We define a generic notion of cut that applies to many first-order theories. We prove a generic cut elimination theorem showing that the cut elimination property holds for all theories having a so-called pre-model. As a corollary, we retrieve cut elimination for several axiomatic theories, including Church's simple type theory.

Over the past two decades, the renowned political theorist William E. Connolly has developed a powerful theory of pluralism as the basis of a territorial politics. In this concise volume, Connolly launches a new defense of pluralism, contending that it has a renewed relevance in light of pressing global and national concerns, including the war in Iraq, the movement for a Palestinian state, and the fight for gay and lesbian rights. Connolly contends that deep, multidimensional pluralism is the best way (...) to promote justice and inclusion without violence. He advocates a deep pluralism—in contrast to shallow, secular pluralism—that helps to create space for different groups to bring their religious faiths into the public realm. This form of deep pluralism extends far beyond faith, encompassing multiple dimensions of social and personal lives, including household organization and sexuality. Connolly looks at pluralism not only in light of faith but also in relation to evil, ethics, relativism, globalization, and sovereignty. In the process, he engages many writers and theorists—among them, Spinoza, William James, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. _Pluralism_ is the first book in which Connolly explains the relationship between pluralism and the experience of time, and he offers readings of several films that address how time is understood, including _Time Code_, _Far from Heaven_, _Waking Life_, and _The Maltese Falcon_. In this necessary book Connolly brings a compelling, accessible philosophical critique together with his personal commitment to an inclusive political agenda to suggest how we might—and why we must—cultivate pluralism within both society and ourselves. (shrink)

I. Introduction Most philosophers today have never heard of Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83), and most of the few who have heard of him know only that he was the founder of Cambridge Platonism.1 He is well worth learning more about, however. For Whichcote was a vital influence on both Ralph Cudworth and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, through whom he helped shape the views of Clarke and Price, on the one hand, and Hutcheson and Hume, on the other. Whichcote should (...) thus be seen as a grandparent of both the rationalist and the sentimentalist strands of eighteenth century British ethical theory. In this paper, I will elucidate the particular ethical positions of Whichcote’s that played such an important role. Whichcote’s thought is interesting in its own right, moreover, as a lens for examining the implications of certain prevalent religious and moral commitments. In what follows, then, I will also seek to show that Whichcote’s profoundly theistic view of human nature is ultimately incompatible with the belief that is fundamental to his Christianity. Perhaps the idea of an irresolvable conflict between Whichcote’s Christianity and his theism sounds at first a bit paradoxical. I hope, though, that by the end of this paper it will be clear how, for many 17th century rationalists, such a conflict was virtually inevitable. (shrink)

The contemporary theorization of art can be traced in a series of interlocking and antagonistic positions: the dissolution of art into social relations, the tracking of art as the work of objects that recede from our grasp, and the practice of art as instantiating or linking to an immanent plane. I take the question of immanence as central to these debates. This is because immanence implies a superior plane that exceeds specification or determination, and it also traces the problem of (...) capitalism as our horizon of immanence that threatens to absorb any such excess, whether that is artistic, political or ontological. Tracking the problem of immanence, I explore how it rests on the tension of a relation to immanence. Using the work of Gilles Deleuze I analyse this relation as existing in the tension between a moment of excess, often theological, and an immanent relation or fold. Returning to Deleuze's use of the early Sartre we find that Sartre offers a subtly different thinking of relations and immanence through exploring how we are cast out amongst relations and objects. I then use two of Sartre's later essays on art to examine his development of a “situated absolute”: the artwork as the site which condenses and gathers the contradictions of relations and objects into itself, precisely refusing immanence. This, I argue, offers the key to unsettling the coordinates of contemporary art theory by reinstating a thinking of the absolute as positional and at once immersed and antagonistic. (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonists were a group of religious thinkers who attended and taught at Cambridge from the 1640s until the 1660s. The four most important of them were Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More. The most prominent sentimentalist moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment – Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith – knew of the works of the Cambridge Platonists. But the Scottish sentimentalists typically referred to the Cambridge Platonists only briefly and in passing. The surface of (...) Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith's texts can give the impression that the Cambridge Platonists were fairly distant intellectual relatives of the Scottish sentimentalists – great great-uncles, perhaps, and uncles of a decidedly foreign ilk. But this surface appearance is deceiving. There were deeply significant philosophical connections between the Cambridge Platonists and the Scottish sentimentalists, even if the Scottish sentimentalists themselves did not always make it perfectly explicit. (shrink)

