In this introduction, I consider different problems posed by the use of singular terms in fiction (section 1), paying especial attention to proper names and, in particular, to names of real people, places, etc. As we will see (section 2), descriptivist and Millian theories of reference face different kinds of problems in explaining the use of fictional names in fiction-related contexts. Moreover, the task of advancing a uniform account of names in these contexts—an account which deals not only with (...) fictional names but also with “real” names—will prove to be very hard no matter whether we favour realist or antirealist intuitions about fictional discourse (section 3). Section 4 offers an overview of the content of this volume, with emphasis on the discussion between Manuel García-Carpintero and Stacie Friend about the meaning of “real” names in fiction-related contexts, the main topic of the Third Blasco Disputatio. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière, it seems to me, is right: politics are rare. Democratic political action makes manifest the part that has no part—not as a protest against the policing order but its rejection through the affirmation of the equality of speaking beings. How can such an affirmation be supported? How can it endure? Perhaps affirming this democratic commitment can find, through the notion of assemblages, an ally, a space encouraging its manifestation and eluding capture by that which speaks in its (...) class='Hi'>name and allots it its place. But what notion of assemblages will best serve this democratic commitment? Manual DeLanda’s theoretical development of the notion first... (shrink)

A biography of the famous revivalist, readable and scholarly, though occasionally rather diffuse. Its claim to see Sunday's work "in terms of a critical reorientation in the ideological structure of American life" is not fully realized; the book tends to waver between biography and sociology without satisfying the requirements of either.--A. R.

This research ethics article focuses on an unexpected finding from my Master’s thesis examining bereaved participants’ experiences of taking part in sensitive qualitative research: some participants wanted their real names used in my written dissertation and any subsequent empirical publications. While conducting interviews for my thesis and explaining the consent process, early responses highlighted the problematic notion of anonymity for participants engaged in qualitative research. Several participants asserted the significance of immortalizing their deceased loved ones in the pages of (...) my thesis, retaining ownership over their words and maintaining a public attachment to their personal identity. The preliminary responses also resonate with concerns regarding the ethics of assigning pseudonyms and anonymity to participants in qualitative research. Themes in the extant literature tend to centre on issues of researchers’ accountability and transparency towards participants or respect. The present article contributes to the debates surrounding anonymity and confidentiality within qualitative research, and also expands on specific issues pertaining to bereavement research ethics. (shrink)

We develop and defend a novel interpretation of mainstream Marvel Comics—an interpretation we call the Fictional Journalism Interpretation. We then show how this interpretation of Marvel comics (i) challenges standard accounts of the manner in which fictional truths are generated by fictions and (ii) provides us with novel, interesting, and in some cases simpler explanations of, and understandings of, phenomena within these comics that are hard to deal with adequately on more traditional accounts, including both contradictions in the fiction and (...) various metafictional storytelling strategies. We conclude by defending the view from a number of objections. (shrink)

Undocumented and undomiciled, Gustavo Jiménez had been in the United States for several years. He knew his leg wasn’t right when it began to swell and redden. After the cellulitis spread to his bloodstream, he was found unconscious on the street and admitted to the intensive care unit. He improved quickly and was soon able to tell a social worker his name and that he had family in Quito. Then his health took a turn for the worse, and he (...) developed multisystem organ failure. His doctors believed his prognosis grave and further care futile. They wanted to invoke a provision under their state’s law that allows, at the discretion of at least two physicians, for the withdrawal of life‐sustaining therapy for isolated and decisionally incapacitated patients, but the social worker had ethical concerns about the doctors’ desire to make such a momentous decision without family input. She asked for a “time‐out to locate his family,” but one of the doctors asserted, “His family isn’t here, and you’ll never find them. Besides we need the bed. The ER is full of patients we can help.” What is owed a patient and family in such a situation? (shrink)

