In this new translation the brilliant and impassioned descriptions of Augustine's colourful early life are conveyed to the English reader with accuracy and art. Augustine tells of his wrestlings to master his sexual drive, his rare ascent from a humble Algerian farm to the edge of the corridors of high power at the imperial court of Milan, and his renunciation of secular ambition and marriage as he recovered the faith that his mother had taught him. It was in a Milan (...) garden that Augustine finally achieved the act of will to Christian conversion, which he compared to a lazy man in bed finally deciding it is time to get up and face the day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

A entrevista concedida por Emmanuel de Saint Aubert a Silvana de Souza Ramos e a Iracy Ferreira dos Santos Junior aborda a história e o papel dos Arquivos Husserl de Paris para o fomento da pesquisa multidisciplinar em fenomenologia. O pensador esclarece qual foi o contato de Merleau-Ponty com os manuscritos de Husserl, e que tipo de leitura, situada e complicada, ele realizou não apenas desses manuscritos, mas da obra de Husserl como um todo. Esse aspecto é particularmente importante (...) para os estudos de filosofia francesa contemporânea porque Merleau-Ponty foi um dos grandes responsáveis pela introdução de Husserl no pensamento francês. Tal esclarecimento permite mostrar a originalidade da filosofia de Merleau-Ponty, pois revela que o autor não era um exegeta de Husserl, mas um pesquisador inquieto e multifacetado, engajado nos debates intelectuais e políticos de sua época. Se ele não pode ser reduzido à figura de um mero leitor de Husserl, tampouco sua ontologia tardia pode ser resumida à influência de Heidegger. Debruçado sobre os manuscritos deixados inacabados por Merleau-Ponty em função de sua morte prematura, os quais eram um esboço de um novo livro, Saint Aubert realizou um minucioso trabalho de pesquisa dos usos que Merleau-Ponty faz de termos centrais de sua ontologia – chair, Leib, empiétement, quiasma – mostrando que eles não traduzem ou expressam literalmente conceitos provenientes de Husserl ou de Heidegger, pelo contrário, esses termos ganham uma gama de sentido multifacetada nos escritos de Merleau-Ponty, alimentando-se de suas leituras e meditações filosóficas, mas também de sua cultura científica e literária, e de suas preocupações éticas e políticas. A pesquisa de Saint Aubert, dedicada à interpretação dos chamados “inéditos” de Merleau-Ponty, resultou na publicação de cinco livros, pelas edições Vrin, todos eles guiados por uma leitura genética transversal da obra merleau-pontiana. Além disso, Saint Aubert, com a ajuda de outros pesquisadores e pesquisadoras, publicou, com apurado cuidado editorial, vários volumes com os manuscritos de Merleau-Ponty. Esse material, disponível de modo organizado e situado, é de uma riqueza incomparável, e permite dimensionar de modo mais preciso o papel de Merleau-Ponty no pensamento contemporâneo, além de iluminar o sentido de seu projeto ontológico. (shrink)

These new translations of two treatises dealing with the possibility and nature of knowledge in the face of skeptical challenges are the first to be rendered from the Latin critical edition, the first to be made specifically with a philosophical audience in mind, and the first to be translated by a scholar with expertise in both modern epistemology and philosophy of language.

For several centuries prior to the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875, individual 'theosophers' in Britain and Europe were quietly in touch with one another all seekers of the inward way. Theosophic Correspondence (1792 1797) is a series of inspiring letters, personal and philosophic, exchanged during the climactic days of the French Revolution between Kirchberger, member of the Sovereign Council at Berne, Switzerland, and Saint-Martin, whom Kirchberger regarded as 'the most eminent writer . . . and most profound (...) of his age'. (shrink)

