identified: the domain of laboratory practice; the context of invisible physical reactions; the future image as it will appear in publication; and the domain of case precedents and reference scenarios from the field. The work of image analysis (...) brings the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out. Thus it can be seen that images are not just taken, they are designed and made. (shrink)

According to Lewis, mereology is the general and exhaustive theory of ontological composition, and every contingent feature of the world supervenes upon some fundamental properties instantiated by minimal entities. A profound analogy can be drawn between these two basic contentions of his metaphysics, namely that both can be intended as a denial of emergentism. In this essay, we study the relationships between Humean supervenience and two philosophical spin-offs of mereological monism: the possibility of gunk and the thesis of composition (...) as identity. In a gunky scenario, there are no atoms and, thus, some criteria alternative to mereological atomicity must be introduced in order to identify the bearers of fundamental properties; this introduction creates a precedent, which renders the restriction of the additional criteria to gunky scenarios arbitrary. On the other hand, composition as identity either extends the principle of indiscernibility of identicals to composition or is forced to replace indiscernibility with a surrogate; both alternatives lead to the postulation of a symmetric kind of supervenience which, in contrast to Humean supervenience, does not countenance a privileged level. Both gunk and composition as identity, thus, display a tension with Humean supervenience. (shrink)

This article reviews practitioners’ evaluations of in-hospital ethics seminars. A qualitative study included 11 innovative in-hospital ethics seminars, preceded and followed by interviews with most participants. The settings were obstetric, neonatal and haematology units in a teaching hospital and a district general hospital in England. Fifty-six health service staff in obstetric, neonatal, haematology, and related community and management services participated; 12 attended two seminars, giving a total of 68 attendances and 59 follow-up evaluation interviews. The 11 seminars facilitated by an (...) ethicist addressed the key local concerns of staff about the social and ethical consequences of advances in genetics and their impact on professional policies and practice. Seminar agendas were drawn from prior interviews with 70 staff members. During evaluation interviews, participants commented on general aspects that they had enjoyed, how the sessions could be improved, timing, the mix of participants, the quality of the facilitation, whether sessions should be more challenging, after-effects of sessions, and interest in attending seminars and contacting the ethicist in future. Participants valued the increased interprofessional understanding and coherent discussion of many pressing issues that addressed important though seldom discussed ethical questions. The seminars worked well in the different hospitals and specialties. (shrink)

Public, private, non-profit and for-profit nursing education enterprises in the U.S. are competing with one another in a newly complex and volatile educational landscape, placing academic leaders into situations fraught with moral, ethical and legal compromise with few precedents for guidance. This case study provides a richly contextualized narrative exploration of ethical and legal challenges to one leader’s moral courage, a fictionalized exploration drawn from multiple sources over time, to form a composite that is nonetheless firmly rooted in the (...) complexity and competitiveness characteristic of nursing education today. Our purpose is three-fold: 1) to direct the reader to moral and ethical questions that require thoughtful discourse and analysis among current and future academic nursing leaders; 2) to raise the issue of the need for regulations and oversight that reflect the changing realities of today’s increasingly complex and competitive educational arena; and 3) to encourage nursing education leaders to share additional cases that resonate for them, and in so doing, to expand the wellspring of ideas from which we can all draw in becoming more effective and morally courageous leaders. (shrink)

The John Rylands Library’s recently rediscovered Spencer Album 8050 contains a proof state of the Battle of the Romans and the Sabines, an engraving pivotal in the short-lived but ambitious collaboration between Jacopo Caraglio and Rosso Fiorentino in Rome. This proof impression was first printed in black ink, and then densely covered with hand-drawn ink. A comparison between the new proof state and previously identified states of the engraving using a novel technical approach involving long-wave infrared light to isolate (...) the printed lines optically indicates that the Spencer proof state precedes any other known state of the engraving. The use of penwork and printing on this early proof and subsequent proof states demonstrates how Caraglio and Rosso saw drawing and printing as intimately connected, iterative steps in the print’s production. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

The article explores the phenomenon of symphonism in the written and other intellectual heritage of Hryhorii Skovoroda. The study reveals that the conclusion about systemic symphonismbeing a property of the thinker’s reflections can only be hypothetical at this stage. This is due tothe fact that the source base of the present study includes a significant number of diverse works by the philosopher that have not yet received a proper archaeographic description. The matter of archaeographic description of sources in the history (...) of philosophy research in Ukraine has not yet been positively resolved and is still in its formation. This article briefly presents the problematic range of source studies of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s works. It is, however, not limited to the suggested list and tends to expand. With this circumstance in mind, the boundaries of the research were limited to a selection of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s letters to various persons, which is contained in the most representative academic printed edition of his writings available today. The distinctive features of understanding the source heritage of the philosopher include its genre character and the way it was disseminated. All the major philosopher’s works were personally handwritten or replicated by other copyists in lists. This circumstance causes considerable difficulties in verifying the accuracy of the content of the original manuscript source in print. The presentation of the material is intentionally not systematic, but illustrative. The selection of extractsfrom the philosopher’s works contains the most distinctive examples of symphonicity, which illustrate the panorama of the growth of symphonic complexes from simpler to quantitatively more complex. The inherent polemical core of the study is to establish the correspondence between systemic symphonicity and dialogicity of the philosopher’s style of thinking. The conclusions about this could be drawn on the basis of historical and philosophical explication from certain sources. The author suggests that the development of dialogicity is preceded by a thorough justification of the principle of proper thinking by Hryhorii Skovoroda, which has a complex symphonic structure. From this perspective, dialogism does not contradict the fundamental symphonicity, but is rather one of its manifestations. (shrink)

