Grounded on Foucault's suggestion that discourses are not just referential or representational systems, but part of the infrastructure ordering practices in a society, this article analyzes transformations in the etiquette literature in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. It claims that the transformations undergone by etiquette books at the time involved not only a change in the substance of manners but also in their format, and it shows how this change in format embodied and helped deploy an (...) infrastructure of social relations constituted by a logic of decenteredness, as opposed to a logic of centeredness. The article discusses both the theoretical issues raised by the concept of an infrastructure of social relations and methodological points concerning the use of etiquette books for social research, and raises some analytical questions regarding our understanding of American history at the time, as well as our more general conceptions of modernity and postmodernity. In order to reinforce its general argument concerning the embeddedness of an infrastructure of social relations in discourse, and to help clarify the idea of a logic of decenteredness, the article also illustrates how etiquette books from a much earlier period embodied and deployed a logic of centeredness. (shrink)

By any standard, nonrationality is an undertheorized concept in sociology. This paper attempts to open a discussion on nonrationality by analyzing one of the most fruitful theorizations of the concept: Simmel's. Simmel developed a theory that placed nonrationality on the same plane with rationality and attributed to the former a role as fundamental as the latter's in the foundations of action, and as central as the latter's in the generation of existential meanings. The gradual eclipse of the nonrational elements of (...) life in the expanses of a modern, highly rationalized world imply, then, an impoverishment of being. I argue that Simmel's theory of the nonrational can serve as a model capable of enriching our understanding of society and of the person and can, in this sense, serve as a counterpoint to current sociological theories that emphasize the rational elements of life and conceive the person in primarily rational terms. (shrink)

This essay discusses Korean Neo-Confucian conceptions of the self and the important practice of self-cultivation in Neo-Confucian culture. Although approaching the question and practice from different perspectives, these conceptions reflect a foundation in reverence for knowledge, righteousness, propriety, and benevolence. Basic comparisons are then drawn between Neo-Confucian and Western conceptions of the self and self-cultivation. In particular, Michel Foucault’s work on self-cultivation as embedded in social discourses or practices suggests that Neo-Confucian self-cultivation also can be described through a microphysics of (...) reverence. Two examples from modern Korean culture are considered in order to demonstrate how a microphysics of reverence reveals replication and reinforcement of existing social practices in the guise of self-cultivation. (shrink)