Our evidential environments are reflections of our social contexts. This is important because the evidence we encounter influences the beliefs we form. But, traditional epistemologists have paid little attention to the generation of this evidential environment, assuming that it is irrelevant to epistemic normativity. This assumption, I argue, is dangerous. Idealizing away the evidential environment obscures the ways that our social contexts distort its contents. Such social distortion can lead to evidential oppression, an epistemic injustice arising from the ubiquity of (...) ideologically-inflected portrayals of oppressed social groups. In some cases, this distortion can be so pervasive as to create a skeptical pothole in agents' epistemic environments---a limited region in which a skeptical scenario obtains. The skeptical challenge of social distortion is important because it suggests that prejudice and irrationality alone may not be enough to explain many harmful beliefs. Where justified belief is merely a matter of responding well to one's evidence, the ubiquity of ideologically-inflected evidence may impel a matching doxastic state, even for exemplary epistemic agents. Nevertheless, there is an asymmetry in blameworthiness between the Cartesian victim and someone laboring under evidential oppression. This asymmetry reveals the need for distinctively non-ideal epistemic norms. I offer a characterization of one such norm: the internalist practice of self-stewardship. (shrink)

New translations of two treatises by the fourth-century Christian thinker dealing with the possibility and nature of knowledge. Intended specifically for philosophical readers and suitable as a text for a course in medieval philosophy, Augustine, or church history. No subject index. Paper edition, $12.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Qu'est-ce que l'action? Une rupture dans le cours du temps, une prise de risques, un commencement. L'agent, tel le plongeur quittant le bord, ne peut revenir en arrière ; l'exécution l'engage tout entier, corps et âme ; il doit faire confiance au monde, aux autres et à lui-même. C'est par l'action que la nouveauté entre dans la nature et dans l'histoire. Ces caractères de l'action sont-ils universels ou varient-ils selon les cultures et les époques? Bien qu'il existe différents styles d'action, (...) les modélisations dramatiques (par le récit) et mathématiques (par le calcul) du phénomène en font ressortir l'unité. En même temps, la dualité du dramatique et du mathématique est insurmontable, sans doute parce que l'histoire humaine est tragique et que la tragédie se prête mal au calcul mathématique. L'action nous révèle notre identité, y compris nos faiblesses, et commande notre destin. Cet essai fait le pari que les hommes peuvent faire prévaloir la raison pour régler les conflits. Il considère la notion chrétienne de communion des saints comme une source majeure des essais politiques et scientifiques pour nous faire prendre la mesure de l'unité du genre humain, malgré la tentation de nous enfermer dans des "sociétés closes". (shrink)

Idealization is a necessity. Stripping away levels of complexity makes questions tractable, focuses our attention, and lets us develop comprehensible, testable models. Applying such models, however, requires care and attention to how the idealizations incorporated into their development affect their predictions. In epistemology, we tend to focus on idealizations concerning individual agents' capacities, such as memory, mathematical ability, and so on, when addressing this concern. By contrast, this dissertation focuses on social idealizations, particularly those pertaining to salient social categories like (...) race, sex, and gender. In Chapter II, Privilege and Superiority, we begin with standpoint epistemology, one of the earliest efforts to grapple with the ways that social structures affect our epistemic lives. I argue that, if we interpret standpoint epistemologists' claims as hypotheses about the ways that our social positions affect access to evidence, we can fruitfully employ recent developments in evidence logic to study the consequences. I lay the groundwork for this project, developing a model based on neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Adapting this framework to standpoint epistemology helps to clarify the meaning of terms like "epistemic privilege" and "superior knowledge" and to elucidate the differences between various accounts of standpoint epistemology. I also address a longstanding criticism of these views: Longino's (1990) bias paradox, which suggests that there is no objective position from which to judge the goodness of a particular standpoint. Chapter III, Evidence in a Non-Ideal World, turns to the broader social context, looking at how ideology affects the availability of evidence. Throughout the chapter, I take the formation, justification, and maintenance of racist, sexist, and otherwise oppressive beliefs as a central case. I argue that these beliefs are, at least sometimes, formed as a result of evidential distortion, a structural feature of our epistemic contexts that skews readily available evidence in favor of dominant ideologies. Because they are formed this way, such beliefs will appear justified on prominent accounts of justification, both internalist and externalist. As a result, epistemic norms that fail to account for such non-ideal conditions will deliver verdicts that are not only counter-intuitive, but also morally unpalatable. This, I argue, reveals a kind of structural epistemic injustice, especially where oppressive ideology is involved and suggests the need for epistemic norms that are sensitive to agents' social contexts. Much of the discussion in Chapters II and III depends on social categories like race and gender, arguing that they have a distinctive influence on our epistemic lives. In Chapter IV, I Know You Are, But What Am I?, my co-author and I focus on social categories themselves, distinguishing between self-identity, social identity, and social role. We self-identify as gay or straight, men or women, couch-potatoes or gym rats. Sometimes, these identities affect our social roles---the way we are perceived and treated by others---and sometimes they do not. This relationship between our internal identities and our preferred public perceptions begs for explanation. On our account, this relationship is captured by what we refer to as 'social identity'---roughly, internal identities made available to others. We argue that this account of social identity plays an illuminating role in structural explanation of discrimination and individual behavior, dissolves puzzles surrounding the phenomenon of 'passing', and explains certain moral and political obligations toward individuals. (shrink)