This article is a report on ongoing field research and the exponential growth of the environment in which sex workers, prostitutes, call girls, and escorts operate. We look at the complexity of the conditions of such work and consider the socio-psychological and media vectors that make up the context from which its actors and stereotypes emerge. With the explosion of websites offering virtual or real sex, there is also a continuation of oppressive and violent male practices in this sector, (...) restricting the freedom of choice for women who work professionally in this field. These practices reproduce the power relations and the exclusion that has always been present in society, and are also now more diffuse as virtual reality has come to play an important role in social practice. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony from his first work as co-author with Chantal Mouffe of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) to his last work On Populist Reason (2005). To that end, this corpus is analyzed with theoretical tools from Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to locate the implicit postulates in Laclau’s work and to organize his work into three main stages. We propose an interpretation of such theory from a psychoanalytic (...) perspective through three key concepts: antagonism, dislocation, and heterogeneity. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to the study of proper names. Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is prima facie a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. (...) On the other hand, proper names can have predicative uses. But the view that proper names are singular terms arguably does not have the resources to deal with these uses. In this dissertation I argue that the Predicate View of proper names is mistaken. In the first part of the thesis, I analyse this view in its main contentions and offer several arguments to reject it. This critical exercise provides useful insight into the life of proper names that I incorporate in my own view as follows: I argue that the behaviour of proper names should be understood in light of the wider phenomenon I call category change. Thus, I maintain, with orthodoxy, that proper names are fundamentally referential terms, but I also argue that they also have other uses, including the predicative uses highlighted by the predicativist. I also offer a semantic theory according to which proper names are polyreferential, that is, they are terms that can have more than one referent in a way that is distinct from both plural terms and general terms. This theory resolves the problem of multiple bearerhood and provides a base to account for all other uses of proper names that are not referential, i.e., common noun, adjectival and verbal uses, as semantically derived from the more fundamental referential meaning. (shrink)

Nijhawan redraws our attention to the problem of accurately perceiving an ever-changing visual world via a sensory system that has finite and significant communication times. The quandary is compelling and stark, but the suggestion that the visual system can compensate for these transmission delays by extrapolating the present is not so unequivocal. However, in this current airing of contradictory issues, accounts, and findings, Nijhawan trades spatial extrapolation a far more expansive notion that forces the issue of both the perceived reality (...) and functional significance of compensation. (shrink)

O artigo pauta o desafio que a teologia tem diante de si na tarefa continua de nomear o Real numa cultura pluralista. Tal desafio coloca-se, sobretudo, à teologia fundamental que se encontra diante da afirmação da experiência como locus theologico . Para enfrentar essa temática o artigo propõe duas possíveis posturas de aproximação ao desafio de nomear o Real e, logo depois, partindo de uma das afirmações, enfrenta propriamente a temática da experiência como locus theologico, e suas conseqüências (...) para a teologia. Esta, por sua vez, será abordada diante do deslocamento que a leva da prática da tutela à vocação do discernimento. Assumindo a vocação do discernimento a teologia, em sua tarefa de nomear o Real, adentra o espaço epistemológico da relacionalidade. Tal espaço se afirma na superação de aproximações metafísicas e/ou racionalistas. Palavras-chave: Teologia fundamental – Pluralismo – Experiência.: The article guides the challenge that theology is faced with the task of naming the Real remains in a pluralistic culture. This challenge arises mainly to the fundamental theology which is before the affirmation of experience as a locus theologico. To address this issue the article proposes two possible positions of approaching the challenge of naming the Real, and soon after, leaving one of the statements, properly faces the issue of experience as theologico locus and its consequences for theology. This, in turn, will be addressed before the shift that leads to the practice of guardianship to the vocation discernment. Assuming the discernment of a vocation to theology, in its task of naming the Real, enters the epistemological space of relationality. Such a space is said to overcome metaphysical approaches and / or rational. Key words: Fundamental theology - Pluralism - Experience. (shrink)

Biological taxonomists rely on the so-called ‘type method’ to regulate taxonomic nomenclature. For each newfound taxon, they lay down a ‘type specimen’ that carries with it the name of the taxon it belongs to. Even if a taxon’s circumscription is unknown and/or subject to change, it remains a necessary truth that the taxon’s type specimen falls within its boundaries. Philosophers have noted some time ago that this naming practice is in line with the causal theory of reference and its (...) central notion of rigid designation: a type specimen fixes the reference of a taxon name without defining it. Recently, however, this consensus has come under pressure in the pages of this journal. In a series of articles by Alex Levine, Joseph LaPorte, and Matthew Haber, it has been argued that type specimens belong only contingently to their species, and that this may bode problems for the relation between type method and causal theory. I will argue that this ‘contingency debate’ is a debate gone wrong, and that none of the arguments in defense of contingency withstand scrutiny. Taxonomic naming is not out of step with the causal theory, but conforms to it. However, I will also argue that this observation is itself in need of further explanation, since application of the type method in taxonomic practice is plagued by errors and ambiguities that threaten it with breaking down. Thus, the real question becomes why taxonomic naming conforms to the causal theory in the first place. I will show that the answer lies in the embedding of the type method into elaborate codes of nomenclature. (shrink)

