This superb collection of writings on buddha nature by the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje (1284-1339) focuses on the transition from ordinary deluded consciousness to enlightened wisdom, the characteristics of buddhahood, and a buddha's enlightened activity. Most of these materials have never been translated comprehensively. The Third Karmapa's unique and well-balanced view synthesizes Yogacara Madhyamaka and the classical teachings on buddha nature. Rangjung Dorje not only shows that these teachings do not contradict each other but also that they supplement each other (...) and share the same essential points in terms of the ultimate nature of mind and all phenomena. His fusion is remarkable because it clearly builds on Indian predecessors and precedes the later often highly charged debates in Tibet about the views of Rangtong ("self-empty") and Shentong ("other-empty"). Although Rangjung Dorje is widely regarded as one of the major proponents of the Tibetan Shentong tradition (some even consider him its founder), this book shows how his views differ from the Shentong tradition as understood by Dolpopa Taranatha and the First Jamgon Kongtrul. The Third Karmapa's view is more accurately described as one in which the two categories of rangtong and shentong are not regarded as mutually exclusive but are combined in a creative synthesis. For those practicing the sutrayana and the vajrayana in the Kagyu tradition, what these texts describe can be transformed into living experience. (shrink)

Den tredje earlen av Shaftesbury (1671–1713) var en av 1700-talets mest inflytelserika filosofer. Dialogen Moralisterna är Shaftesburys viktigaste verk, i vilket han undersöker den godhet, kärlek och skönhet som utmärker naturen och samhället. Med sin säregna blandning av moralfilosofi, estetisk teori och poesi intar Moralisterna en unik plats inom den europeiska upplysningen. -/- Karl Axelsson är lektor i estetik vid Södertörns högskola. Utöver själva översättningen bidrar han med en omfattande inledning om Shaftesburys filosofi, förklarande noter och hänvisningar till Shaftesburys övriga (...) verk. (shrink)

By a fragment of a natural language, we understand a collection of sentences forming a naturally delineated subset of that language and equipped with a semantics commanding the general assent of its native speakers. By the semantic complexity of such a fragment, we understand the computational complexity of deciding whether any given set of sentences in that fragment represents a logically possible situation. In earlier papers by the first author, the semantic complexity of various fragments of English involving at most (...) transitive verbs was investigated. The present paper considers various fragments of English involving ditransitive verbs and determines their semantic complexity. (shrink)

Information and its cognate concepts are frequently used in increasingly varied areas of scientific and scholarly investigations, from computing and engineering to philosophy and the social sciences. As a consequence, a great deal of interesting and exciting research is taking place in a wide range of fields, which do not always communicate with each other. So the second workshop1 of the IEG (the interdepartmental research group in philosophy of information at the University of Oxford2), took the shape of a series (...) of seminars, hosted in Oxford by the Department of Engineering Science, during the academic year 2008–2009. The project aimed to bring together leading experts in the broadly construed area of information research, with the goal of offering a stimulating series of talks and discussions on “the nature and scope of information”. (shrink)

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). (...) The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is.. (shrink)

Is it the task of legal semiotics or the legal philosophers to define legal semiotics? For the philosopher of law, the question recalls the distinction between philosophers’ philosophy of law and legal scholars’ philosophy of law. The thesis that the paper argues is that a semiotic legal perspective can also be sought from the analysis of anthropological knowledge on the origin of the social bond and society, implying a social and institutional theory of the mind. In the first paragraph, the (...) search for a different kind of rationality emerges from a semiotician, Jürgen Trabant, who analyses semiotically the thought of a rhetorician and philosopher of law, Giambattista Vico. In the second paragraph, the anthropological notion of social bond emerges from the debate on the relationship between the idea of the gift and that of exchange. In the third paragraph, the analysis of the legal notion of thirdness recognizes the central role of myth and fiction in the configuration of the civil world and sign, returning to Vico’s critical view of the philosophy of language as an institution of society. (shrink)

The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik. Edited by IlyA Arkhipov, Leonid Kogan, and Natalia Koslova. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 50. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 829, illus. $234.