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing (...) literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. (shrink)

‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance (...) logic. Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest. (shrink)

In this article, we first present the platform and the Dislog language, designed for discourse analysis with a logic and linguistic perspective. The platform has now reached a certain level of maturity which allows the recognition of a large diversity of discourse structures including general-purpose rhetorical structures as well as domain-specific discourse structures. The Dislog language is based on linguistic considerations and includes knowledge access and inference capabilities. Functionalities of the language are presented together with a method for writing discourse (...) analysis rules. Efficiency and portability of the system over domains and languages are investigated to conclude this first part. In a second part, we analyse the different types of arguments found in several document genres, most notably: procedures, didactic texts and requirements. Arguments form a large class of discourse relations. A generic and frequently encountered form emerges from our analysis: ?reasons for conclusion? which constitutes a homogeneous family of arguments from a language, functional and conceptual point of view. This family can be viewed as a kind of proto-argument. We then elaborate its linguistic structure and show how it is implemented in . We then investigate the cooperation between explanation and arguments, in particular in didactic texts where they are particularly rich and elaborated. This article ends with a prospective section that develops current and potential uses of this work and how it can be extended to the recognition of other forms of arguments. (shrink)

Le Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l'homme et l'univers est un ouvrage fondamental pour ceux qui cherchent à comprendre les mystères de la Création. Pour Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, l'homme porte en lui-même la clé de tous les mystères. Se connaître soi-même est donc la condition primordiale pour accéder à la Connaissance. Les textes sacrés nous enseignent que l'histoire de l'humanité est liée à un drame en trois actes. Le premier est celui de l'âge d'or ; le (...) deuxième celui d'une chute douloureuse dans la matière ; le troisième, qui reste à venir, sera marqué par une rédemption, une réintégration dans le Divin. L'auteur de ce livre s'efforce de percer le sens ésotérique de ces trois étapes. Il montre aussi que l'impasse dans laquelle se trouve l'homme résulte de la confusion qui règne dans ses pensées. S'il nourrissait sa volonté à la chaleur de l'Amour divin, il accéderait à la régénération d'une manière naturelle, et l'humanité trouverait la Connaissance menant à la Paix Profonde. (shrink)

Dieses Buch erhalten Sie als BonD-Ausgabe. Dabei handelt es sich um einen Nachdruck der vergriffenen Originalausgabe von 1999 - hergestellt auf Bestellung, mit einem hochwertigen Digitaldruckverfahren. Das Traktat "De principiis naturae" ist eines der fruhesten Werke des Thomas von Aquin, in dem er das von der Tradition arabischer Aristoteles-Auslegung rezipierte Gedankenmaterial einer originellen Synthese unterzieht, die fur sein gesamtes Denken grundlegend ist. Mit der ihm eigenen denkerischen Stringenz entwirft Thomas hier seinen Seinsbegriff durch eine Analyse der Prinzipien des konkret Seienden: (...) Aus der alles Endliche bestimmenden Differenz zwischen Wirklichkeit und Moglichkeit schliesst er auf die Ursachen des Seins, um dann die fur seine Ontologie zentrale Analogielehre zu entfalten. Aufgrund ihres einfuhrenden Charakters eroffnet diese - hier erstmals in deutscher Ubersetzung edierte - Schrift einen authentischen Zugang zum philosophischen Gedankengebaude des Aquinaten. (shrink)