Michael Gill has argued that contemporary metaethics proceeds on the assumption that morality is uniform. I apply Gill’s diagnosis to the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. I argue, on the basis of examples, that there is good reason to question the assumption that morality is semantically uniform. I describe the assumption as a symptom of what Wittgenstein has called the philosopher’s “craving for generality‘. I discuss several recent metaethical positions in which the question “Cognitivism or non-cognitivism?‘ appears as a false (...) dilemma. I conclude that these positions are still subject to the craving for generality. I defend a more radically Wittgensteinian approach to metaethics, in which the idea of family resemblances and an emphasis on differences between moral judgments are particularly important If morality is not necessarily to be thought of as semantically uniform, at least one important consequence follows. An omnipresent way of arguing in metaethics, namely arguing for cognitivism by arguing against non-cognitivism, becomes unavailable to the metaethicist. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze's two-volume theory of film, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_ and _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, have slowly been making an impact on Anglo-American film studies. The special issue of _Film-Philosophy_ on his work (vol. 5, 2001) and David Rodowick's excellent introduction, _Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine_ (1997), are just two signs, among many, of the growing interest in Deleuze's writings on cinema. His work has also inspired the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to propose a new theory of film that significantly (...) departs from Deleuze. Agamben has developed a new theory of 'gestural cinema', arguing that '*the element of cinema is gesture and not image*'. [1] He has also argued that this new theory of gestural cinema means that cinema belongs, essentially, to the realm of ethics and politics, and not aesthetics. It is this new theory that I want to introduce. (shrink)

This chapter offers a proceduralist argument against capital punishment. More specifically, it contends that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. At stake is a principle of political morality: legal institutions must strive to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The incompatibility of remedy and execution is the crux of the irrevocability argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the morally required compensation, execution is impermissible. Along with defending (...) his key premises, Yost explains the complicated role that sentencing uncertainty plays in the argument. He concludes by noting some of the flaws in substantive consequentialist and retributivist justifications of capital punishment. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a (...) break with the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)

​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy. The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination (...) so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading. (shrink)

This paper reviews Benjamin Noys’ recent attempt in Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism to mount a critique of accelerationism. The book, persuasive in certain respects, bypasses the institutional dynamics of accelerationism’s theoretical progenitors, viz. Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit of Warwick University, and instead portrays it as a “defeatist strategy” of the post-’68 conjuncture of “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Such portrayal is debatable to the extent that it exhibits a questionable appropriation of “theory” in the strict sense of (...) the term; a term the paper attempts to define with reference to Matthew Arnold, Louis Althusser and Gilles Grelet. (shrink)

At least some of your beliefs are commitments. When you believe that P as a commitment, your stance on P is such that you believe it on the basis of your considered judgement. Sometimes, you also believe that you believe P. Such self‐beliefs can also be commissive in a sense, as when they are reflective endorsements of your lower‐order commissive beliefs. In this paper I argue that one's commissive self‐beliefs ontologically constitute one's lower‐order commissive beliefs because one's commissive self‐beliefs instantiate (...) the same inferential dispositions that are constitutive of one's lower‐order commissive beliefs. Constitutive relations between commissive self‐beliefs and first‐order commissive beliefs are maximally epistemically secure because they do not result from any epistemic procedure by which one must try (and possibly fail) to detect one's first‐order commissive beliefs. This maximal epistemic security suffices to warrant one's commissive self‐beliefs, such that one possesses commissive self‐knowledge of an especially privileged sort. (shrink)

