“Metapolitics” is an ambiguous term. Recent philosophers have claimed the concept for neo-conservative, even right-wing agendas, while others have employed it to signal radical discontent with politics altogether. Beginning with Peter Viereck’s characterization of Nazi ideology as “Meta-Politics,” this essay works its way back from an “irrational,” “volkish,” and supposedly “conservative” concept to another use of “Metapolitics” as found in Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen that was rooted in a liberal tradition of the Enlightenment—especially in August Schlözer and Saul Ascher. (...) Both, Buber and Cohen, linked “metapolitical politics” to prophetic and theopolitical sensibilities. As such, the prophetic motif of turning loomed large at the center of their respective philosophies of nationalism. But it was a theme that also connected a wide range of thinkers, including Hans Kohn and Leo Baeck, and which emerged as a Leitmotiv of cultural and spiritual Zionism as well as of the modern Renaissance of Jewish culture. Drawing on Moritz Lazarus, the essay argues that the recurring trope of turning helped establish a paradoxical nationalism founded not upon self-empowerment and political othering but on self-criticism. Concluding with a brief excursion on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prophetic politics in the Civil Rights Movement, the essay gestures towards the possibility of nationalism as collective introspection and self-reformation. (shrink)

Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption culminates in an aesthetic configuration of simultaneous presences: world, man, God, creation, revelation, and redemption are viewed in a metahistorical side-by-side, connected by the “factualizing power of the And.” But the idea of simultaneity, which is central to Rosenzweig’s configurative thinking, belongs to the historical imagination as much as it belongs to the theological “breaking through the shackles of time.” Rosenzweig’s “and” belongs to both a tradition of cosmic-aesthetic historicism and the philosophical reconstitution of time (...) as a simultaneous perception. In the co-presence of all historical moments, history’s hidden Gestalt, which only a people that is at once old and young can envision, connects the “and” of history with what Hegel considered history’s end—its ultimate self-recognition. Eternity, then, means neither flight from, nor resistance to, history’s naked fact, but the recognition of history’s Gestalt as an image that “does not tolerate epochs.”. (shrink)

CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing can and has altered human genomes, bringing bioethical debates about this capability to the forefront of philosophical and policy considerations. Here, I consider the underexplored implications of CRISPR-Cas9 gene drives for heritable human genome editing. Modification gene drives applied to heritable human genome editing would introduce a novel form of involuntary eugenic practice that I term guerrilla eugenics. Once introduced into a genome, stealth genetic editing by a gene drive genetic element would occur each subsequent generation irrespective (...) of whether reproductive partners consent to it and irrespective of whether the genetic change confers any benefit. By overriding the ability to ‘opt in’ to genome editing, gene drives compromise the autonomy of carrier individuals and their reproductive partners to choose to use or avoid genome editing and impose additional burdens on those who hope to ‘opt out’ of further genome editing. High incidence of an initially rare gene drive in small human communities could occur within 200 years, with evolutionary fixation globally in a timeframe that is thousands of times sooner than achievable by non-drive germline editing. Following any introduction of heritable gene drives into human genomes, practices intended for surveillance or reversal also create fundamental ethical problems. Current policy guidelines do not comment explicitly on gene drives in humans. These considerations motivate an explicit moratorium as being warranted on gene drive development in heritable human genome editing. (shrink)

It is tempting to invoke organismal selection as perpetually optimizing the function of any given gene. However, natural selection can drive genic functional change without improvement of biochemical activity, even to the extinction of gene activity. Detrimental mutations can creep in owing to linkage with other selectively favored loci. Selection can promote functional degradation, irrespective of genetic drift, when adaptation occurs by loss of gene function. Even stabilizing selection on a trait can lead to divergence of the underlying molecular constituents. (...) Selfish genetic elements can also proliferate independent of any functional benefits to the host genome. Here we review the logic and evidence for these diverse processes acting in genome evolution. This collection of distinct evolutionary phenomena – while operating through easily understandable mechanisms – all contribute to the seemingly counterintuitive notion that maintenance or improvement of a gene's biochemical function sometimes do not determine its evolutionary fate. (shrink)

Recent research has filled many gaps about Caenorhabditis natural history, simultaneously exposing how much remains to be discovered. This awareness now provides means of connecting ecological and evolutionary theory with diverse biological patterns within and among species in terms of adaptation, sexual selection, breeding systems, speciation, and other phenomena. Moreover, the heralded laboratory tractability of C. elegans, and Caenorhabditis species generally, provides a powerful case study for experimental hypothesis testing about evolutionary and ecological processes to levels of detail unparalleled by (...) most study systems. Here, I synthesize pertinent theory with what we know and suspect about Caenorhabditis natural history for salient features of biodiversity, phenotypes, population dynamics, and interactions within and between species. I identify topics of pressing concern to advance Caenorhabditis biology and to study general evolutionary processes, including the key opportunities to tackle problems in dispersal dynamics, competition, and the dimensionality of niche space. (shrink)

Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot me-Rabenu Asher mi-Lunil -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot mi-sefer Tsedah la-derekh -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot ʻAśarah hilulim -- Ḳitsur Ḥovat ha-levavot Margaliyot ṭovot.