Interwoven with natural structurations and personal history, the flesh , in Merleau-Ponty's gradually-forged conception, is nourished by the combined influences of neurology, Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis. This triple influence undergirds a recurring theme in his later writings: the mirror . "The flesh is a mirror phenomenon," Merleau-Ponty tells us. The unpublished manuscripts reveal that this famous clause refers neither directly to Husserl, nor to Wallon and Lacan, but is driven by contemporary readings of Paul Schilder and Wolfgang Metzger, who study (...) the phenomena of distanciated migrations of the body-image in vision. The mirror mingles objective body with phenomenal body, in an effective community between my lived body and its external image. It shows how the flesh lives both within and outside of itself, animated by an essential incompleteness that engages perception in a process of incorporation and, thus, hints at intercorporeity. (shrink)

This article is about a period of technology transfer – the late 1910s and 1920s – when wartime aerial reconnaissance techniques and operations were being adapted to a range of civilian uses, including urban planning, land use analysis, traffic control, tax equalization, and even archaeology. At the center of the discussion is the ‘photomosaic’: a patchwork of overlapping aerial photographs that have been rectified and fit together so as to form a continuous survey of a territory. Initially developed during the (...) First World War to provide coverage of fronts, photomosaic mapping was widely practiced and celebrated during the postwar years as an aid to urban development. The article traces both the refinements in photomosaic technology after the Armistice and the rhetorical means by which the form’s avant-garde wartime reputation was domesticated into an ‘applied realism’ that often effaced its site-specific perspective, its elaborately rectified optics, and the oppositionality of both its military and civilian uses. The article has a broader theoretical aim as well. Classic statements of both structuralist and post-structuralist spatial theory (Barthes and de Certeau are the primary examples here) have produced an ossified geometry wherein the vertical is the axis of paradigm, top-down strategy, and manipulative distance and the horizontal the axis of syntagm, grassroots tactics, and resistant proximities and differences. In its close study of the technology and rhetoric surrounding interwar photogrammetry, the article provides an example of how one might reverse the long-standing misrecognition of high-altitude optics as effacing time, difference, and materiality – and what it might mean to view such optics as, instead, a resource in turning from abstract toward differential conceptions of both aerial photography and our theoretical habits. This turn I call ‘applied modernism’, a term that accesses both the wartime photomosaic’s affiliation with avant-garde painting and its insistence that portraits of the total are always projections from partial, specific vantages. (shrink)

Santo Tomás de Aquino comenzó a redactar estos Comentarios a las correspondientes obras de Aristóteles en Roma (1268) y los terminó en París (1269). Son un complemento al tratado "Del alma" y dan por supuesto lo que este tratado explica sobre la esencia, las facultades y los actos del alma, especialmente los actos de los sentidos, tanto externos como internos. Aunque a lo largo de sus "Comentarios" Santo Tomás repite algunos rasgos básicos de la sensación expuestos en "Del alma", su (...) preocupación es explanar la psicofísica de tales actos en relación con sus objetos respectivos. Por lo que a la secuencia de estos libros se refiere, se aprecia un avance vital desde el comentario esquivo al "De sensu et sensato" al cautivante comentario al "De memoria et reminiscentia". Al traspasar la raya ideal que divide el mundo exterior y el interior, penetramos en un ámbito de luz orientadora y de ejercicio persuasivo. (shrink)

The idea that our epistemic practices can be wrongful has been the core observation driving the growing literature on epistemic injustice, doxastic wronging, and moral encroachment. But, one element of our epistemic practice has been starkly absent from this discussion of epistemic morality: attention. The goal of this article is to show that attention is a worthwhile focus for epistemology, especially for the field of epistemic morality. After presenting a new dilemma for proponents of doxastic wronging, I show how focusing (...) on attention not only allows us to defuse that dilemma, but also helps to substantiate accounts of what goes wrong in cases of doxastic wronging. (shrink)