In 1773, the Scottish traveller Patrick Brydone published an account of visiting Mount Etna, in which he drew on three distinct categories of thought: the scientific, the aesthetic, and the cultural. He carried his barometer up the volcano to measure it; he was overwhelmed with awe on viewing the sunrise from its summit; and he carefully set his account in the context of different mythological and philosophical explanations of Etna, largely drawn from the writings of classical authors. In preceding (...) centuries, Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth and Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus viewed mountains as laboratories for better understanding nature, for evoking a sense of eschatological awe, and as embedded in long traditions of cultural appreciation. Earlier still, Pietro Bembo in 1496 recounted his journey to the summit of Etna which wove together personal observation, classical insights, and aesthetic admiration. In an ancient example, the first-century anonymous Aetna poem urged readers to move beyond mythological explanations for volcanic activity and to instead enjoy true aesthetic pleasure in investigating the volcano and its causes for themselves. This article offers a close reading of these texts in order to demonstrate three key points. The first is that an intense aesthetic experience of volcanoes can be found in accounts predating the eighteenth-century articulation of the ‘natural sublime’. The second is that the compulsion to investigate and understand natural phenomena, as a key element of aesthetic appreciation, is also evident before the Enlightenment. Third, the article suggests that a sense of Etna as ‘classic ground’—as a feature which both intensified the viewer’s interest in its natural phenomena and produced an ‘interested’ aesthetic experience of its natural greatness—likewise extends back even to the ancient texts from which later travellers would draw their own cultural associations. (shrink)

It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a (...) conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions ofconcept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic ofconcept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how weoughtto deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditionsissufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine thepossession-conditions for the Categories. (shrink)

This paper evaluates three recent attacks on what Harry Frankfurt has called the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), i.e., the principle that if a person could not have done otherwise he is not morally responsible for what he has done. One critic of PAP argues that, if a person was drawn irresistibly to a drug yet was “altogether delighted with his condition”, he might well be morally responsible even though he could not have done otherwise. A second critic describes (...) circumstances in which, if the agent had failed to perform a certain action, physical forces would have taken effect and caused him to perform that action. Such a person, he argues, may be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise. I argue that both of the preceding counterexamples fail. The third argument against PAP shows, I maintain, that PAP is not acceptable as it stands; appropriately supplemented, however, it will continue to serve its traditional role in the compatibilist-incompatibilist debate. (shrink)

This study investigated relationships between state anxiety and leisure-domain physical activity levels during Covid-19 pandemic. We used frequency, duration, and intensity as key variables of physical activity. Trait anxiety, state anxiety before pandemic, age, gender, and education level were also included in the analysis. Our general hypothesis was that participants who declared doing more physical activity levels would exhibit lower levels of anxiety during the Covid-19 pandemic. A convenient sample of 571 volunteer adults was drawn mainly from São Paulo (...) State, the epicenter of Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. To obtain the participants’ levels of anxiety we used a validated short-version of the State and Trait Anxiety Inventory. Levels of physical activity were measured via questions from VIGITEL, a validated questionnaire about the individual’s habits on risk factors. Answers were given regarding the first week of March 2020 and at the very moment the participant was filling in the electronic form. Data analyses were conducted through descriptive and inferential techniques, with the use of non-parametric tests and linear regression models. Overall, participants’ responses indicate that anxiety levels were higher during the pandemic compared to the period that preceded the pandemic, and that frequent and long physical activity in the leisure-domain reduced anxiety, regardless its intensity. The regression models revealed an inverse relationship between physical activity and anxiety and independent of gender, age, education level, trait anxiety, and physical activity before pandemic. (shrink)

This book continues from where the authors' previous book, Structural Proof Theory, ended. It presents an extension of the methods of analysis of proofs in pure logic to elementary axiomatic systems and to what is known as philosophical logic. A self-contained brief introduction to the proof theory of pure logic is included that serves both the mathematically and philosophically oriented reader. The method is built up gradually, with examples drawn from theories of order, lattice theory and elementary geometry. The (...) aim is, in each of the examples, to help the reader grasp the combinatorial behaviour of an axiom system, which typically leads to decidability results. The last part presents, as an application and extension of all that precedes it, a proof-theoretical approach to the Kripke semantics of modal and related logics, with a great number of new results, providing essential reading for mathematical and philosophical logicians. (shrink)

Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new. and I think it not improbable that modern ideas may, through the media of newspapers and conversation, have seeped down into the social stratum which exists below stairs. My souls are agglomerations of past and present cultures, scraps from books (...) and newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once-fine clothing that has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched together. (shrink)

The article highlights the impact of globalization processes on formation of dominant worldviews and guidelines, as well as ways and means of representing the latter. The state and prospects of studying intertextuality as an important element of modern world discourses in the projection on the national cultural background are studied. Attention is drawn to the high degree of development of both theoretical and applied aspects of intertextuality of discourses by representatives of academic communities of different countries and fields of (...) knowledge, which gave grounds to establish the polydiscursive and interdiscursive nature of the object of analysis. Orientation of domestic experts on parameterization of mainly specific manifestations of intertextuality within certain discourses at the level of isolated intertexts and presence of gaps in the theoretical description of the phenomenon in the context of national specificity is stated. Emphasis is placed on the definite variability of the terminology due to the interdisciplinary nature of discursiveness and, accordingly, intertextuality. A complementary link has been established between postmodernism as the dominant philosophical worldview and the intertextuality of discourses. The specifics of the intertextuality of contemporary Ukrainian literary discourse with regard to various scientific studies are clarified. The concept of “intertextual memory” is introduced and justification of its use is given. The need to apply the term “postmodern intertextuality” in relation to contemporary literary discourse is considered. The common and distinctive features of the manifestation of intertextuality in literary and journalistic discourses are traced. The specifics of intertextuality of Ukrainian journalistic discourse are described. It is established that the precedent character of the communicative act is of exceptional importance for realization of intertextuality in journalistic discourse. (shrink)

The Plurality of Realities' contains four texts by Leon Chwistek that deal with his original philosophical conception called the theory of plurality of realities. This collection is essential not only for understanding the full-fledged version of Chwistek's conception but also for surveying its development over a span of five years (1916-1921). Reading these essays in chronological order allows us to notice all stages of its development, beginning with its first sketches, drawn in the book Meaning and Reality, where only (...) two realities are considered, and finishing with Chwistek's most famous essay, The Plurality of Realities, in which he discusses four different realities: the reality of things, the reality of physics, the reality of impressions, and the reality of imaginations. The collection is preceded by two introductory essays by Karol Chrobak. The first presents Leon Chwistek against the background of the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the interwar period in Poland. The second focuses on Chwistek's conception of the plurality of realities and gives a critical account of its most widespread interpretations. Translated by Karol Chrobak. (shrink)

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as today, (...) I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

The paper identifies a possible precedent for Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the work of Johann Nicolaus Tetens. An attempt is made to reconstruct the reasoning that led Tetens to reject idealism as a false starting point, and some parallels are drawn between Tetens’s psychologistic approach to the problem andKant’s transcendental methodology.

