1. Complex demonstratives (noun phrases of the form ‘that F’) often behave in devious ways which do not fit well with their traditional understanding as devices of direct reference. Namely, there a...

In this review I provide a brief analysis of the main features of the collective volume Shifting Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Teresa Marques and Åsa Wikforss. The volume addresses several related topics, and it contains contributions from psychologists and philosophers. It deals with the topic of concept variation understood in a broad sense, for it tackles diachronic, contextual, interpersonal and even intrapersonal variation; besides, the second part of the book is devoted to the topic of concept revision (...) and amelioration. I provide a brief description of the book and then I critically assess each of the contributions. (shrink)

Semanticists often restrict their theories by imposing constraints on the parameters that can be employed for interpreting the expressions of a language. Such constraints are based on non-logical features of actual contexts of utterance, but they often have important effects on issues that do pertain to logic, like analyticity or entailment. For example, Kaplan’s restriction to so-called “proper contexts” was required in order to count “I am here now” as valid. In this paper I argue that constraints of this kind (...) are often posited in an arbitrary and non-consistent way, and that they yield the intended results only at the price of imposing ad hoc principles whose justification could in turn justify further, often undesirable restrictions into the theory. I also introduce a criterion for telling whether such constraints are imposed in a legitimate manner. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two claims regarding complex demonstratives. On the one hand I argue that, when one of these expressions misdescribes the referred object, the right semantic analysis is to treat the expression as uninterpretable. On the other, I claim that the uninterpretability thesis finds itself in trouble when it comes to dealing with non-deictic uses of complex demonstratives, i.e., uses of “that F” in which the speaker has no acquaintance or direct perception of any object that could (...) satisfy the predicative material. In order to make these two claims compatible, I set out to modify the way the uninterpretability thesis has been traditionally formulated. (shrink)

In the educational sphere, the concept of democracy is used in many and varied ways, though the hegemonic school culture often starts from a concept of democracy that is taken for granted, and it is understood that the entire educational community shares a similar concept. As a result of the research project “Democracy, participation and inclusive education in schools” we realized that the above-mentioned concept is used without being accurately defined in the school setting. This observation is what has prompted (...) us to write this article, basically structured in two parts. In the first part, based on the theoretical debate occurring in the field of social sciences, we delimit the concept of democracy and structure it in four basic dimensions: governance, inhabitance, otherness and ethos. In the second part, we specify and examine in depth these four dimensions in the school setting in order to construct a broad and transversal, yet specific, definition, with which to be able to develop ambitious democratic projects and, in turn, contribute to scientific debate. (shrink)

Frege begins Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, the work that introduces the project which was to occupy him for most of his professional career, with the question, 'What is the number one?' It is a question to which even mathematicians, he says, have no satisfactory answer. And given this scandalous situation, he adds, there is small hope that we shall be able to say what number is. Frege intends to rectify the situation by providing definitions of the number one and the (...) concept of number. But what, exactly, is required of a definition? Surely it will not do to stipulate that the number one is Julius Caesar - that would change the subject. It seems reasonable to suppose that an acceptable definition must be a true statement containing a description that picks out the object to which the numeral '1' already refers. And, similarly, that an acceptable definition of the concept of number must contain a description that picks out precisely those objects that are numbers - those objects to which our numerals refer. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of '1' and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of ‘1’ and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. There is, as we shall see shortly, a great deal of evidence that Frege’s definitions are not intended to pick out objects to which our numerals already refer. But if this is so, how can these definitions teach us anything about our science of arithmetic? And what criteria must these definitions satisfy? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is that Frege thinks we need to learn about the science of arithmetic. (shrink)

The study of the cultural Cold War and East–West interaction outside diplomacy and high politics has emerged as an important research field during the last two decades. With a few exceptions, however, scholarly interaction has been overshadowed by other forms of interaction. Existing research has mostly paid attention to technological exchange and to espionage, which was at times connected with scientific exchanges across the Iron Curtain. This article discusses scholarly exchanges in the human sciences between Finland and the Soviet Union. (...) Even though Finland was a western-style democracy with a market economy, it had close political ties with the Soviet Union, which allowed for the development of active scholarly connections between the countries. This article discusses the emergence of such connections in the human sciences and the reasons for their rapid expansion in the 1970s. (shrink)

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work (...) organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs. (shrink)

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework (...) that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry. (shrink)

In 1877 Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland liquefied oxygen in the form of a mist. The liquefaction of the first of the so-called permanent gases heralded the birth of low-temperature research and is often described in the literature as having started a ‘race’ for attaining progressively lower temperatures. In fact, between 1877 and 1908, when helium, the last of the permanent gases, was liquefied, there were many priority disputes—something quite characteristic of the emergence of a (...) new research field. This paper examines Cailletet’s path to the liquefaction of oxygen, as well as a debate between him and the Polish physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski over the latter’s contribution to the liquefaction of gases. (shrink)