This essay discusses Korean Neo-Confucian conceptions of the self and the important practice of self-cultivation in Neo-Confucian culture. Although approaching the question and practice from different perspectives, these conceptions reflect a foundation in reverence for knowledge, righteousness, propriety, and benevolence. Basic comparisons are then drawn between Neo-Confucian and Western conceptions of the self and self-cultivation. In particular, Michel Foucault's work on self-cultivation as embedded in social discourses or practices suggests that Neo-Confucian self-cultivation also can be described through a microphysics of (...) reverence. Two examples from modern Korean culture are considered in order to demonstrate how a microphysics of reverence reveals replication and reinforcement of existing social practices in the guise of self-cultivation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 368-370 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich; xvii & 256 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; $49.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. In his preface to this gathering of his essays and reviews on twentieth-century American and British poetry, David Bromwich regrets that it is "too late to suppress the (...) evidence of a critic educating himself in public" (p. xi). But even the earliest work reprinted in Skeptical Music--"The Making of the Auden Canon," published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, when the author was still a graduate student at Yale--hardly qualifies as juvenilia. Indeed, in Bromwich's case, evidence of a critic educating himself in public seems to have been suppressed from the start. No single explanation will account for an author's precocity, but the consistency of Bromwich's critical voice over the last quarter century is certainly related to his early preoccupation with William Hazlitt, the subject of his first book. In choosing Hazlitt as his model, Bromwich rejected what he took to be the legacy of systematic and professional literary theory extending from Coleridge to each new school of academic criticism. Bromwich's own development as a critic has therefore been subtler and more introspective than the critical retooling of so many of his colleagues. Although never far from the evaluative art of the reviewer, Bromwich has come to favor the more speculative dimension of his work. The more recent the piece, the more overt the attempt to imagine "what was in the poet's mind, or what was in the poem's mind, on the theory that certain thoughts and feelings are worth the trouble to characterize because of their strangeness and originality" (p. xi).Some of the most compelling chapters in Skeptical Music imagine what was in the poet's mind, or the poem's mind, by telling stories about complex relationships between poems by different poets--between the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, or T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. These are stories about literary influence, or deep temperamental affinity. As in Harold Bloom's work, the stories are grounded in close readings, usually of the passages the critic prizes for their aesthetic superiority.A related procedure is at work in "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero"--a long speculative piece on Wallace Stevens's transfer of allegiance, at a crucial moment in his career, from the pragmatism of Nietzsche to the pragmatism of William James. What Stevens found "most persistently attractive" in Nietzsche's pragmatism, Bromwich coolly explains, was "the suggestion that the good of existence is change" and that "our most vivid acknowledgment of that good comes from the ability to imagine a life wiped clear of ourselves" (p. 71). But the Nietzschean sublime proved insufficient for Stevens. During the Second World War, the poet was confronted by "the reality of American soldiers going off to fight... for a cause which, as Stevens saw it, they could only make true by their fighting" (p. 68). Stevens turned to James for "the less brutal idea of a [End Page 368] man or woman who is made great by an enterprise in which others have a part" (p. 78).Bromwich's argument that Stevens became a more valuable poet when he located heroism in human solidarity, not just Nietzschean contingency and self-creation, bears a family resemblance to the work of one of James's heirs, Richard Rorty. Like Rorty, Bromwich often feels the pressure to adjudicate between the claims of the individual artist and the claims of the community; and like Rorty, he makes his judgements on a case by case basis, without recourse to a set standard, rule, or theory. In the closing chapter of Skeptical Music--"Is Taste Moral?"--Bromwich directly addresses the tension between aestheticism and the social good, a subject that also surfaces at the close of his preface and at numerous moments throughout the book. But the claims of the community seem relatively muted... (shrink)

Covering the theories of, among others, Derrida, Lefort and Laclau, this volume opens up space to the political (polemicisation). Chapters cover themes such as social structure, ethical arguments, and political organisation.

Enmity, War, Intensity Norberto Bobbio once gave a minimal definition of politics, characterizing it as the activity of aggregating and defending our friends, and dispersing and fighting our enemies.1 We know that the instigator of this definition is Carl Schmitt, although his critics have often misunderstood the reference to enmity. What resonates most is the claim that friend-enemy oppositions constitute the basic code of the political and that such oppositions can lead to the extreme case of war. This might explain (...) why part of the debate on The Concept of the Political has revolved around the status of the enemy…. (shrink)

The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterized by a continual process of political territorialization (...) and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. However, it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our political actuality. (shrink)

In this chapter, we discuss a selection of current views of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). We focus on the different predictions they make, in particular with respect to the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) during visual experiences, which is an area of critical interest and some source of contention. Our discussion of these views focuses on the level of functional anatomy, rather than at the neuronal circuitry level. We take this approach because we currently understand more about experimental (...) evidence at this coarse level and because these results are appropriate for arbitrating between current theoretical frameworks. We discuss the Two-Visual-Systems Hypothesis (Milner & Goodale 1995; 2006), Local Recurrency (Lamme 2010; Lamme 2006), Higher Order (Lau 2008; Lau & Rosenthal 2011) and Global Workspace theories (Baars 1997; Baars 2005; Dehaene & Naccache 2001; Dehaene 2014). Despite the apparent stark differences between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing, available evidence suggests that their neural substrates must be largely shared. This indicates that the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing is likely to be subtle and highly specialized. We argue that current experimental evidence about the involvement of specific activity in prefrontal cortex supports the higher order neural theory of consciousness. In consequence, imaging techniques that focus only on marked differences between conscious and unconscious level of activity are likely to be insensitive to the relevant neural activity patterns that underlie conscious experiences. Finally, it follows from the evidence we discuss that the functional advantages of conscious over unconscious perceptual processing may be more limited than commonly thought. (shrink)

Si las diferencias se rehúsan a cruzarse o contaminarse entre ellas, el mestizaje o hibridación termina siendo reemplazado por la lógica del desarrollo separado que es característica del apartheid. Con ello el mundo múltiple deviene un mosaico de fragmentos aislados y autoreferenciales. En el límite..