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis. Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the (...) central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues: · What would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science? · Is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics? · How can mental and physical explanations coincide? Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas. No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy. (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

The idea that we acquire knowledge by trial and error has been one of the truly great ideas of the twentieth century. As no reader of his philosophical and autobiographical work could have failed to notice, Karl Popper credits himself for having invented this idea. The theory of trial and error or, in Popper's words, the Searchlight theory of knowledge and mind, is not just a part of Popper's comprehensive philosophy but rather one of its key features. It is at (...) the bottom of some of his most spectacular achievements in methodology, epistemology, the philosophy of biology, and even political philosophy. Indeed, it is put forward at once as a model for the growth of individual knowledge (both human and animal), the growth of life (Darwin's theory of evolution), and the growth of scientific knowledge (philosophy of science). As happens so often with innovative ideas, the Searchlight theory derives much of its glamour from the theory it rejects: the view of the mind being a tabula rasa and sense perception the origin of all (human) knowledge. Popper nicknames this empiricists' view as the Bucket theory since it conceives of the mind as nothing but the conduit for sense-impressions, an empty bucket to be filled by the accumulation and storage of information. 1 In his hands the Bucket theory collapses under the strain of philosophical arguments and scientific facts and is replaced by a theory which maintains that our knowledge of the physical world is drawn from our mind and constructed from the repertoire of knowledge dispositions we already possess. Acquiring dispositions proceeds according to the method of trial and error elimination. This method, Popper contends, consists essentially of three stages: forming a problem or expectation, trying out a number of solutions of the problem, and eliminating or discarding false solutions as erroneous. 2 A key feature of Popper's theory of trial and error elimination, and the reason for speaking of a Searchlight theory of knowledge and mind, is his insistence that problems or expectations take precedence over observations. Observations are always preceded by expectations, points of view, questions or problems which, as a searchlight, illuminate a certain area, thereby enabling the organism or the scientist to know what to observe in the first place. -/- The question arises how and when did Popper come to this theory of the growth of knowledge and mind which was to have such radical implications for the philosophy of science, epistemology, and the philosophy of psychology? My aim in this article is to trace the roots of his theory of the Searchlight. The earliest traces of the theory are to be found in his unpublished dissertation, Zur Methodenfrage der Cognitive psychology (1928). Here I will focus upon this "hasty last minute affair" written in the tradition of early German cognitive psychology and supervised by one of its most outstanding proponents, Karl Bühler. Scrutiny of this manuscript, however, reveals not so much the formative influence of Bühler as that of Otto Selz. Indeed, I will argue that Popper borrowed his crucially important Searchlight theory from Selz. Thus having found the origin of the key notion of his epistemology in psychology, the relation between psychology and philosophy in Popper's work, always fraught with tension, is up for thorough reconsideration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political CultureCynthia DamonHarriet I. Flower. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Studies in the History of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xxiv + 400 pp. 75 black-and-white ills. 1 map. Cloth. $59.95.Despite its title, this book is not really about forgetting. Forgetting, as Tacitus knew to his cost, (...) cannot be done to order, whether the order be one's own or another's. Erasure, rather. Indeed erasures of a wide variety, from official memory sanctions mandating the removal of names from inscriptions and imagines from funerals, to spontaneous erasures on or of monuments associated with the disgraced, to literary attacks targeting posthumous reputations. The emphasis is on the first category; the book is structured around a chronological survey of official memory sanctions and the physical traces thereof from the early Republic [End Page 599] up to the first year of the principate of Antoninus Pius, but the other types are well integrated into the discussion. The Art of Forgetting is a fascinating study of the battle between the living and the dead or disgraced for prime turf in the memory space of the Roman elite.As with so much of Roman history as we can know it, the "memory wars" and "memory games" treated in this book are an elite phenomenon. The erasures discussed (and, happily, often pictured) here are most accessible to us when they are accomplished in the same enduring media to which the Roman elite entrusted its public record and reputation. The title of Flower's first chapter, "Clementis' Hat," alluding to the chance survival of a photographic testimonial for Czech politician Vladimir Clementis, captures Flower's early assertion that we can only know the incompletely successful erasures (12), but this seems to me to collapse an essential distinction, preserved elsewhere in the book, including its subtitle, between memory and reputation. The senate-mandated erasure of the man accused of Germanicus' murder is accomplished both by chiseling his name out of the dedication of a statue of Germanicus and by chiseling it into the empire-wide inscriptions on which the senate's verdict in his trial was recorded. The former deprives him of prime memory space; the latter assigns him space on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. Both oblivion and disgrace are weapons in the memory wars, and their relative salience varies.The chronological survey of the Roman evidence is preceded by a contextualizing chapter on memory sanctions in the Greek world, particularly in the Hellenistic world, in which Rome's elite saw first hand the battles over what went into the monumental record that followed (or even preceded) battles for territory. Early-attested sanctions such as the razing of a disgraced person's house seem to combine practical and symbolic ends: displacement of the individual and his immediate family and erasure of an avatar. The record of sanctions in democratic Athens, which adds to house-razing the expulsion of remains and the erection of stelai publicizing the names and crimes of offenders against the demos, already shows the complementary effects of oblivion and disgrace later exploited at Rome. A helpful distinction is drawn between amnesties such as that of 403 B.C.E. Athens, in which "a new start was made by promising not to use the past as a political weapon" (23), and the kind of memory politics manifested in sanctions. The discussion of the Hellenistic world establishes the connection, later relevant to the treatment of Rome's imperial women, between extravagant honors and harsh penalties in the symbolic realm: in the rhetoric of relations between cities and kings, for example, a ruler in favor is honored as a god, while a ruler out of favor may find his cult appropriated, his record erased, and his memory cursed.Rome had its own long-standing traditions of memory sanctions. Or at least by the Augustan age it felt it had. Chapter 3 tries to get back beyond the triumviral phase of Roman memory sanctions, citing fifth- and fourth-century house-razings for "citizen traitors" (45... (shrink)