In recent times there have been increasing efforts at reinterpreting core CSR theories such as stakeholder theory with new perspectives as well as applying them to different contexts away from its Western masculinist connotations. This work seeks to add to these efforts by exploring the impacts that the African philosophical worldview of Afro-communitarianism has on small business stakeholder relationships. Specifically it discusses the kinds of relationships that owner/managers of small businesses, in adherence to Afro-communitarianism, maintain with their families, employees, local (...) communities and competitors- all key stakeholders. The contention is that such ethics demand more extensive ethical responsibilities from owner/managers of small businesses than owner/managers motivated by traditional stakeholder theory with its Western masculinist undertones. It is hoped that this effort will add significant perspectives to stakeholder theory as well as having implications for both small and large business practice. (shrink)

Extreme conditions like savantism, autism or synaesthesia, which have a neurological 2AH, UK basis, challenge the idea that other minds are similar to our own. In this paper we report a single case study of a man in whom all three of these conditions co-occur. We suggest, on the basis of this single case, that when savantism and synaesthesia co- occur, it is worthwhile testing for an undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). This is because savantism has an established association with (...) ASC, and the combination of ASC with synaesthesia may increase the likelihood of savantism. The implications of these conditions for philosophy of mind are introduced. (shrink)

Philosophy Lab: An Experiential Approach to Conceptual Analysis gives students the skills and strategies needed to do philosophical work in the Analytic tradition. They are presented with a step-by-step method for performing a preliminary conceptual analysis and practice examples to apply the method to standard philosophical problems. Students are introduced to the work of great thinkers including Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Wittgenstein, and Ryle. These works are complemented by contemporary empirical findings concerning perception, desire, emotion, moral intuition, and other basic elements (...) of explicit intentional cognition. Each chapter features primary source material, commentary, and activity instructions. The activities are designed to allow students to experience each mode of cognition in relative isolation, and then to see how they combine and interrelate in more complex contexts. Finally, students use the template model of conceptual analysis to explore the material. They identify and isolate the concept to be analyzed, determine whether it is simple or complex, and if complex, identify the constituent parts of the concept. Specific topics covered include causal power, sex and marriage, compassion, ambition, justice, and death. Through presentation and modeling the book not only enables student to do conceptual analysis with precision, it helps them understand and interpret philosophical issues. Philosophy Lab is a comprehensive, carefully designed text for first courses in philosophy. It may be used with first-year undergraduate students, advanced high-school students, or adult learners. Asher Walden holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Drew University. Dr. Walden is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. (shrink)

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the ethical value of literature. However, how exactly does literature contribute to our ethical understanding? In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher argues that literary scholars should locate this question in the long and various history of moral philosophy. On the basis of his own reading of this history, Asher contends for the centrality of emotions in our ethical lives and shows how literature - novels, poetry, and drama - (...) can each contribute to crucial emotional understanding. Individual chapters on T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw give detailed analyses of how this contribution takes shape even in modernist authors who try to reconfigure the very nature of the self. (shrink)

Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why and its Netflix adaptation have enjoyed widespread popularity. While they draw needed attention to issues like bullying and teen estrangement, they may have an unintended effect: they mislead about the etiology of suicide and even glamorize it to a degree. The medical literature has shown that suicide is almost always the result of psychiatric disorder, not provocative stress, in much the same way an asthmatic crisis is primarily the result of an underlying medical (...) condition, not an allergic stimulus. Both the novel and Netflix series ignore this premise and even belittle the idea. Thus, while the story has artistic merits, it also has the potential to be destructive if accessed by young readers and viewers seeking guidance. Approximately ten percent of teens suffer from depression, and suicide recently surpassed homicide as the second-leading cause of death among persons ages ten to twenty-four in the United States. A more balanced view addressing these misconceptions is provided for teens, parents, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