Third World and transnational feminisms have emerged in opposition to white second-wave feminists’ single-pronged analyses of gender oppression that elided Third World women’s multiple and complex oppressions in their various social locations. Consequently, these feminisms share two “Third World feminist” mandates: First, feminist analyses of Third World women’s oppression and resistance should be historically situated; and second, Third World women’s agency and voices should be respected. Despite these shared mandates, they have diverged in their proper domains of investigation, with transnational (...) feminism concentrating on the transnational level and Third World feminism focusing on local and national contexts. Further, their respective positions regarding nation-states and nationalism have been antithetical, as leading transnational feminists have categorically rejected nation-states and nationalism as detrimental to feminism. In recent decades, transnational feminism has become the dominant feminist position on Third World women, overshadowing Third World feminism, and the dismissal of nation-states and nationalism as irrelevant to feminism has become fashionable. Against this current trend, this article argues for the relevance of nation-states and nationalism for transnational feminism and the urgency of reclaiming Third World feminism. (shrink)

In Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics Anita Chang offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of her transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity and Revival, she (...) reveals the layers and depths that comprise a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, Chang discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary. (shrink)

Evolving as Foucault’s third modulation of power, security power marks a radical departure from previous eras of sovereign and disciplinary power. Dramatically decentering the individual, altering the means by which government acts and shifting from a static to a dynamic conception of temporal activity, an understanding of Foucauldian security power provides a number of critical insights into modern governance. This paper seeks to explain and analyze Foucault’s conceptualization of security power as the new language of governance and apply it in (...) relation to the pervasive phenomena of government attempts to control fertility. Using the cases of inter-war France and post-colonial India, the theorization of security power will be grounded in the realities of natalist policy demonstrating the universality of the exercise of security power and its applicability to numerous contexts and settings. The concretization of theory in case study not only illuminates the workings of a new model of power but highlights the difficulty of resisting this novel type of government control. Understanding power to understand modes of resistance is central to the Foucauldian method, and drawing from Foucault’s newly translated lectures, this paper will bring to light a fascinating mode of analysis which helps illuminate the evolving nature of power and control in the modern era. (shrink)

Utility of third party funding is an undeniable fact, especially where a party is under financial strain, yet its increased usage in private arbitration has given rise to a number of substantive and procedural issues. In view of this, the present paper attempts to map the growing utility or otherwise of the mechanism of third party funding, and analyses its various nuances and legal sustainability within the framework of international arbitration. Further, an attempt is made to analyse the ways and (...) means of ameliorating the utility of third party funding and for enhancing its acceptance in the global arbitration community. (shrink)

All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life as suchÑwhether philosophical, ethical, or politicalÑassume the notion of personhood as their indispensable point of departure. This is all the more true today. In bioethics, for example, Catholic and secular thinkers may disagree on what constitutes a person and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisive importance: human life is considered to be untouchable only when based on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment of subjective (...) rights continues to be increasingly linked to the qualification of personhood, which appears to be the only one capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, right and life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins of Western civilization. The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is that the notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it is precisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to create a separation in both the human race and the individual between a rational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into the inferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to the performative power of the person, whose dual origins can be traced back to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues his strikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry by inviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the third person, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of the person, points toward the orginary unity of the living being. (shrink)

Whether or not one is justified in speaking of a “third quest of the historical Jesus” is open to debate. Any historical quest for Jesus, however, involves three stages of research: (a) establishing a data base of authentic materials; (b) reconstructing a plausible picture of Jesus; and (c) assessing the significance of one's reconstructed Jesus for later history.

This essay offers hope that beyond the specter and tragedy of the Yugoslav civil war lie the prospects for peace, democratization, economic and political reconstruction, and the evolution of a democratic Third Yugoslavia. But, to realize this hope, there is a need for the development of a genuine civic culture and civil society in the Yugoslav successor states based on democratic values, pluralism, and tolerance, rooted in the conception of universal human rights, constitutionalism, and equality before the law. The South (...) Slavs may have to retrieve their historical memory which predates the fateful divisions along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The Swiss model of autonomous cantons, four major languages, neutrality, but a pronounced common national identity is also instructive for democratic prospects of a possible future South Slav (con-) federation and peace in the Balkans, A proposed Illyrian Constitution would bind the South Slavs together, reconnecting individual human rights to community. Above all, moral and spiritual renewal are the necessary precondition for peace and reconciliation, as well as economic and political reconstruction and the genesis of a democratic Third Yugoslavia. (shrink)

In China, twenty years of reform, which started precisely with the repudiation of egalitarianism and the encouragement to "get rich first," has led to a serious interrogation of the ethics of wealth creation and accumulation. The issue of equity has become a subject of intense intellectual contestation in China, particularly in the recent debates between the liberals and the New Left.1 For a society with a time-honored tradition of putting emphasis on collective values, there is every reason for all parties (...) in the dispute to claim concern for equity and selfless motivation in probing the question of social justice, although they are deeply divided in their assessment of the extent of inequalities in China today, especially in comparison to the Mao era; in their opinions about the origin of the current inequalities; and in their attitudes toward and remedies for them. This paper is an attempt to explore the complexity of contention between the Left and the liberals, as well as the prospects for a third way for China. (shrink)