Kant famously insists that free will is a condition of morality. The difficulty of providing a demonstration of freedom has left him vulnerable to devastating criticism: critics charge that Kant's post-Groundwork justification of morality amounts to a dogmatic assertion of morality's authority. My paper rebuts this objection, showing that Kant offers a cogent demonstration of freedom. My central claim is that the demonstration must be understood in practical rather than theoretical terms. A practical demonstration of x works by bringing x (...) into existence, and what the demonstration of freedom brings into existence is a moral will, a will regulated by the moral law and capable of acting in accordance with it. Since to act morally is to act freely, bringing a moral will into existence actualizes our capacity for freedom and demonstrates that we possess it. To confirm the viability of such a demonstration, Kant must establish that agents can regulate their wills by practical principles, and that practical judgments are efficacious of themselves (i.e., that non-Humean motivational internalism is true). Kant, I argue, is successful on both counts. (shrink)

The late reflections of G.W. Leibniz on eternal return have often been dismissed as insignificant as regards his wider philosophy. This may be due to the prevalent championing of his optimistic views on the continual progress of humanity, which seem to contradict the notion of eternal return. Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze both put forward concepts of eternal return that form part of their respective critiques of historical progress, yet these have rarely been read in conjunction with their (...) views on Leibniz. This article argues, first, that for Leibniz progress and return are not contradictory, and second, that Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s concepts of return were informed, in different ways, by their readings of Leibniz, and specifically by his conception of multiple worlds as the spatial equivalent of eternal return. In doing so I will shed light on the contribution of Leibniz’s philosophy not only to the progressive theories of history put forward during the Enlightenment, but also to the critique of these very visions. (shrink)

Nietzsche distinguished between two forces in art: Apollonian, which represents order and reason, and Dionysian, which represents chaos and energy. Economists, Ward argues, have operated for too long under the assumption that their work reflects the scientific, Apollonian principals that inform physics when they simply do not apply to economics: 'constants' in economics stand in for variables, and the core scientific principles of prediction and replication are all but ignored by economists. Ward encourages economists to reintegrate the standard rigor of (...) the scientific method into their work while embracing the fact of the shape-shifting changeability of human beings. Economists can still aspire to scientific standards, as is demonstrated by the success of biology, in which there is considerable Dionysian variability. Economists must avoid the temptation to wish away dynamic complexity and diversity and must recognize, among other things, that the desire to take risks is fundamentally human. The second half of the book takes some first steps toward creating this new Dionysian Economics. (shrink)

This text examines some parallels between Walter Benjamin’s “critique of violence” and the theory of violence proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever the differences between these two approaches, they both share an important common feature, defining the violence of state and law in terms of a “violence which presupposes itself”. This circular structure of the concept of violence renders utterly problematic the attempts to envisage a wholly other, revolutionary form of violence, which could be opposed to (...) that of the state or its law. Benjamin’s hypothesis of a divine violence which breaks the circle of the mythical one, as well as the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the war machine, have been devised in order to come to terms with this situation. However, these concepts are not intended to serve as a basis for the legitimation of possible acts of counter-violence. What they assert is rather the fundamental and irreducible unavailability of the event in the sphere of social struggles, where our actions can neither be calculated in advance as to their results nor be ultimately justified. (shrink)

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions. In _Nietzsche and Philosophy_, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical (...) ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought. (shrink)

This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical ...

Examines the philosophy of Henri Bergson, explains his concepts of duration, memory, and elan vital, and discusses the influence of science on Bergson.

Until recently, cognitive science focused on such mental functions as problem solving, grammar, and pattern-the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers: we invent new meanings, imagine wildly, and even have ideas that have never existed before. Today the cutting edge of cognitive science addresses precisely these mysterious, creative aspects of the mind.The Way We Think is a landmark analysis of the imaginative nature of the mind. Conceptual blending is already (...) widely known in research laboratories throughout the world; this book, written to be accessible to both lay readers and interested scientists, is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner show that conceptual blending is the root of the cognitively modern human mind, and that conceptual blends themselves are continually combined and reblended to create the rich mental fabric in which we live.The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, culture, and invention; and how we imagine what could be and what might have been. The result is a bold and exciting new view of how the mind works. (shrink)