El artículo tiene su origen en una conferencia que con el mismo título fue pronunciada en el Congreso Internacional de Filosofía Teórica y Práctica destinado a estudiar el problema del mal y ver el tratamiento realizado por varios autores empezando por Agustín de Hipona. En la presentación se quiere mostrar la característica única que tiene Agustín por la manera cómo enfrenta el problema del mal, por lo cual se le puede considerar el primer autor moderno porque el planteamiento sigue su (...) experiencia vital hecha de búsqueda de felicidad y el resultado pasa a ser la primera filosofía cristiana. Se estudia la respuesta maniquea a la que se adhirió y los motivos que le llevaron a abandonarla totalmente y superarla definitivamente tal y como queda patente en los textos claves de sus obras y en particular en las Confesiones y en el De natura boni que se presentan. (shrink)

Re-emergent scientific atheism bears the marks of its historical origins in the efforts of Bonč-Bruevič and Jaroslavskij. The disciples of the 'Lenin generation' use their 'fathers' somewhat as 'second-level classics'.

Interesante y muy bien lograda aproximación al universo teórico construido por Ricardo Guastini, filósofo del derecho italiano.

The article defends the no-harm principle as an intuitively plausible and a common-sense way to justify individual emitters’ duties to take more radical steps in the fight against climate change. The appearance of climate change as requiring large-scale collective action should not lead us astray with respect to the fundamental moral nature of the problem: individual emitters who knowingly sustain and foster the carbon intensive ways of acting also bear personal moral responsibility for the foreseeable climate-related harm and acquire in (...) line with the no-harm principle a direct personal duty to contribute to the efforts of preventing the harm. The article examines more closely the so-called collectivistic approach, according to which emitters’ responsibilities are primarily collective, and argues that without individualistic grounds of emitters’ personal moral responsibility for the harm the collectivistic approach fails to provide unstructured emitters with sufficient reason to act together and fulfil their correlative duty of effective harm prevention. The article argues that since an emitter's personal moral responsibility warrants others to expect her personal engagement in the efforts of effective harm prevention and can justify blame if she fails, identifications of personal responsibility may also significantly increase unstructured emitters’ collective capability of remedying the climate crisis. (shrink)

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language, but his projects—and the very terminology he employed in pursuing those projects—are still current in contemporary philosophy. This is undoubtedly why it seems so reasonable to assume that we can read Frege' s writings as if he were one of us, speaking to our philosophical concerns in our language. In Joan Weiner's view, however, Frege's words (...) can be accurately interpreted only if we set that assumption aside. Weiner here offers a challenging new approach to the philosophy of this central figure in analytic philosophy. Weiner finds in Frege's corpus, from Begriffsschrift on, a unified project of remarkable ambition to which each of the writings in that corpus makes a distinct contribution—a project whose motivation she brings to life through a careful reading of his Foundations of Arithmetic. The Frege that Weiner brings into clear view is very different from the familiar figure. Far from having originated one of the standard positions on the nature of reference, Frege turns out not to have had positive doctrines on anything like what contemporary philosophers mean by "reference." Far from having served as a standard-bearer for those who take the realists' side of contemporary disputes with anti-realists, Frege turns out to have had no stake in either side of the controversy. Through Weiner's lens, Frege emerges as a thinker who has principled reasons for challenging the very assumptions and motivations that animate philosophers to dispute these doctrines. This lucidly written and accessible book will generate controversy among all readers with an interest in epistemology, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

This article investigates the gender diversity of the corporate board of European Union banks. Employing a large sample of 612 European banks from 20 European countries, it identifies organizational characteristics that could be predictive of women’s presence on bank boards. We identify three factors that play a particularly important role in defining bank board gender diversity. First, the proportion of women on the board is higher for lower-risk banks. We argue that there may be some statistical discrimination behind this relation, (...) although it could also be explained by a real risk-aversion hypothesis. Second, banks with larger boards have a higher proportion of women on their boards, which could be considered a signal of some kind of preference for homogeneity on small boards. Finally, banks that have a growth orientation are more prone to include women on their board, since they may be seen as providers of diverse external resources that are more valued by firms operating under critical circumstances. (shrink)

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)

"Speciesism: 'A failure, in attitude or practice, to accord any nonhuman being equal consideration and respect'"--From the book's cover.