This essay explores a new conceptual paradigm for bridging the gulf separating what C. P. Snow called The Two Cultures--science and the humanities. Central to this rainbow paradigm is a more unified, holistic, and integral understanding of human life in society. A fruitful science-theology dialogue presupposes a much broader context of a revitalized Third Culture which weaves together insights from all the arts and sciences, social sciences and humanities. The essay thus invokes the incarnational dimension of man as God's creation (...) and truth as the Logos or ultimate Reality. The conclusion follows that a new lingua franca--a more felicitous conceptual understanding focusing on man as the missing link-requires integrative insights across all disciplines. Such an integral vision of what it means to be fully human reflects a sapiential, existential, and eschatological challenge of unity in diversity, that is, a truly human culture or a culture of cultures. (shrink)

The paper tries to demonstrate how a hermeneutic critique of scientism raises important issues not only about the dialogue between (post)analytical and Continental philosophers but also about a third way of philosophizing that gets rid of traditional dilemmas and stubborn dividing lines inherited from the “two cultures” paradigm. In outlining a conception of hermeneutic realism, the paper elaborates on a distinction between ontic and ontological forms of realism. An ontic form specifies a certain range of entities whose existence is reified (...) as something “given”, as presence-at-hand. An ontological form of realism is realism about the reality that is ready-to-hand within the “readable technologies” of interrelated practices. The paper argues that the ontological forms of realism provide opportunities for combating scientism philosophically, while advocating a cognitive autonomy of science based upon the interpretative openness of scientific research. (shrink)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has followed the prevailing view in the federal courts by holding that state Medicaid funds must cover the same kinds of abortions as provided for under the 1994 Hyde Amendment. On July 25, 1995, the court held that a Pennsylvania law was preempted to the extent that it restricted Medicaid funding for abortions beyond the limits set by federal law ) by imposing additional procedures not prescribed by the Hyde Amendment.Particularly, (...) the court held that the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Acts ), whch requires victims of rape and incest to report the crime to law enforcement officials before Medicaid abortion funding is made available, exceeded the reporting requirements set by the Hyde Amendment, which provides a waiver for patients who are physically or mentally unable to comply with the reporting requirement. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A First-Person Analysis Using Third Person-Data as a Generative Method: A Case Study of Surprise in Depression” by Natalie Depraz, Maria Gyemant & Thomas Desmidt. Upshot: In my commentary, I try to examine whether, and how, the approach presented by Depraz, Gyemant & Desmidt lines up with Varela’s neurophenomenology. I focus on the neural and phenomenological dimensions, respectively, arguing that the end result is somewhat of a mixed bag: if it paves the way for (...) a fruitful expansion of the neuro-aspect, it seems to cast a dubious, perhaps even distortive, shadow on the phenomenological aspect. (shrink)

Several moral objectivists try to explain the reliability of moral beliefs by appealing to a third factor, a substantive moral claim that explains, first, why we have the moral beliefs that we have and, second, why these beliefs are true. Folke Tersman has recently suggested that moral disagreement constrains the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations. Apart from constraining third-factor explanations, Tersman’s challenge could support the view that the epistemic significance of debunking explanations depends on the epistemic significance of disagreement. This (...) paper aims to show that disagreement does not constrain the epistemic legitimacy of third-factor explanations in metaethics, and it suggests a way forward in addressing the view that debunking depends on disagreement. First, Tersman’s constraints are impossible to violate, given the assumption that the justification relation exhibits monotonicity. Second, some disagreements are irrelevant, given that they cannot be about beliefs whose reliability the objectivist seeks to defend. Third, actual disagreement about moral beliefs is implausible, given recent ethnographic findings. In light of this discussion, the paper shows that the prospects of the disagreement view depend on which moral beliefs objectivists need to defend and the criteria we use to assess epistemically relevant moral disagreement. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas' radical heteronomous ethics has received a great deal of scholarly attention. However, his political thought remains relatively neglected. This essay shows how Levinas moves from the an-archical, ethical relationship with the Other to the totalizing realm of politics with his phenomenology of the third person, the Third. With the appearance of the Third, the ego must respond to more than one Other. It must decide whom to respond to first. This decision leads the ego from the an-archical, ethical (...) realm to the realm of politics. Although the Third universalizes the an-archical relationship with the Other into the political realm, it does not supplant the original ethical relationship. Instead, there is a never-ending oscillation between ethics and politics. The world of institutions and impersonal justice must be held in check by the an-archical responsibility for the Other. Levinas calls for both an-archy and justice. Key Words: Derrida • ethics • Levinas • liberalism • the Other • politics • responsibility • said • saying • the Third. (shrink)