Arguably the most foundational principle in perception research is that our experience of the world goes beyond the retinal image; we perceive the distal environment itself, not the proximal stimulation it causes. Shape may be the paradigm case of such “unconscious inference”: When a coin is rotated in depth, we infer the circular object it truly is, discarding the perspectival ellipse projected on our eyes. But is this really the fate of such perspectival shapes? Or does a tilted coin retain (...) an elliptical appearance even when we know it’s circular? This question has generated heated debate from Locke and Hume to the present; but whereas extant arguments rely primarily on introspection, this problem is also open to empirical test. If tilted coins bear a representational similarity to elliptical objects, then a circular coin should, when rotated, impair search for a distal ellipse. Here, nine experiments demonstrate that this is so, suggesting that perspectival shapes persist in the mind far longer than traditionally assumed. Subjects saw search arrays of three-dimensional “coins,” and simply had to locate a distally elliptical coin. Surprisingly, rotated circular coins slowed search for elliptical targets, even when subjects clearly knew the rotated coins were circular. This pattern arose with static and dynamic cues, couldn’t be explained by strategic responding or unfamiliarity, generalized across shape classes, and occurred even with sustained viewing. Finally, these effects extended beyond artificial displays to real-world objects viewed in naturalistic, full-cue conditions. We conclude that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape “out there,” and their perspectival shape “from here.”. (shrink)

Introspection is a fundamental part of our mental lives. Nevertheless, its reliability and its underlying cognitive architecture have been widely disputed. Here, I propose a principled way to model introspection. By using time-tested principles from signal detection theory (SDT) and extrapolating them from perception to introspection, I offer a new framework for an introspective signal detection theory (iSDT). In SDT, the reliability of perceptual judgments is a function of the strength of an internal perceptual response (signal- to-noise ratio) which is, (...) to a large extent, driven by the intensity of the stimulus. In parallel to perception, iSDT models the reliability of introspective judgments as a function of the strength of an internal introspective response (signal-to-noise ratio) which is, to a large extent, driven by the intensity of conscious experiences. Thus, by modelling introspection after perception, iSDT can calibrate introspection’s reliability across a whole range of contexts. iSDT offers a novel, illuminating way of thinking about introspection and the cognitive processes that support it. (shrink)

The paper deals with the status of referents for claims among conflicting claimants when multiplicity is a fact and there is no room for a substantive notion of community. It develops a notion of contingent and 'impure' universal as it arises in the negotiation of equivalence in scenarios of conflict between claimants. My argument is that measures of equivalence cannot conform to the caricature of absolute, all-encompassing referents intent on subjugating difference in the name of sameness; that a reflection about (...) decisions and the validity of claims - i.e. concerning singularity - cannot be reduced to a simple application of the rule; and that decisions are lodged in the undecidable terrain between norms and their redescription, which means that the status of universals is an effect of continual political battles. Key Words: conflict • deliberation • negotiation • particularism • undecidability • universals. (shrink)

Martin Buber believed that life's deepest truth lies in human relationships. In this classic work he puts this belief into practice, applying it to the concrete problems of contemporary society.

Metacognition is the capacity to evaluate the success of one's own cognitive processes in various domains; for example, memory and perception. It remains controversial whether metacognition relies on a domain-general resource that is applied to different tasks or if self-evaluative processes are domain specific. Here, we investigated this issue directly by examining the neural substrates engaged when metacognitive judgments were made by human participants of both sexes during perceptual and memory tasks matched for stimulus and performance characteristics. By comparing patterns (...) of fMRI activity while subjects evaluated their performance, we revealed both domain-specific and domain-general metacognitive representations. Multivoxel activity patterns in anterior prefrontal cortex predicted levels of confidence in a domain-specific fashion, whereas domain-general signals predicting confidence and accuracy were found in a widespread network in the frontal and posterior midline. The demonstration of domain-specific metacognitive representations suggests the presence of a content-rich mechanism available to introspection and cognitive control. (shrink)