It is shown that the facts of behavior which Freud sought to encompass by his distinction of Primary and Secondary Process can be formulated in terms of Skinner's system of behavior. This is illustrated by considering the 'primary process' behavior in dreaming, some of whose characteristics according to Freud are: it is illogical and random; visual images predominate in primary process thinking; it is highly charged with affect compared to 'secondary process' thinking; it shows 'condensation' — the fusing together of (...) two or more images into a single image. It is shown that all of these properties can be derived from Skinner's account of behavior. It is then pointed out that both Freud and Skinner have pointed to similar controlling variables of behavior, utilized mainly similar processes, and drawn many of the same distinctions. Implications for contemporary criticisms of Skinner's account of 'thinking' are pointed out. The above is preceded by a preliminary argument that since both Freud and Skinner performed functional analyses of behavior, it should be possible to compare the two accounts if the 'superfluous' middle term — the intrapsychic apparatus — in Freud's account is ignored. It is pointed out that in extrapolating his system to human behavior, Skinner has described in terms of his own system some of the characteristically 'Freudian' facts of behavior, and his formulations on the phenomena of 'repression' are summarized. The Skinnerian formulation of the primary and secondary process distinction is then presented in support of the argument that other facts of behavior which have not been discussed by Skinner can nevertheless be represented within his system of behavior. (shrink)

This case study discusses the scope of responsibilities and the basis of legitimacy of multinational corporations in a complex operating environment. In January 2013 a precedent was set when Shell was held liable in The Hague for oil pollution in the Niger Delta. The landmark ruling climaxed the ongoing dispute over the scope of Shell’s responsibilities for both the company’s positive and negative impact. Shell’s was considered a forerunner in corporate social responsibility and had even assumed public responsibilities in (...) a context of a public responsibility void. However, the company remained a regular target of civil society activism and legal proceedings concerned with malpractice. The court case attracted international attention for its novelty and increasing media and civil society pressure required immediate action. How can Shell respond to this negative publicity to keep its license to operate? What is the scope of the company’s responsibilities in such a controversial human rights context? Students are expected to discuss these questions going beyond a simple moralistic or liability thinking. They are encouraged to take into account the complex structural processes that connect persons and institutions in very different social and geographical positions. The experiences of Shell are an excellent case in point since attention is drawn to the background conditions of globally operating companies, in which the isolation of perpetrators based on causality is not realistic. The case also reveals the particular challenges, which MNCs face in the context of increasing demands to take on public responsibilities while respecting their economic mandate. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one suspends judgment about (...) some matter if and only if one inquires into this matter. Subsequently, I use conclusions drawn from the preceding discussion to offer a tentative account: S suspends judgment about p iff S believes that she neither believes nor disbelieves that p, S neither believes nor disbelieves that p, and S intends to judge that p or not-p. (shrink)

Drawing on broad definitions of technology and engineering as well as precedents in the philosophical literature, this paper makes the novel argument that the purposeful design of one’s unique good life using existing philosophical concepts is an engineering activity. Whether as a metaphor or as an engineering activity in its own right, a sampling of important benefits and perspectives provided for well-being by the presented “life engineering” framework are highlighted. A key strength of the framework is the conceptual simplicity, with (...) minimal sacrifices in completeness or consistency. This necessitates a tradeoff of limited precision for any one practical implementation. Consistent conceptual definitions for wisdom, virtue and the good life are presented within an informative ethics. Only a descriptive evaluation to aid in conceptual understanding is discussed, no prescriptive normative evaluations are made. The good life is defined to be one in which the minimum requirements are met and then performance is good, but no attempt is made to define what is good. A fundamental limitation of the framework stems from the inherent focus of technology on human utility. Although no novel fundamental conclusions are drawn in this paper, the presented framework is demonstrated to correspond with numerous ethical precepts of many existing philosophical traditions. (shrink)

St Joachim and St Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, painted by Eugenio Cajés between 1604 and 1605, is the sole remnant of a major commission for the Cercito chapel in the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. The painting has been praised by modern critics, who have drawn attention to the painter’s emulation of Italian artistic precedents. Illuminating as this appraisal may be, such an approach does not explain why the patrons chose an iconographic subject that (...) had become increasingly rare, especially since the traditional association of the Meeting with the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin had been questioned in the late sixteenth century. Above all, focussing on the painting’s style fails to take into account the specific context for which this painting was conceived. As it happens, the Cercito family chapel was dedicated to a very particular cult, that of the Holy Child of La Guardia, the purported victim of one of the most notorious blood libels in late medieval Spain. The purpose of the present study is to redress the previous art-historical oversight with regard to this painting, through an in-depth study of the artistic, devotional and socio-cultural significance of the Meeting at the Golden Gate in seventeenth-century Madrid. An analysis of the extensive and to date unpublished archival documentation for the commission makes it possible to reconstruct key elements of the lost chapel. These sources, when read together with devotional texts that circulated at the time, reveal the personal motives that underpinned the foundation and decoration of the Cercito chapel. The reconstruction of the Cercito chapel proposed in this article offers a new perspective on the way in which religious art engaged with the tensions prompted by the issue of the purity of blood, as well as with anxieties related to family and procreation. (shrink)