Scholars of epistemology have identified two conceptions of epistemic injustice: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. The former refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of identity prejudice. The latter refers to violations of one’s right to know what one is entitled to know. This essay advances a third conception, formative epistemic injustice, which refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of or result in malformation—the undue restriction (...) of one’s formative capacities. The author argues that formative epistemic injustice is a distinctly educational wrong and that it brings to light important epistemic injustices that standard accounts of epistemic injustice either downplay or are unable to capture. This third conception of epistemic injustice is an important analytic tool for theorizing both epistemic injustice and educational justice. (shrink)

Taking the title of his book from Isaiah Berlin's famous essay distinguishing a negative concept of liberty connoting lack of interference by others from a positive concept involving participation in the political realm, Samuel Fleischacker explores a third definition of liberty that lies between the first two. In Fleischacker's view, Kant and Adam Smith think of liberty as a matter of acting on our capacity for judgment, thereby differing both from those who tie it to the satisfaction of our desires (...) and those who translate it as action in accordance with reason or "will." Integrating the thought of Kant and Smith, and developing his own stand through readings of the Critique of Judgment and The Wealth of Nations, Fleischacker shows how different acting on one's best judgment is from acting on one's desires--how, in particular, good judgment, as opposed to mere desire, can flourish only in favorable social and political conditions. At the same time, exercising judgment is something every individual must do for him- or herself, hence not something that philosophers and politicians who reason better than the rest of us can do in our stead. For this reason advocates of a liberty based on judgment are likely to be more concerned than are libertarians to make sure that government provides people with conditions for the use of their liberty--for example, excellent standards of education, health care, and unemployment insurance--while at the same time promoting a less paternalistic view of government than most of the movements associated for the past thirty years with the political left. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that our conscious perceptual experiences assign confidence. In previous papers, I motivated it using first-personal evidence (Morrison, 2016), and Jessie Munton motivated it using normative evidence (Munton, 2016). In this paper, I will consider the extent to which it is motivated by third-personal evidence. I will argue that the current evidence is supportive but not decisive. I will then describe experiments that might provide stronger evidence. I hope to thereby provide a roadmap for future research.

In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because existing experiments have not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of (...) its main competing theories, subject-sensitive invariantism. In this paper, we discuss how a particular, "third-person", experimental design is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. In spite of the theoretical significance of third-person knowledge ascriptions for debates surrounding contextualism, no formal experiments evaluating such ascriptions that assess contextualist claims have previously been conducted. In this paper, we conduct an experiment specifically designed to examine that central gap in contextualism’s empirical foundation. The results of our experiment provide crucial support for epistemic contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. (shrink)

Private certification as a means of risk regulation and quality assurance can offer advantages over government regulation, including superior technical expertise, better inspection and monitoring of regulated entities, increased responsiveness to consumers, and greater efficiency. This Article examines two examples of reliable private certification in regulatory arenas - fire safety and kosher food - where political opposition and resource constraints have frustrated government regulatory efforts. The Article identifies key features of reliable private certification and analyzes its comparative institutional advantages over (...) government regulation. Critics of private certification question its legitimacy, asserting that private regulation is less participatory, transparent, and accountable than government regulation. The Article responds to these claims, arguing that the two examples of private certification presented here compare favorably with government regulation based on these criteria of legitimacy. (shrink)

I substantiate the argument that lead me to believe very strongly that we need to find new ways for the arts and sciences to collaborate, and to create a networked culture that brings the arts and humanities into interaction with the sciences and engineering. Our world faces many problems, on all scales, and we must use all the different approaches to create a world culture that is sustainable and respects and nurtures the differing world-views of each community. We have no (...) choice but to forge new art–science collaborations. (shrink)

Set principally in or around Seraing, an industrial region in decline just outside of Liège, in Belgium, the films of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne marry geographical and historical-social realism with a series of ethical inquiries into such topics as immigration, unemployment, black market trading and petty crime. To date, critical commentary on the films has tended mainly to read the work of the Dardennes along two lines. The dominant approach uses the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a philosophical touchpoint in (...) order to illuminate the ethical dimension of the Dardenne brothers' films. The second considers the political dimensions of their films. However a third, related body of writing has emerged in later years, one which understands in terms of their relation to what Jürgen Habermas (2006), amongst others, has dubbed the postsecular age. This article locates the Dardennes' films at the intersection between the ethical, the political, and the postsecular, looking to the theologically-inflected philosophy of Gillian Rose to make the case that Seraing serves as the model of what Rose refers to as “the third city” – a postsecular site which challenges easy divisions between politics and ethics. As such Seraing is not, I shall argue, a mere staging post for the moral, political and spiritual problems posed by the films, but its cradle. Paying particular attention to the Dardennes' film Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014) I demonstrate what an engagement that turns on existence with and within the city – an engagement that is both political and ethical – might look like. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito is one of leading figures in a new generation of Italian philosophers. This book criticizes the notion of the person and develops an original account of the concept of the impersonal - what he calls the third person.