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of Amos (...) Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. (shrink)

This paper discusses the issues of deciding to have a child with mental retardation, and of terminating a pregnancy when the future child is known to have the same disability. I discuss these problems by criticizing a utilitarian argument, namely, that one should act in a way that results in less suffering and less limited opportunity in the world. My argument is that future parents ought to assume a strong responsibility towards the well-being of their prospective children when they decide (...) to reproduce. The moral point in cases in which our acts affect the well-being of future children should be expressed strictly in terms of parents' culpability. Future children thus do not have current moral standing but presently living persons have current obligations to consider the presumable effects of their actions on future people. I will also argue that there are morally significant differences between 'selective contraception' and selective abortion. (shrink)

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international (...) duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational 'atmospheric' political obligations, which in turn may justify protests - even those causing some damage to private property - against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of 'atmospheric' citizenship obligations. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether prospectiveparents ought to find out about their geneticconstitution for reproductive reasons. It isargued that ignoring genetic information can bein line with responsible parenthood or perhapseven recommendable. This is because parenthoodis essentially an unconditional project inwhich parents ought to commit themselves tonurturing any kind of child. Besides, thetraditional reasons offered for theunfortunateness of impairments and the tragicfate of families with disabled children are notconvincing. Other morally problematic outcomesof genetics, such as discrimination againstindividuals with impairments, and limiting freeparental (...) decision making, are alsoconsidered. (shrink)

When (if ever) may a professional deceive a client for the client's own good? Under what conditions (if any) is whistle-blowing morally required? These are just some of the questions that scholars as diverse as Michael D. Bayles, Thomas Nagel, Sissela Bok, Jessica Mitford, and Peter A. French confront in this stimulating anthology. Organized around philosophical issues such as the moral foundations of professional ethics, models of the professional-client relationship, deception, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, professional dissent, and professional virtue, (...) the volume illuminates the complex ethical issues that arise in journalism, law, health care, counselling, education, engineering, business, politics, and social science research. A variety of pedagogical aids--including clear introductions to and study questions for each set of readings, concrete cases designed to focus discussion, and an appendix on preparing cases and position papers--makes the text invaluable for both students and teachers of professional ethics. (shrink)

This paper follows Derrida’s criticism, in The Voice and the Phenomenon, of Husserl ‘s conception of meaning as ideality and identity. The french author contests the ideality and supratemporality·of meaning, its separation from the meaning conferring act, and defends the inclusion of the following indicative dimensions of the last in the former: 1) the sensible element of the linguistic sign (namely in the ideal form of the word, that is in the expression) 2) the manifestation and communication of the experience (...) or act (in the conscience as such) 3) the sensible and empirical content of experience, be it sensational, perceptive, imaginative or potentially and mediatelly intended (in the meaning itself). He questions, moreover, having asserted its temporal condition, which also derives, nevertheless, from some assertions by Husserl, the possibility of constitution of a «strict» and «true» identity, stating that intuitive presence is unable to form both the total covering between the intended and the fulfilling meaning, and the abstract ideality that would be function of the possibility of an infinite repetition, instead of conditioned by a “finite-infinite” one. Finally, he explains better the relation between the sensible face of sign and the ideality of meaning, the former’s place and role within the differentiation and repetition process. He notes that it is an ‘originary’ lack in thinking and meaning itself that claims for the linguistic sign (‘supplement of origin’), “in succession” for its ideal form and its sensible oral and written elements, without ever reaching any completion (‘ supplementarity’, ‘differe(a)nce’). We also attend the derridean hypothesis of writing as the consummation of the link between ideality and death, the last one being considered as having a special relation to sensibility and difference. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze how movement takes part in creating intersubjective meaning. We discuss what Daniel Stern termed ‘affect attunement,’ a primary way of constituting intersubjectivity. Based on an analysis of how movement, meaning-making, vitality affects, and primordial feelings interrelate in affect attunement, we show that primordial feelings and thereby movement play a much greater role in affect attunement than Stern proposed. This makes movement a primary meaning-making modality, indispensable to the development of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the relation between (...) movement and affect attunement in psychological development, we discuss the role of movement in autism. Recent research suggests that differences in movement precede the onset of social-communicative deficits and may be primary to autistic development. Building on the proposed interrelation of movement and primordial feelings in affect attunement, we suggest that autistic movement differences illuminate the vital role played by movement in early intersubjective development. (shrink)

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen (...) to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish (...) Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)

Traditionally, “the operator calculus of Born and Wiener” has been considered one of the four formulations of quantum mechanics that existed in 1926. The present paper reviews the operator calculus as applied by Max Born and Norbert Wiener during the last months of 1925 and the early months of 1926 and its connections with the rise of the new quantum theory. Despite the relevance of this operator calculus, Born–Wiener’s joint contribution to the topic is generally bypassed in historical accounts of (...) quantum mechanics. In this study, we analyse the paper that epitomises the contribution, and we explain the main reasons for the apparent lack of interest in Born and Wiener’s work. We argue that they did not solve the main problem for which the tool was intended, that of linear motion, because of their reluctance to use Dirac delta functions. (shrink)