The editor of this Journal has asked me to comment on the preceding paper by Professor Hammond in which certain parallels are drawn between relativity physics and my own suggestions concerning the establishment of “representative design” in psychological experimentation. Since I find little basis for criticism of Dr. Hammond's major line of reasoning, I shall concentrate on anticipating possible objections to Hammond's comparison as well as on elucidating my point of view by means of examples, both old and new, (...) that seem pertinent in the present context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistical Wisdom:Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia”Christopher Lyle JohnstoneThe pursuit of Wisdom is at the center of the Western intellectual tradition, its attainment the literal ideal and end of all philosophical inquiry. It is recognized by various religions and belief systems as the key to a meaningful, fulfilling, happy life. Yet for all this, its nature remains unclear and the means of its attainment uncertain. Is it one thing, or are (...) there different kinds of wisdom? How is it acquired? Can it be taught or communicated to others? How, if at all, do speech and language figure in the attainment and dissemination of wisdom?The relationship between wisdom and utterance, reflected in the connection between philosophy and rhetoric, has been a focus of intellectual interest in the West since at least the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 BCE): Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Bacon, Vico—all have been concerned, either directly or indirectly, with the interrelation of speech or eloquence and what they view as the highest form of knowledge. Recent scholarship has pursued this relationship along several related lines of inquiry, albeit sometimes obliquely. Some investigators have examined the role of speech in the creation of all human knowledge.1 Others have concentrated more particularly on the role of rhetoric in the creation or exercise of wisdom.2 In an effort to illuminate the ancient foundations of these connections, several scholars have lately studied the link between language and thought in Greek philosophy and rhetoric.3My present interest centers on the linkages between wisdom and speech—between sophia and logos—in the teachings of those pivotal thinkers of the fifth-century Greek "Enlightenment," the Older Sophists. Although the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archelaus, and the Atomists took up moral and political topics, presocratic thinkers generally had concentrated on the origins and mechanical workings of the physical world in which human beings live. As contemporaries of Protagoras and Gorgias, the Atomists—Leucippus and Democritus—are particularly noteworthy for having initiated inquiry into [End Page 265] the relationship between custom or law (nomos) and nature or objective reality (physis), which became a central concern for many of the Older Sophists.4 Such moral and political themes were taken up in earnest by the thinkers and teachers who resided in or were drawn to Athens in the fifth century BCE. Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Antiphon, and others raised questions that were fundamentally political and moral: How should one live one's life? What are the values that should guide one's conduct? By what moral standards should our actions be judged, and how are these standards to be discovered? What legitimizes the laws that govern society? Are law and morality rooted in the nature of things, or are they merely matters of custom and convention? Such questions mark a shift in intellectual inquiry away from the sorts of naturalistic, metaphysical, and ontological problems that preoccupied presocratic thinkers and toward a primary concern with matters of praxis, politics, and morality.My aims in this essay are, first, to illuminate the conceptions of wisdom that can be reconstructed from our evidence for the teachings of the Older Sophists, and then to discern the role of speech in the attainment and exercise of this wisdom. The past half-century or so has witnessed a growing interest in the Sophists of fifth-century Athens. This interest is particularly noteworthy because it involves a determination to consider the Sophists on their own terms rather than through Plato's eyes, as had been customary in most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sophistical studies. Though an early precedent was set by Grote's (1846) effort to challenge the Platonist bias in historical treatments of the Sophists, it was such scholars as Untersteiner (1949, 1954), Cornford (1950), Kerferd (1950, 1981), and Guthrie (1968, 1971) who inspired more recent revisionist histories of sophistical ideas.5 More recent studies have sought to illuminate the philosophical foundations of such ideas and their implications for the theory and practice of rhetoric. J. Poulakos (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1990, 1995), Schiappa (1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999), de Romilly (1992), Consigny (2001), McComisky (2002), Gagarin (2002... (shrink)

The very fact that the Gödel sentence $$\mathcal {G}$$ is independent of Peano Arithmetic fuels controversy over our access to the truth of $$\mathcal {G}$$. In particular, does the truth of $$\mathcal {G}$$ $$ ) precede the truth of its numerical instances $$\varphi $$, $$\varphi $$, $$\varphi, \ldots $$, as the so-called standard argument induces one to believe? This paper offers a shift in perspective on this old problem. We start by reassessing Michael Dummett’s 1963 argument which seems to speak (...) in favour of the priority of the truth of the numerical instances of $$\mathcal {G}$$ over the truth of $$\mathcal {G}$$ itself. In opposition to some recent criticisms of Dummett’s argument, we argue that the latter is not reducible to the standard one. We then point out its prototypical nature in the sense individuated by Jacques Herbrand. This shift in perspective brings us to the claim that the controversy over the priority between $$\mathcal {G}$$ and its numerical instances endures only because the problem is ultimately ill-posed. An encompassing moral about the epistemological mechanism of prototype proofs is also drawn. (shrink)