Studying the neural correlates of conscious awareness depends on a reliable comparison between activations associated with awareness and unawareness. One particularly difficult confound to remove is task performance capacity, i.e. the difference in performance between the conditions of interest. While ideally task performance capacity should be matched across different conditions, this is difficult to achieve experimentally. However, differences in performance could theoretically be corrected for mathematically. One such proposal is found in a recent paper by Lamy, Salti and Bar-Haim [Lamy (...) D, Salti M, Bar-Haim Y. Neural correlates of subjective awareness and unconscious processing: an ERP study. J Cognitive Neurosci 2009,21:1435-46], who put forward a corrective method for an electroencephalography experiment. We argue that their analysis is essentially grounded in a version of High Threshold Theory, which has been shown to be inferior in general to Signal Detection Theory. We show through a series of computer simulations that their correction method only partially removes the influence of perfor- mance capacity, which can yield misleading results. We present a mathematical correction method based on Signal Detection Theory that is theoretically capable of removing performance capacity confounds. We discuss the limitations of mathemati- cally correcting for performance capacity confounds in imaging studies and its impact for theories about consciousness. (shrink)

Implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) in supply chains is not a trivial task. In fact, many firms in recent years have publicly proclaimed that in order to keep their CSR commitments, they had to reduce reliance on external suppliers by vertically integrating their operations. Our aim in this article is to examine whether there is truly a relationship between a firm’s CSR performance and its level of vertical integration. Drawing on a multi-industry sample of 2,715 firm-year observations, and after addressing (...) endogeneity concerns, we demonstrate that firms with higher CSR performance tend to vertically integrate more (or, outsource less). We also demonstrate that this tendency is weaker for firms that have higher degrees of asset specificity or international diversification. Our core conclusion is that CSR performance and outsourcing are at odds, but firms can reconcile this tension by deepening their collaborations with suppliers. (shrink)

Consciousness and confidence seem intimately related. Accordingly, some researchers use confidence ratings as a measure of, or proxy for, consciousness. Rosenthal discusses the potential connections between the two, and rejects confidence as a valid measure of consciousness. He argues that there are better alternatives to get at conscious experiences such as direct subjective reports of awareness (i.e. subjects’ reports of perceiving something or of the degree of visibility of a stimulus). In this chapter, we offer a different perspective. Confidence ratings (...) in general, and metacognitive measures in particular, may offer important advantages over subjective ratings. The arguments we offer here are supported by empirical, practical and socio-strategic considerations. However, we do not suggest consciousness and confidence are interchangeable. We recognize the limitations of confidence ratings in some experimental designs and for some research questions. Nevertheless, we also address a potential conceptual link between consciousness and confidence that stems from Rosenthal’s very own work on mental quality space theory. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of Descartes's metaphysics to place it in its immediate historical context, the Late Scholastic philosophy of thinkers such as Suárez against which Descartes reacted. Jorge Secada views Cartesian philosophy as an 'essentialist' reply to the 'existentialism' of the School, and his discussion includes careful analyses and original interpretations of such central Cartesian themes as the role of scepticism, intentionality and the doctrine of the material falsity of ideas, universals and the relation between sense (...) and understanding, causation and the proofs of the existence of God, the theory of substance, and the dualism of mind and matter. His study offers a picture of Descartes's metaphysics that is both novel and philosophically illuminating. (shrink)