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is pointed out that the BerlinA- KayA universal partial ordering of colours and (...) the frequency of traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary throughout to use real numbers as opposed to bi-valent quantities; and also that the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of unconditional truth, but rather several real-valued quantities associated with visual communication. The implication of real-valued truth quantities is that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped, because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycho-linguistic speech production models. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore Plato's views about the nature of language and thought, and their relations to the world. Plato is sometimes thought to hold that meaningful terms do not require referents at all. Others argue that he holds a referential theory of meaning according to which the meaning of a term just is its referent. I reject both of these views, arguing that Plato thinks that a significant term must have a referent but that the referent of a (...) term does not exhaust its signification: there is also a descriptive component. On my view, Plato embraces a mixed account according to which naming and thought are descriptive and object dependent. Moreover, according to Plato, language is prior to thought, and the way the world is---what objects there are---ultimately determines what we can talk and think about. ;I focus on the Cratylus, Theaetetus and Sophist, the dialogues in which Plato develops his most sophisticated discussions of language and thought. In the Cratylus , Plato articulates an account of the signification of names, and he reveals his views about the nature and role of nominal definitions---the clusters of descriptions that linguistically competent speakers have in mind when they use terms from their language. A name signifies a nominal definition by convention; it signifies a real nature by nature. Plato defends an account of the necessary conditions on thought in the Theaetetus where the account of thought Plato ultimately embraces is not, as some have argued, a form of Russellian acquaintance. For Plato, thought is object dependent and at the same time conceptual. The commitment to object dependence and to the fundamental status of the world is evident in all three dialogues, but it is only explicitly defended in the Sophist. Plato argues that discourse and thought are hostage to what there is. Actual, countable objects determine the possible contents of language and thought. (shrink)

In "How Do We Know It Is Now Now?" David Braddon-Mitchell (Analysis 2004) develops an objection to the thesis that the past is real but the future is not. He notes my response to this, namely that the past, although real, is lifeless and (a fortiori?) lacking in sentience. He argues, however, that this response, which I call 'the past is dead hypothesis', is not tenable if combined with 'special relativity'. My purpose in this reply is to argue (...) that, on the contrary, 'special relativity' supports the thesis that the future is unreal. (shrink)

This paper offers a close reading of PAW Media animation My Name is Danny. Drawing across a growing body of recent Central and Western Desert experimental cinema, this paper asks what is at stake in the turn to animation. Rather than escapism or otherworldly fabrications which have little to do with lived experience of the “real,” animation in this context has potent everyday exigencies and politics. The capacity for bringing to life literally – animate – is here linked (...) to the primacy of a sentient landscape; an object world already alive and enlivened with motion, movement, sensation. The question for contemporary filmmaking is how to engage country and its viscera today. How to keep country/ancestor/story alive literally through sentient forms of affective exchange; a project which animation, as this paper will explore, uniquely provides. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, as well as the animation theory of Cholodenko, Lemarre and others, this paper argues for a radical reconsideration of animation not as incompatible with tradition but in fact as facilitating traditional ontologies of affect and sensation in a national context of remote Aboriginal Australia “under occupation.”. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 59 Heft: 3 Seiten: 353-370.

The name tells the thing if it's a name. If it doesn’t tell the thing, it isn’t a name. This is the puzzling and enigmatic theory proposed by Cratilo in the homonymous Plato’s dialogue. The thesis in Hermogenes already sounds hermetic, an "oracle" which requires the presence of an interpreter to clarify what remains hidden in the terms of the sentence. According to the disciple of Heraclitus, the names are by nature guaranteed to impart pure truths, that (...) is, they are all right, at least as many as are real names. An imperfectly fitting name isn’t an inappropriate name. It would not be a name at all. In this text we would like to examine the Platonic Cratylus with respect to the meaning that lies behind the words of Cratylus and clarify his position in face of Socrates's refutation. We will therefore concentrate our attention on the last section of the dialogue devoted to the exchange between Cratylus and Socrates, especially pages 427e-440e. (shrink)

In the only two articles on the topic of which I am aware, Chad Carlson and Scott Aikin have leveled three objections against fantasy sports—namely, that participation in fantasy sports elicits...