Here is the first book to present Karl Marx as one of the great systematic philosophers, a man who went beyond the traditional bounds of the discipline to work out a philosophical system in terms of a concrete social theory and politico-economic critique. Basing her work on the Grundrisse (probably Marx's most systematic work and only translated into English for the first time in 1973), Gould argues that Marx was engaged in a single enterprise throughout his works, specifically the construction (...) of a systematic and philosophical theory of society. Gould examines five basic themes of Marx's social ontology: society, labor, causality, freedom, and justice, in five separate chapters, preceded by an introductory chapter explicating thesis and methods. The book shows how Marx's ontology, or theory of social reality, may be reconstructed from concrete details of his account of the historical stages of social development and from his analyses and critiques of capitalist economy. It clarifies further the value theory underlying Marx's critique of modern society and explores the question of how philosophy can play a major role in understanding and resolving social issues. This book will be of interest to all students of society, since it raises issues of the relationship of technologies to society and of the forms and prospects for socialism as a possible future society. It has deliberately been written in a style that makes the difficult, technical issues accessible to undergraduates just beginning to read Marx, as well as, of course, graduate students of social theory and specialized scholars. The lay reader will also be drawn to the particular content of this book and will enjoy the lucid, straightforward presentation. Marx's Social Ontology proposes a solution to a long-standing problem in interpretations of Marx: the apparent dilemma of his insistence on the ideal of full self-realization of the individual and his equal insistence on the ideal of full self-realization of the community. This is a book of major significance dealing with topics of enduring and current interest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Architectural Theory, Volume 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870Peg RawesArchitectural Theory, Volume 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Malden MA, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 590 pp., $49.95.This anthology is a rich and comprehensive documentation of the key stages that construct Western architectural theory, from Vitruvius's classical writing to Gottfried Semper's theories in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Comprised of 229 texts by these (...) and other significant writers of architectural theory, it represents an extremely valuable resource for architectural design, history, and theory education and, more broadly, for aesthetic education, art history, aesthetics, and visual culture. Professor Mallgrave's career as an architectural historian and theorist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and editor of Architecture and Aesthetics for the Texts and Documents Series at the Getty Research Institute, has enabled him to bring together a large number of canonical texts by architects and writers, including Alberti, Palladio, Vasari, Perrault, Wotton, Wren, Soufflot, Blondel, Boullée, Ledoux, Soane, Reynolds, Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin, and Greenough. In addition, Mallgrave has selected important contextualizing texts that inform the philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic development of the discipline by writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Morris, Chambers, Winckelmann, Locke, Hume, Ramsey, Burke, Walpole, Price, von Schlegel, Wolff, Jefferson, Emerson, Hugo, Zola, and Leibnitz.Six stages of development are laid out, beginning with the Classical and Renaissance periods in part I. In part II the debates about Classicism in France and Britain develop, leading into part III, in which texts from the Neoclassical and Enlightenment debates in Europe take precedence. In part IV, Picturesque and Sublime theories are documented, from which part V turns to consider the importance of Historicism in the nineteenth century and, finally, in part VI the impact of Historicism is examined in relation to developments in industrialization.Introducing each part, Mallgrave succinctly highlights the historical, cultural, and political structures that underpin the development of architectural ideas and debates during the period. Within each part, internal sections further distinguish the particular ideas that preoccupied specific individuals and groups to comprise different theoretical positions. Part II, for example, is divided into the nationalist differences between "French Classicism: Ancients and Moderns" and "British Classicism and Palladianism," and part IV identifies key texts that contribute to the theorization of eighteenth-century aesthetics in three stages: "Sources of the Picturesque," "Toward a Relativist Aesthetics," and "Consolidation of Picturesque Theory." In addition, Mallgrave introduces each individual text, drawing attention to the author's intellectual ambitions and the contemporary debates in which their contribution is constructed. Architectural [End Page 111] theory is therefore characterized as a discipline that is made up of dynamic discussions, which are frequently unresolved and irregular in their formation. Diverse and opposing agendas are pursued, both within and between different institutions, academies, and communities, including the late-sixteenth-century "stylistic battles" of Alberti and Serlio's treatises, which were developed out of Vitruvius's ten "books" of architecture; the pluralism of styles in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century that was comprised of puritanical influential theories, Gothic and French Classicism, and the new generation of American architectural theorists; and the emergence of a German architectural theory within the political disputes that led to the unification of Germany in 1871. Architectural theory is therefore firmly constructed in relation to social, material, cultural, and political systems and frameworks.This colorful construction of architectural theory is evident, especially in those sections that are central to Mallgrave's ongoing research interests, in the tension between the rational, technical, and empirical discussions that inform seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Running through parts II and III, for example, is one of the most drawn-out and bitter disputes, which dominated architectural theory in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Academy of Architecture. Focused on the value of Vitruvius's Roman origins of Classicism, versus revivalist ambitions to retrieve the ornamental Classicism of Greek and Gothic styles, this great quarrel occupies the texts, letters, essays, and articles by architects and writers, including Blondel, Perrault, Piranesi, Soufflot, Winckelmann, Le Roy, Boullée, and Ledoux. But this debate is also important in the context of... (shrink)

Construing all efficient causes as beginning and ceasing with their effects invites the dilemma that a given effect or event either always occurs or neveroccurs. One escapes the dilemma by distinguishing basic and subsidiary efficient causes, according temporal priority of causes to their effects in the case of theformer. In the case of human making and doing, where the two efficient causes belong to the same subject, the two are supplemented by a final cause whichserves to link or to mediate (...) them. This it does by drawing out or actuating the subsidiary cause which exists potentially in the basic cause. Arguing from analogy,can it be argued that, just when basic and subsidiary efficient causes belong to the same non-human subject in nature, they must likewise be supplemented byfinal causes if the potentiality of subsidiary causes in basic causes is to be drawn out and made actual? Surprising though it might seem to some, the answer tothis question is yes. To show this, I first place efficient causes in a dilemma. Next I show how one escapes the dilemma by distinguishing basic and subsidiary efficient causes, making the former temporally precede the latter. These two causes in some cases need to be linked, and this, I argue, requires a cause of another type, a final cause. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that construals of our emotional responses to fictions as irrational or merely pseudo-emotional are not the only explanations available to us, and that necessary and sufficient conditions for an emotional response to a fiction can be established without abandoning either its intentionality or the assignment of a causal role to our beliefs. ;Colin Radford's claim that our emotional responses to fictions are irrational and inconsistent is challenged in two ways. First, distinctions can (...) be drawn between our reactions to fiction and indisputably irrational emotional reactions which preclude arriving at Radford's conclusion via an argument from analogy. Further, the conditions for rationality put forward in several analyses of emotion, ranging from that of David Hume to that of Ronald de Sousa, are not violated by our emotional responses to fictions. ;Kendall Walton's contention that such affective reactions are merely quasi-emotions is contested on the ground that the absence of the existentially committed beliefs which Walton allies with all genuine emotional responses does not demonstrate an absence of cognitive content. Existentially uncommitted evaluative beliefs, thoughts, and even beliefs about the world can be linked to our emotional experience of fictions, and can serve a function necessary to the identification of the emotion, a function which Walton assigns to the existentially committed belief. ;In our experience of fictions, the objects of our emotion are various. However, a direct response to a fictional entity or event is characterized in terms of Peter Lamarque's account: as a response to the content of a thought, a response to what has been thought or imagined rather than to the thought itself. The roles played both by evaluative beliefs and beliefs about what can occur in the world are investigated and found to constitute necessary conditions for an emotional response to a fiction. An account of the role of the imagination, which borrows from Boruah, David Novitz, and Susan Feagin, provides another condition which, together with the two preceding, appears sufficient for such a response. (shrink)