When a circular coin is rotated in depth, is there any sense in which it comes to resemble an ellipse? While this question is at the center of a rich and divided philosophical tradition (with some scholars answering affirmatively and some negatively), Morales et al. (2020, 2021) took an empirical approach, reporting 10 experiments whose results favor such perspectival similarity. Recently, Burge and Burge (2022) offered a vigorous critique of this work, objecting to its approach and conclusions on both philosophical (...) and empirical grounds. Here, we answer these objections on both fronts. We show that Burge and Burge’s critique rests on misunderstandings of Morales et al.’s claims; of the relation between the data and conclusions; and of the philosophical context in which the work appears. Specifically, Burge and Burge attribute to us a much stronger (and stranger) view than we hold, involving the introduction of “a new entity” located “in some intermediate position(s) between the distal shape and the retinal image.” We do not hold this view. Indeed, once properly understood, most of Burge and Burge’s objections favor Morales et al.’s claims rather than oppose them. Finally, we discuss several questions that remain unanswered, and reflect on a productive path forward on these issues of foundational scientific and philosophical interest. (shrink)

To find the neural substrates of consciousness, researchers compare subjects’ neural activity when they are aware of stimuli against neural activity when they are not aware. Ideally, to guarantee that the neural substrates of consciousness—and nothing but the neural substrates of consciousness—are isolated, the only difference between these two contrast conditions should be conscious awareness. Nevertheless, in practice, it is quite challenging to eliminate confounds and irrelevant differences between conscious and unconscious conditions. In particular, there is an often-neglected confound that (...) is crucial to eliminate from neuroimaging studies: task performance. Unless subjects’ task performance is matched (and hence perceptual signal processing is matched), researchers risk finding the neural correlates of perception, rather than conscious perception. Here, we discuss the theoretical motivations for the performance matching framework and review empirical demonstrations of, and theoretical inferences derived from, obtaining differences in consciousness while controlling for task performance. We summarize signal detection theoretic modeling frameworks that explain how it is that we can derive performance-matched differences in consciousness without the effect being trivially driven by differences in criterion setting, and also provide principles for designing experimental paradigms that yield performance-matched differences in awareness. Finally, we address potential technical and theoretical issues that stem from matching performance across conditions of awareness, and we introduce the notion of “triangulation” for designing comprehensive experimental sets that can better reveal the neural substrates of consciousness. (shrink)

We give characterizations for the sentences "Every $\Sigma^1_2$-set is measurable" and "Every $\Delta^1_2$-set is measurable" for various notions of measurability derived from well-known forcing partial orderings.

We investigate which filters onωcan contain towers, that is, a modulo finite descending sequence without any pseudointersection. We prove the following results:Many classical examples of nice tall filters contain no towers.It is consistent that tall analytic P-filters contain towers of arbitrary regular height.It is consistent that all towers generate nonmeager filters, in particular Borel filters do not contain towers.The statement “Every ultrafilter contains towers.” is independent of ZFC.Furthermore, we study many possible logical implications between the existence of towers in filters, (...) inequalities between cardinal invariants of filters $,${\rm{co}}{{\rm{f}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$,${\rm{no}}{{\rm{n}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$, and${\rm{co}}{{\rm{v}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$), and the existence of Luzin type families, that is, if${\cal F}$is a filter then${\cal X} \subseteq {[\omega ]^\omega }$is an${\cal F}$-Luzin family if$\left\{ {X \in {\cal X}:|X \setminus F| = \omega } \right\}$is countable for every$F \in {\cal F}$. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:.. MERELY A MAN OF LETTERS" an interview with Jorge Luis Borges* Philosophy and Literature: Why don't you tell us about some of the philosophers who have influenced your work and in whom you have been the most interested? Jorge Luis Borges: Well, I think that's an easy one. You might talk in terms of two: Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But I suppose Hume might be worked in (...) also, because, after all, Hume refutes Berkeley. Really, he comes from Berkeley—even if Berkeley comes from Locke. You might think of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume as being three links in an argument..... But I suppose that when someone refutes someone else in philosophy, he is carrying on the argument. P&L: And Schopenhauer? Borges: Schopenhauer is very different from Hume. Of course, Schopenhauer had his idea of the Will. That is not to be found in Hume.... The case of Berkeley was different. I suppose he thought of God as being aware of all things all the time, if I don't get him wrong. If we go away, does this room disappear? No, because God is thinking about it. Now, in the case of Schopenhauer, I was rereading Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea, and I was rather taken aback, or baffled I should say, puzzled by something that keeps on recurring in Schopenhauer. Of course it may have been a slip of the pen, but as he goes back to it, and as he was a very careful writer, I wonder if it is a slip of the pen. For example, Schopenhauer begins by saying that the universe, the stars, the spaces in between, the planets, *On April 14, 1976, two editors of Philosophy and Literature, along with an interested colleague, interviewed Jorge Luis Borges at Michigan State University, where he held a position as visiting professor for the winter term. These remarks are edited from the transcript of that conversation. 337 338Philosophy and Literature this planet, those things, have no existence—except in the mind which perceives them. But then, to my surprise—and I suppose you can explain this to me, since you are philosophers and I am not—what Schopenhauer says is that all those things have no existence except in the brain. And that the universe—I remember these words, I don't think I'm inventing them now—"ist ein Gehirnphänomen," that the world is a cerebral phenomenon. Now, I was baffled. Because, of course, if you think of the universe, I suppose the brain is as much a part of the external world as the stars or the moon. The brain after all is a system of visual, of tactile, perceptions. He keeps on insisting on the brain. I don't think, for example, that Bishop Berkeley insists on the brain, or Hume, who would have insisted on the mind, consciousness. P&L: People sometimes say that they see Berkeley in stories like "Orbis Tertius." Borges: Yes, I suppose they do. Well, of course. But in that story I was led by literary means also. P&L: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story? Could you explain that? Borges: Very easily.... Encyclopedias have been my chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. I used to go to the Biblioteca National in Buenos Aires—and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. One night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden and the Druids—a treasure trove, no?—all in the same volume, "Dr-." Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia... a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. For example, you would have a language and then a literature, and then a history and so on. Then I thought I would write a story of a fancy encyclopedia. Of course that would require many different people to write it... (shrink)