Re-activating the philosophical quest for real definitions, I dare propose that its fulfillment is most convincingly represented, close to home, where one probably least expects it, notably in the first half of Section 36 of Word and Object, in the pages of Quine. Aristotle must inevitably remain our guide even as we insist on respecting Quine's anti-essentialism, and I must then explain how Aristotle, truncated, can be put here to use. Well, we may begin, appropriately, with a definition or (...) with what, nearly enough, smacks of being one, namely the Aristotelian slogan, definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam. Although that may be itself a real definition (of real definition), I shall not pursue this scholastic point, preferring to concentrate on my principal task which I take to be to vindicate the feasibility of formulating a real definition of some mind-independent reality. Such a vindication can scarcely succeed today unless it is recognized from the outset that we have here at hand one of those cases where the very (logical) possibility of a problematic thing can be established only by having recourse to the modal principle that actuality entails possibility. Nothing less than a concrete instance of a real definition will then suffice, and I thus expect my sceptical reader (I count on her scepticism) to be in doubt whether the scholastic bit of jargon 'real definition' picks out one of the concepts in her repertoire. (shrink)

Low heart rate causes a risk of death, heart disease, and cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, monitoring the heart rate is critical because of the heart’s function to discover its irregularity to detect the health problems early. Rapid technological advancement allows healthcare sectors to consolidate and analyze massive health-based data to discover risks by making more accurate predictions. Therefore, this work proposes a real-time prediction system for heart rate, which helps the medical care providers and patients avoid heart rate risk in (...) real time. The proposed system consists of two phases, namely, an offline phase and an online phase. The offline phase targets developing the model using different forecasting techniques to find the lowest root mean square error. The heart rate time-series dataset is extracted from Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care. Recurrent neural network, long short-term memory, gated recurrent units, and bidirectional long short-term memory are applied to heart rate time series. For the online phase, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark have been used to predict the heart rate in advance based on the best developed model. According to the experimental results, the GRU with three layers has recorded the best performance. Consequently, GRU with three layers has been used to predict heart rate 5 minutes in advance. (shrink)

Dennett [1991] proposes a novel ontological account of the propositional attitudes—real patterns. Despite its name, the degree to which this account is committed to realism remains unclear. In this paper, I propose an alternative criterion of pattern instantiation, one that assesses the difficultly of faithfully interpreting a physical system as instantiating a particular pattern. Drawing on formal measures of simplicity and similarity, I argue that, for well-instantiated patterns, our interpretation will be computable by using a short program. This (...) approach preserves the flexibility of Dennett’s original, while offering substantially stronger realist commitments. (shrink)

Can dialogue make real impact on the state of affairs in the real world, or is it a pastime of the polite societies or a lullaby useful for sending gullible grown-ups into “sleep”? In the present paper, following a two-tier analysis of the notion of dialogue, as “shared exploration towards greater understanding, connection, or possibility,” and as a product of our “collective intentionality,” I shall develop a bifurcated argument. Against the cynic pundits, who preach that realpolitik and not (...) dialogue is the name of the game in our daily interactions with each other, I shall argue that in an increasingly pluralistic world, dialogue is a powerful and indispensable means for making desirable changes. Similarly, against the over-enthusiastic optimists who believe that dialogue provides us with a magical wand, I shall argue that dialogue is as good as we can make it: dialogue cannot work miracles in a vacuum of collective will. The upshot of my argument is that firstly, dialogue is an indicator of the rationality and maturity of the social actors: the more rational the social actors the more ubiquitous and effective the dialogue and vice versa. And secondly, although, dialogue itself may lead to frustration or even violence, it is the absence of dialogue that poses the greatest danger for the future of mankind. (shrink)