This essay is about mathematics as a written or literate language. Through historical and anthropological observations drawn from the history of Greek mathematics and the oral tradition preceding the rise of literacy in Greece, as well as considerations on the nature of alphabetic writing, it is argued that three essential linguistic features of mathematical discourse are jointly possible only through written, alphabetic language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how both alphabetic principles and issues related to literacy faced (...) by the Greeks in the axiomatization of geometry play a central role in some specific metamathematical theories. Drawing extensively on the work of ArpSd Szatx5, Eric Havelock, and Albert Lord, the implications developed between Szab6's history of Greek mathematics and Havelock and Lord's theories of writing and oral traditions (Homer's in particular) are the author's own, as are the applications to modern logic. (shrink)

This essay is a second attempt to reconcile the perspectives of Merleau-Ponty and Guattari, following on the examination of the unconscious in a previous issue of Chiasmi. Here the focus concerns an ontology that overcomes the dualistic heritage of Western metaphysics. More precisely, I compare the concept of flesh as Merleau-Ponty employs it in his later texts with that of the machine as Guattari uses this from the end of the 1960s until his last writings in the early 1990s. The (...) machine concerns the potential for transformation in a given social and political configuration, so that the ontology to be drawn from this concept is a thought of transformation. The position of individual subjectivity in this context is not so different from that granted to it by Merleau-Ponty in his last writings: a curvature of the flesh or, as Deleuze and Guattari write about the artisan in A Thousand Plateaus, “one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter.”Cet essai est une deuxième tentative de rapprochement des perspectives de Merleau-Ponty et de Guattari, après la problématique de l’inconscient traitée dans un précédent numéro de Chiasmi. Cette fois elle a lieu sous l’angle d’une ontologie qui surmonte l’héritage dualiste de la métaphysique occidentale. Plus précisément, je mets en comparaison la notion de chair telle que Merleau-Ponty la met en oeuvre dans ses textes tardifs et celle de machine telle que Guattari l’emploie depuis la fin des années 1960 jusqu’à ses derniers écrits du début des années 1990. La machine concerne le potentiel de transformation dans une configuration sociale et politique donnée, de sorte que l’ontologie qu’on peut tirer de cette notion est une pensée de la transformation. La position de la subjectivité individuelle dans ce contexte n’est pas très différente de celle que lui accorde Merleau-Ponty dans ses derniers écrits : une courbure de la chair, ou comme l’écrivent Deleuze et Guattari dans Mille plateaux à propos de l’artisan, « celui qui est déterminé à suivre un flux de matière ».Questo saggio è un secondo tentativo di avvicinare le prospettive di Merleau-Ponty e di Guattari, dopo quanto fatto in un precedente numero di Chiasmi attorno alla problematica dell’inconscio. Questa volta, tale raffronto sarà nella prospettiva di un’ontologia che superi l’eredità dualistica della metafisica occidentale. Più precisamente, intendo confrontare la nozione di carne, nel modo in cui essa prende corpo nei testi dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty, e quella di macchina di Guattari, nella maniera in cui è caratterizzata dall’autore a partire dalla fine degli anni Sessanta fino ai suoi ultimi scritti dell’inizio degli anni Novanta. La macchina riguarda il potenziale di trasformazione in una configurazione sociale e politica data, e quindi l’ontologia che ne deriva implica un pensiero della trasformazione. In questo contesto, la posizione della soggettività individuale non è molto diversa da quella caratterizzata da Merleau-Ponty nei suoi ultimi scritti: una curvatura della carne, o, come scrivono Deleuze e Guattari in Millepiani a proposito dell’artigiano, “colui che è determinato a seguire un flusso di materia”. (shrink)

The decision of the International Tennis Federation (July, 1999) to approve trials of different ball types represented a clear admission of the need for tennis to adapt to the enhanced competence of elite athletes. However, such action brings into question to what extent tennis is evolving beyond its modern appearance and how far such change is desirable. Over the last 30 years, advanced technology and athletic capability has resulted in male players having outgrown the structure of the game, which can (...) be seen as having promoted the ITF’s reaction. The need to ensure that tennis remains a challenging game for players at all levels and an exciting game for spectators appears to reflect an interest and concern for the practicecommunity of the sport. However, it is problematic to conclude that such changes are in the interests of all concerned. This article argues that any such changes to the structure of the game must be preceded with some admission about what future is sought for tennis and thus, where limits might be drawn on the changes made within the game. Furthermore, it is recognised that by invoking the ‘new balls’ proposal, a clear statement is made about what aspects of the game are considered worthy to preserve or not. This article addresses the implications of technological change for tennis, identifying upon what basis such change should take place to ensure a credible future for tennis. (shrink)