Virtue signaling—using public moral discourse to enhance one’s moral reputation—is a familiar concept. But, what about profile pictures framed by “Vaccines work!”? Or memes posted to anti-vaccine groups echoing the group’s view that “Only sheep believe Big Pharma!”? These actions don’t express moral views—both claims are empirical (if imprecise). Nevertheless, they serve a similar purpose: to influence the judgments of their audience. But, where rainbow profiles guide their audience to view the agent as morally good, these acts guide their audience (...) to view the agent as epistemically good. They are instances of epistemic virtue signaling. The first goal of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic virtue signaling. I argue that epistemic virtue signaling occurs through both behavioral and propositional signals, and serves purposes similar to those of moral virtue signaling across a wide variety of discourses. The second is to show that there is much work for this concept to do. In particular, this concept illuminates a double bind faced by those who suffer from and seek to overcome testimonial injustice. I close by demonstrating how this double bind arises in the dissolution of medical autonomy, focusing on the care gap faced by pregnant women of color in the United States today, as compared with their white counterparts. (shrink)

Sarah is a young deaf woman in revolt, refusing to speak. She marries James, an orthophonist who works in a special school for the deaf. However, what gradually emerges in the course of their relationship is the latent suffering caused by what each of the partners isn't getting. James, tired of acting as Sarah's interpreter, frustrated by the limits of what they can share, shouts out:You want to be independent of me, you want to be a person in your own (...) right, you want people not to pity you … then you [must] learn to read my lips and you [must] learn to use that little mouth of yours for something besides eating and showing me you're better than hearing girls in bed! Come on! Read my lips? What am I saying? Say what I'm saying … You always have to be dependent on someone, and you always will for the rest of your life until you learn to speak. Now come on! I want you to speak to me. Let me hear it. Speak! Speak! Speak! …. (shrink)

In Caribbean literature, being gazed upon is often part of a larger design of imperial governance, conquest and appropriation, where surveillance is constant and omnipresent, particularly in texts that centre on life on the plantation or are set within the colonial house itself. In his first novel Witchbroom, Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott presents a family saga through the eyes of the family’s last surviving member, Lavren, a hermaphrodite, trickster-narrator who travels through time to write down the record of his/herstory. To (...) tell his/her ‘Carnival Tales’, the narrator sets the scene in the houses of Kairi, in which the turret room features prominently. The room’s shape, location and the vantage point it offers to its privileged entrants allows them to have eyes on everything that goes on on the family estate and to record events accordingly. But the turret room also serves as a place of gendered confinement and seclusion replete with blind spots that the trickster-narrator–or, perhaps, the implied author?–will expose through his/her own supervisory gaze. As such, this contribution proposes to analyse the turret room as a complex and somewhat paradoxical site where scopic power serves at once to hide and reveal, and as a space that concomitantly functions as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’. By focusing on the carnivalesque, metafictional dimensions of the novel more particularly, the article will ultimately seek to examine iterations of authorial control and reader manipulation as literary reassessments of panopticism. (shrink)

This book examines education and the aim of life through the ages; how the conception of progress is the primary driving force in the modern world; and how this limited understanding of progress has failed to satisfy the deepest aspirations of humanity, bringing modern civilisation to its present crisis and highlighting the limitations of today's education to meet this crisis. The author presents the free progress system at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and explains how the views of (...) Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on integral education can prepare the children of today to consciously and luminously participate in the evolutionary destiny of the future. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerised lexicons for the automatic (...) treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)

According to an intuitive picture of relevant entailment, an entailment is relevant if all the formulas it contains contribute to its validity. In this paper, we provide a ground-theoretic analysis of this notion of contribution, and as a result of relevant entailment. We build a system of bilateral logical grounding within which we can derive classical entailment and analyze the contribution of premises and conclusions, in terms of a certain type of connection between their respective logical grounds. The resulting framework (...) is shown to have a strong unifying and explanatory power by bringing together the notions of grounding and relevance and explaining the commonalities and differences between alternative contribution-based accounts of relevance. (shrink)