Background: The risk of surgery in eloquent areas is related to neuropsychological dysfunctions. Maximizing the extent of resection increases the overall survival. The onco-functional balance is mandatory when surgery involves cognitive areas, and maximal information on the cognitive status of patients during awake surgery is needed. This can be achieved using direct cortical stimulation mapping and, in addition to this, a neuropsychological monitoring technique called real-time neuropsychological testing. The RTNT includes testing protocols based on the area where the surgery (...) is performed. We reported on tests used for left temporal lobe surgery and our RTNT decision tree.Case Report: We reported our RTNT experience with a 25-year-old right-handed man with 13 years of schooling. He reported daily partial seizures. MRI revealed the presence of a low-grade glioma involving the temporo-insular cortex. The neuropsychological status presurgery which was within the normal range was combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging information. Awake surgery plus RTNT was performed. Direct electrical stimulation during object naming elicited a motor speech arrest. Resection was continuously accompanied by the RTNT. The RTNT provided enriched information to the surgeon. Performance never dropped. A slight decrement in accuracy emerged for pseudoword repetition, short-term memory and working memory, phonological processing, and verbal comprehension. Total resection was performed, and the histological examination confirmed the nature of the lesion. Immediate postsurgery performance was within the normal range as it was the fMRI and DTI assessment.Conclusion: The RTNT provides essential information that can be used online, during surgery, for clinical aims to provide the surgeon with useful feedback on the cognitive status of patients. (shrink)

According to the Economic Survey of India, 2012–2013, the real estate sector contributed 5.9 % of the India’s total Gross Domestic Product in the Financial Year 2011–2012, while remaining the second largest employment generator after agriculture in India. The urban population in India is projected to touch 600 million by 2030, from 377 million in 2011, thereby fuelling a housing shortage of around 26 million. However, the perception of Construction industry, like other sectors of the economy, is that of (...) creating “human habitat in a manner generally focussed on profitability without consideration of its long-term impacts.” Under such circumstances, Tata Housing Development Company Limited, a closely held Public Limited Company under 99.86 % subsidiary of Tata Sons, is the first Indian real estate company to have reported the triple bottom-line Global Reporting Initiative G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in its Sustainability Report FY 2013–2014. THDCL aims to volunteer its resources to the extent it can reasonably afford, to sustain the environment and to improve the quality of life of the people of the area in which it operates. This Situational Case Study, targeted towards management students and practitioners, and social and developmental workers in the areas of Corporate Governance, Strategic Management, Business Environment, Business Policy and Community Welfare, aims to identify the community engagement model of THDCL; analyse it in terms of its implementation and impact; and initiate discussion about the role of strategic partnerships under Corporate Social Responsibility in an emerging economy. This work may be used for developmental related workshops/training programmes for students and working professionals of innovation, CSR, sustainability, social and developmental sectors and shared, among others, in various Chambers of Commerce and Academic forums on the same. It is, however, not intended to serve as an endorsement, source of data or illustration of effective or ineffective management. Certain names and information could have been disguised for confidentiality. (shrink)

With reference to Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (PoM) in my paper I will address three points, namely: To what extent Schelling’s PoM provides us with arguments in favour of 1. Realism, 2. Emergentism and 3. Documentality (Ferraris 2009). Accordingly, in the first section, Reality, I will present Schelling’s PoM as realism, arguing that in mythology Schelling finds the traces of the developing of consciousness, regarded as a real fact. But, as this latter can only be real if having (...) a history, i.e. if emerging from a previous natural status, which is devoid of any consciousness, PoM should be regarded as strongly related with a sort of emergentism. This will thus be the object of the second section, where I will investigate the genetic interpretation of Schelling’s Weltalter proposed by Wolfram Hogrebe (Hogrebe 1989) and suggest that precisely this analysis of the Weltalter explains also why Schelling’s project couldn’t but fail. In fact, against its intention, the Weltalter, as it was trying to explain the rise of semantics together with it the true genesis of the our acknowledgment of the world, still remains affected by an idealistic stance and hence couldn’t succeed in becoming positive philosophy. Eventually, in the third section of this paper, Documentality, I argue, that a solution of the problems left open by Schelling’s Weltalter and positively addressed in the PoM is offered by the interpretation of this latter as a contribution to Documentality. Even if created before and apparently independently from the act writing, in fact mythology relies on the possibility of recording tales, hence it is made of and eventually ends up in a written corpus. This means that the consciousness mythology gives us an account of, is the one that for the first time is able to present itself in narrated tales. It is not the mere possibility of acknowledging something, but in fact the possibility of binding our will to a freely formulated law trough our memory, i.e. the birth of conscience upon consciousness, which is the real sense of religion. In this sense Ferraris’ concept of documentality provides us an important theoretical framework to understand the hidden presuppositions of Schelling’s PoM and to relate this latter to its realistic and emergentistic character. (shrink)