Das angebliche Bilderverbot, das im Zweiten Gebot des Dekalogs enthalten sein soll, ist eigentlich ein Idolatrieverbot. Das heißt, dass das jüdische Gesetz nicht Bilder an sich, sondern Idole verbietet. Gewiss: Manche Bilder werden als Idole verehrt. Es gibt aber auch Bilder, die keine idolatrische Bedeutung haben, und umgekehrt Idole, die keinen bildlichen Charakter aufweisen. Die Untersuchung dieser komplexen Zusammenhänge ist das Hauptziel des vorliegenden Sammelbandes. Von unterschiedlichen theoretischen Standpunkten ausgehend, eröffnen die hier versammelten Aufsätze neue Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis zwischen (...) Bild und Idol. Mit Beiträgen von Beniamino Fortis, Asher D. Biemann, Ellen Rinner, Mario C. Schmidt, Lars Tittmar, Johannes Bennke und Agata Bielik-Robson. (shrink)

Antes de qualquer coisa, o leitor do presente artigo encontrará uma grande preocupação de David Asher em transmitir o pensamento filosófico de Schopenhauer para o leitor britânico da época (1871), isso fica claro, pois esse empreendimento por vezes levou o autor a fazer citações ultra extensas de Schopenhauer (das quais ele mesmo traduzia da língua alemã para o inglês). Nessas longas citações/traduções que o autor faz do filósofo, tratei de copiá-las da tradução brasileira de Jair Barboza d’O mundo como (...) vontade e como representação. Sempre especifico essas cópias em notas, por isso, meu trabalho foi de fazer uma tradução parcial: traduzir o próprio Asher e não o texto de Schopenhauer traduzido por ele. Outro ponto muitíssimo importante a ser levado em consideração é que o presente texto foi comprovadamente lido pelo próprio Charles Darwin, tal como devidamente mostro na nota de rodapé número 16. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that some words can (...) behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

La célébration du cinquantième anniversaire de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et de l’ouverture des camps donne depuis quelques années l’occasion de revisiter une histoire juive douloureuse et loin d’être dépassionnée. De nombreux déportés, l’âge venu, écrivent leurs témoignages, toujours poignants, et qui éclairent les faits avec la brutalité que donne l’expérience personnelle. Quelques-uns de ces témoignages retiennent particulièrement l’attention par ce qu’ils nous font comprendre de...

La célébration du cinquantième anniversaire de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et de l’ouverture des camps donne depuis quelques années l’occasion de revisiter une histoire juive douloureuse et loin d’être dépassionnée. De nombreux déportés, l’âge venu, écrivent leurs témoignages, toujours poignants, et qui éclairent les faits avec la brutalité que donne l’expérience personnelle. Quelques-uns de ces témoignages retiennent particulièrement l’attention par ce qu’ils nous font comprendre de...

The paper offers a new reading of the argument against poetry in Plato’s Republic 10. I argue that Socrates’ corruption charges rely on the tripartite theory of the soul, and that metaphysical doctrines play a role only in the first charge, which demonstrates that the poets are not qualified to teach by reducing tragic poetry to mimetic skill. This accusation clears the way for two corruption charges: the strengthening of appetite, and the softening of spirit (i.e., ‘the greatest charge’). The (...) former focuses on the dangerous association between the poets and the largest appetitive class in the city (hoi polloi), while the latter focuses on the corruption of the educated elite (hoi epieikeis). (shrink)

Popper conceived an experiment whose analysis led to a result that he deemed absurd. Popper wrote that his reasoning was based on the Copenhagen interpretation and therefore invalidated it. Many authors who have examined Popper's analysis have found in it various technical flaws which are briefly summarized here. However, the aim of the present article is not technical. My concern is to redress logical flaws in Popper's argument: the terminology he uses is ambiguous, his analysis involves counterfactual hypotheses, and it (...) violates Bohr's complementarity principle. Therefore, the absurdity of Popper's result only confirms Bohr's approach. (shrink)

This book explores the problem of moral metaphysics through investigations of four pivotal philosophers. It uses the contemporary idea of moral sentimentalism as a comparative category to explore the problems and challenges inherent in the project of moral metaphysics.

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once (...) such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

The physicist not only observes phenomena, but he also has an active role in the formulation of some laws. For instance, laws involving irreversibility refer explicitly to what can or cannot be done by physicists. As the abilities of the latter may vary, we obtain sequences of laws, the convergence of which is discussed.

Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media (...) and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images. All stills are taken from the video that was shot in the Philippines, Thailand, California, and the German–Czech border. (shrink)

Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media (...) and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images. All stills are taken from the video that was shot in the Philippines, Thailand, California, and the German—Czech border. (shrink)

An imprecise measurement of a dynamical variable (such as a spin component) does not, in general, give the value of another dynamical variable (such as a spin component along a slightly different direction). The result of the measurement cannot be interpreted as the value of any observable that has a classical analogue.