We discuss at some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottomup from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to (...) a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to discuss the nature of social phenomena, and to determine the appropriate way to explain them. Many of the contentions advanced rest largely upon the fact that social phenomena can be investigated only by methods which respect their distinctive character and status as social phenomena. In chapter I it is argued that the most important difference between the social and the natural sciences is that the former have to employ intentional criteria to identify their (...) explananda-phenomena. Because human and societal phenomena are intrinsically meaningful, the type of causation which prevails in the social realm is fundamentally different from that which prevails in the physical. In chapter II the claim of Popper and Hayek that the task of the social sciences is to trace the unintended consequences of human actions is critically examined. Two examples of economic explanation are given in order to show the importance of unintended consequences, and to illustrate the general form explanations of social phenomena should adopt. In chapter III the contention that the social sciences deal with inherently complex phenomena is examined and defended, and the main implications of this contention for social analysis are drawn. The extent to which social phenomena are in principle predictable is discussed. In chapter IV the structural properties of formal scientific theories are briefly characterised, and then Friedman's famous argument on the testability of economic theories is analysed and rejected. The role within a scientific theory of statements formulated with reference to idealisations of the phenomena being studied, and the role within a social explanation of the 'principle of rationality', are discussed. In chapter V the central questions behind the methodological individualism/methodological holism controversy are brought to light. Provided that methodological individualism is not construed as a reductionist or mechanistic principle, it can successfully avoid the main objections of its detractors. It is argued that the method of functional analysis in sociology is consistent with methodological individualism. Finally, it is claimed that the principle of methodological individualism does indeed recommend the appropriate way to explain societal phenomena. In chapter VI, the various strands of thought running through the five preceding chapters are drawn together in a brief summary of the most important points raised by this thesis. (shrink)

Summary The object of this study is to analyse certain aspects of the debate between David Brewster and William Whewell concerning the probability of extra-terrestrial life, in order to illustrate the nature, constitution and condition of natural theology in the decades immediately preceding the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of species. The argument is directed against a stylised picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and (...) certain forms of the design argument. Contrary to the popular image of natural theology as an essentially static, autonomous and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, the paper underlines the existence of a fundamental divergence of strategies within natural theology, a divergence that, in the case of Brewster and Whewell, can be correlated with the religious cultures to which they most closely belonged. The fact that, in the plurality of worlds debate, their respective positions became mutually exclusive suggests that the fragmented and disordered state of natural theology, only too apparent before the Darwinian impact, was occasioned as much by the ulterior problem of rationalising the excessive space of the astronomers and the excessive time of the geologists as it was by any principle of the uniformity of nature in the biological sphere. The argument is substantiated with particular reference to the breakdown in communication as Brewster and Whewell developed conflicting strategies to expose the ?development hypothesis? that had appeared in Vestiges. Their altercation also reveals a certain conflict of status concerning the conclusions of astronomy and geology which, in turn, suggests that tensions between the physical and life sciences were not peculiar to the period following the publication of Darwin's theory. (shrink)

The law inevitably draws lines. These lines distinguish, for example, whether certain conduct reflects ordinary recklessness constituting manslaughter or more extreme recklessness constituting murder. There is no way to meaningfully draw such lines, however, absent shared ways of representing amounts of recklessness or at least knowledge of the consequences of drawing lines in particular places. Yet legal actors frequently draw lines in the dark, establishing cutoffs along a spectrum with little or none of the information required to do so in (...) a way that suits the law’s goals. For example, jurors must decide whether some conduct constitutes extreme recklessness without knowing prior precedent nor the sentencing consequences of drawing cutoffs in particular places. Judges and lawyers cite line drawing precedents from other jurisdictions without considering whether the lines drawn in prior cases had the same consequences as those in the case at bar. And scholars argue about how to classify conduct without making clear what consequences they believe ought to attach once the classification is made, leaving it hard to tell when scholars have substantive or simply superficial disagreements. In this Article, I discuss some line drawing problems and briefly suggest ways we can add meaning to cutoffs. More generally, I argue, we can “smooth” certain features of the law to both reduce our vulnerability to line drawing in the dark and improve the fit between the law and what our best theories of law recommend. Even when we cannot easily smooth the law, thinking about the law in a smoother fashion can help reduce the jurisprudential pathologies I describe. (shrink)

In response to a suggestion in the Class. Rev. , the two MSS. of the Liber Glossarum preserved at Tours have recently been examined. Since they had not been seen by Goetz when he published his excerpts, the following short descriptions may be added to the introduction of Vol. V. of the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum: 1. Tours, Bibliothèque de Ville, MS. No. 850; end of the ninth century; foll. 493, of which 1, 491, 492 are mere corners; cmm. 49 by (...) 29. The last item is an Isidore gloss, Zatenen.-gemmam. Gaps due to loss of folia occur between Abiectus and Abdolet; Dextera manus and Dialogus; Faber and Impulitum; Res diuinae and Samsacus. There are no corrections except between folia 197 and 300, where a thirteenth-century hand has checked the MS. by means of another copy of the Lib. Gloss. The items are drawn up in two columns, and the alphabetical arrangement agrees for the most part with that of Vat. Pal. lat. 1773. Marginal indications of the sources of the items are numerous except between Profanum and Remeantes; where two or three neighbouring items come from the same source, the marginal mark is repeated; and towards the end of the MS., where the scribe takes to writing two items in the same line, the indication is also carefully transferred. This is important in view of Goetz' theory that the source of an unlabelled item is that given by the last preceding label. (shrink)

It has become common, in both popular and scholarly discourse, to appeal to ‘delayed animation’ as an argument for abortion (DAAA). Augustine and Aquinas seemingly held that the rational soul was infused midway in pregnancy, and therefore did not regard early abortion as homicide. The authority of these thinkers is thus cited by some contemporary Christians as a reason to tolerate or, for proportionate reasons, to promote first-trimester abortion and embryo experimentation. The present essay is an exercise in aetiology. It (...) examines the origins of DAAA. Distinctions are drawn between different forms of DAAA in historical context, premises, and conclusions. Some forms raise important anthropological questions, though these arguments are not indefeasible. The most popular forms of DAAA, which are typically framed as appeals to precedent, are the weakest, in that there is little precedent for DAAA before 1950. The argument is in fact a novelty in the tradition. (shrink)