Naming, according to Sebeok, constihttes the first stage of zoosemiotics. This special but common use of language acrually inaugurates more complicated procedures of human discourse on non-human kingdom, including classification of its members. Because of language's double articulation in sound and sense, as well as the grapheme's pleremic (meaning-full) rather than cenemic (meaning-empty) characteristic (according to Hjelmslev). Chinese script is capable of naming and grouping animals randomly but effectively. This paper attempts to describe the said scriptorial "necessity of naming" (Kripke) (...) in classical Chinese by citing all the creatures, real or fabulous, with a /ma/ (horse) radical. (shrink)

While Kierkegaard creates characters who represent various ways of existing as lovers in the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, namely, Johannes the Seducer and Judge William, he does not have a corresponding character for love in the religious sphere. Is there truly only marginal space for romantic love in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, or did his own personal history prevent him from being able to imagine what that might look like? This paper examines a commonly overlooked discourse, “On the Occasion of (...) a Wedding,” for Kierkegaardian insights on erotic love in the religious sphere. Against understanding erotic love as a moment (in the aesthetic sphere), or a duty (in the ethical sphere), this paper explores how “On the Occasion of a Wedding” recasts erotic love as gift. Kierkegaard stages the “imagined occasion” of a wedding as a phenomenological reduction through which love presents itself with gift‐like characteristics. Respecting the gift‐status of love transforms the lover into a grateful recipient rather than a seducer or a conqueror. This paper concludes that the proper response to love as gift would be neither to refuse it in favor of nihilistic uncertainty nor to possess it through triumphalistic objectivity, but to humbly embrace both its “already” and its “not yet” dimensions. (shrink)

Hegel frequently identifies ethical life with a “second nature.” This strategy has puzzled those who assume that second nature represents a deficient appearance of ethical life, one that needs to be overcome, supplemented, or constantly challenged. I argue that Hegel identifies ethical life with a second nature because he thinks that a social order only becomes a candidate for ethical life, if it provides a context conducive to the development of what I call “real habits.” First, I show that (...) a criterion for a real habit can be found in Hegel's Anthropology, namely, that of liberation. Next, I explain how the state, as Hegel analyzes it in the Philosophy of Right, provides such an environment by enabling trust toward and within it. I then consider two literary examples of contexts that fail to be similarly supportive—Coates' Between the World and Me and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale—concluding with reasons for thinking that real habits are an integral part of ethical life. (shrink)

This study provides a thorough exegesis of the names of metaphysics according to the proem of the Disputationes metaphysicae by Francis Suarez. The key to its consideration lies in the simultaneous unity between this science and the names assigned to it mainly by Aristotle. Due to the scant attention devoted to this work, this study emphasizes that the epistemic unity of metaphysics is given beforehand –prior to the final consideration and determination of its proper object, which is the entity insofar (...) real entity– by the complementarity of the different perspectives each name of metaphysics denotes. (shrink)

Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, (...) however, is not simply located in its object, in the cruelty of what happened in the camp. The Shoah makes us at the same time facing the unimaginable ‘real’ of the modern subject—the blind spot in our own identity. If we need imagination to deal with the Shoah, it is also because of an ungraspable ‘real’ in ourselves. This is why adequate Shoah representations, acknowledging their object as being beyond representation, include the same ‘beyond’ concerning the subject of the Holocaust memory. The essay makes this clear in an elaborated comparison of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film, Shoah, with some conceptual works of art from the late nineties—all of this ‘fine-tuned’ in a reflection upon Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAssuming there are fictional objects, what sorts of properties do they have? Intuitively, most of their properties involve being represented—appearing in works of fiction, being depicted as clever, being portrayed by actors, being admired or feared, and so on. But several philosophers, including Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, Kendall Walton, and Amie Thomasson, argue that even if there are fictional objects, they are not really represented in some or all of these cases. I reconstruct four kinds of arguments for this (...) unexpected conclusion; they concern the semantics of names, pragmatic force, creation, and representations’ qualitative content. But I find all the arguments flawed. I then argue for the contrary, employing a new perspective: representation of fictional objects begins with the works of fiction that originate them. A work of fiction represents its “native” objects because our culture bestows that property on it. I sketch conditions for such property bestowal and argue that they are satisfied in this case. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the real and only victims of insider trading are those being wrongfully prosecuted under the current broad interpretation of Rule 10(b)-5 of the Securities Exchange Act. The term ‘insider trading’ has no clear legal definition and thus lends itself to prosecutorial overreach. I argue that such overreach characterizes the numerous insider trading investigations and prosecutions currently being pursued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Rather than any valid application of securities law, these (...) prosecutions reflect political opportunism and the influence of powerful special interests within the securities industry. I conclude by advocating that Rule 10(b)-5 be applied as originally intended, namely to deter active securities fraud and price manipulation only. (shrink)