The contributors to this volume argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the "participatory turn," which proposes that individuals and communities have an ...

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate the (...) unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus’ identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain. (shrink)

Brendle, J., H. Judah and S. Shelah, Combinatorial properties of Hechler forcing, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 59 185–199. Using a notion of rank for Hechler forcing we show: assuming ωV1 = ωL1, there is no real in V[d] which is eventually different from the reals in L[ d], where d is Hechler over V; adding one Hechler real makes the invariants on the left-hand side of Cichoń's diagram equal ω1 and those on the right-hand side equal 2ω and (...) produces a maximal almost disjoint family of subsets of ω of size ω1; there is no perfect set of random reals over V in V[ r][ d], where r is random over V and d Hechler over V[r], thus answering a question of the first and second authors. (shrink)

Der Status quo in zeitgenossischen pluralistischen Gesellschaften konfrontiert die politische Philosophie mit dem Problem, eine Staatslegitimation zu formulieren, die fur alle Burger trotz konfligierender Interessen und Wertvorstellungen uberzeugend ist. Im ersten Teil wird Thomas Hobbes klassische Vertragstheorie, die Spieltheorie sowie James Buchanans okonomische Vertragstheorie kritisch diskutiert. Die im zweiten Teil entworfene kontextbezogene Vertragstheorie analysiert eine Gesellschaft, in der Egoisten, moderate Altruisten und moralische Idealisten interagieren. Sie zeigt, dass ein Verfassungsstaat fur fast alle Burger interessenkompatibel ist, weil er Interaktionsprobleme vermeidet, die (...) im Naturzustand, einem Sklavenstaat, einer Moraldiktatur und einem Minimalstaat auftreten wurden.". (shrink)

Michel Foucault left us with an implicit reflection about the meaning of the work of the “master of life,” just as antique philosophy (Greco-Roman) practiced and made a problem of it. In Foucault’s studies about ancient philosophy, which will soon be available as a whole in a written edition, this f..

This comprehensive reference volume features essays by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field. Provides a comprehensive "who's who" guide to medieval philosophers. Offers a refreshing mix of essays providing historical context followed by 140 alphabetically arranged entries on individual thinkers. Constitutes an extensively cross-referenced and indexed source. Written by a distinguished cast of philosophers. Spans the history of medieval philosophy from the fourth century AD to the fifteenth century.