For which infinite cardinals $\kappa $ is there a partition of the real line ${\mathbb R}$ into precisely $\kappa $ Borel sets? Work of Lusin, Souslin, and Hausdorff shows that ${\mathbb R}$ can be partitioned into $\aleph _1$ Borel sets. But other than this, we show that the spectrum of possible sizes of partitions of ${\mathbb R}$ into Borel sets can be fairly arbitrary. For example, given any $A \subseteq \omega $ with $0,1 \in A$, there is a forcing (...) extension in which ${A = \{ n :\, \text {there is a partition of } {{\mathbb R}} \text { into }\aleph _n\text { Borel sets}\}}$. We also look at the corresponding question for partitions of ${\mathbb R}$ into closed sets. We show that, like with partitions into Borel sets, the set of all uncountable $\kappa $ such that there is a partition of ${\mathbb R}$ into precisely $\kappa $ closed sets can be fairly arbitrary. (shrink)

We study the relationship between a computably enumerable real and its presentations. A set A presents a computably enumerable real α if A is a computably enumerable prefix-free set of strings such that equation image. Note that equation image is precisely the measure of the set of reals that have a string in A as an initial segment. So we will simply abbreviate equation image by μ. It is known that whenever A so presents α then A ≤wttα, (...) where ≤wtt denotes weak truth table reducibility, and that the wtt-degrees of presentations form an ideal ℐ in the computably enumerable wtt-degrees. We prove that any such ideal is equation image, and conversely that if ℐ is any nonempty equation image ideal in the computably enumerable wtt-degrees then there is a computable enumerable real α such that ℐ = ℐ. We also prove a kind of Rice Theorem for these ideals, namely that if the index set of such a equation image ideal is not empty or equal to ω then it is equation image-complete. (shrink)

We investigate the behavior of cardinal characteristics of the reals under extensions that do not add new [Formula: see text]-sequences (for some regular [Formula: see text]). As an application, we show that consistently the following cardinal characteristics can be different: The (“independent”) characteristics in Cichoń’s diagram, plus [Formula: see text]. (So we get thirteen different values, including [Formula: see text] and continuum). We also give constructions to alternatively separate other MA-numbers (instead of [Formula: see text]), namely: MA for [Formula: see (...) text]-Knaster from MA for [Formula: see text]-Knaster; and MA for the union of all [Formula: see text]-Knaster forcings from MA for precaliber. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantics and meta-semantics for ordinary names in fiction. It has recently been argued by some philosophers that when ordinary names are used in fictional contexts, they change their semantic contents and work as fictional names in general. In this paper, I argue that there is no compelling reason to believe that such reference changes occur and defend the view that whether those names refer to real or fictional objects depends on which semantic intentions speakers (...) have. (shrink)

Is the reference to the Book of Job sufficient to explain why Hobbes gave the name ‘Leviathan’ to the state he advocated? Had he not been aware of how maligned this name had been for centuries: that it not only referred to a monster, but soon became synonymous with the devil himself? - The “long shadow” that, according to Carl Schmitt, the name ‘Leviathan’ alone had cast on Hobbes’s work from the very beginning was first cleared somewhat (...) in 2007 by Noel Malcolm’s reference to Jacques Boulduc’s Job- commentary of 1619/37. As far as the “extraneous influence” in question is concerned, however, reference could also be made to the Job-commentary of a certain Joseph Caryl of 1643, which in turn took away some of the scandalous connotation of the biblical Leviathan. The real key to Hobbes’s naming, however, may lie with Jean Bodin, with whom Hobbes shares everything that the name ‘Leviathan’ stands for in his political philosophy. (shrink)