A comienzos de la década de los 80, el filósofo Gilles Deleuze aplicó la teoría de la imagen de Bergson expuesta en Materia y Memoria (1896) a la imagen cinematográfica con la intención de desarrollar nuevas herramientas conceptuales que, a través de un análisis de la historia del cine, permitieran poder delinear mejor tanto la relación cognoscitiva más allá de los presupuestos de sujeto-objeto, como una teoría de la comunicación pre-verbal no estructuralizada fonéticamente que superara definitivamente la concepción lacaniana (...) del lenguaje. Si bien dichos análisis pueden ser vistos también como el establecimiento de unos principios alternativos a las teorías del montaje tanto de Vertov como de Eizenshtéin, el interés primario de nuestro paper se centrará en la redefinición de las categorías espacio-temporales que conlleva esta nueva teoría del cine esgrimida por Deleuze. Concretamente analizaremos cómo la nueva tecnología cinematográfica, especialmente en su desarrollo europeo de la segunda postguerra (Godard, Fellini, Syberberg, Tarkovski) supone una comprensión temporal por completo ajena a cualquier comprensión de causalidad lineal, teleológica o no, de corte cronológico. En su lugar, el cine en tanto que medio de comunicación propio del mundo metropolitano contemporáneo emplea unas categorías temporales más cercanas a conceptos como “acontecimiento” o “haecceitas”, que en algunos puntos lo acercan a la concepción del tiempo desarrollada por Walter Benjamin, pero que por otro lo relacionan directamente con formas aiónicas del mismo ya estudiadas por Deleuze en la década de los 60, y aplicadas al estudio del dadaísmo en la de los 70. (shrink)

At last available in paperback, this book anticipates and explains the post-structuralist turn to empiricism. Presenting a challenging reading of David Hume's philosophy, the work is invaluable for understanding the progress of Deleuze's thought.

Provides a short introduction to Kant, emphasizing Kant's own view of his philosophy. Deleuze offers an overview of the whole of Kant's critical philosophy.

Hardly anyone disputes that discrimination can be a grave moral wrong. Yet this consensus masks fundamental disagreements about what makes something discrimination, as well as precisely why acts of discrimination are wrong. Benjamin Eidelson develops systematic answers to those two questions. He claims that discrimination is a form of differential treatment distinguished by its special connection to the differential ascription of some property to different people, and goes on to argue that what makes some cases of discrimination intrinsically wrongful (...) is that they manifest an attitude of disrespect for the personhood of those who are disfavored. He endeavors to specify what this attitude consists in, and to demonstrate how attending to its character can help us to better understand the moral dimensions of different forms of wrongful discrimination. The book concludes with an extended discussion of racial profiling in law enforcement. (shrink)

Here, I lay the foundations of a high-level ontology of particulars whose structuring principles differ radically from the 'continuant' vs. 'occurrent' distinction traditionally adopted in applied ontology. These principles are derived from a new analysis of the ontology of “occurring” or “happening” entities. Firstly, my analysis integrates recent work on the ontology of processes, which brings them closer to objects in their mode of existence and persistence by assimilating them to continuant particulars. Secondly, my analysis distinguishes clearly between processes and (...) events, in order to make the latter abstract objects of thought (alongside propositions). Lastly, I open my ontological inventory to properties and facts, the existence of which is commonly admitted. By giving specific roles to these primitives, the framework allows one to account for static and dynamic aspects of the physical world and for the way that subjects conceive its history: facts account for the life of substances (physical objects and processes), whereas events enable cognitive subjects to account for the life story of substances. (shrink)

Mental Spaces is the classic introduction to the study of mental spaces and conceptual projection, as revealed through the structure and use of language. It examines in detail the dynamic construction of connected domains as discourse unfolds. The discovery of mental space organization has modified our conception of language and thought: powerful and uniform accounts of superficially disparate phenomena have become available in the areas of reference, presupposition projection, counterfactual and analogical reasoning, metaphor and metonymy, and time and aspect in (...) discourse. The present work lays the foundation for this research. It uncovers simple and general principles that lie behind the awesome complexity of everyday logic. (shrink)

Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as inputs. Blending is easy to detect in spectacular cases but it is for the most part a routine, workaday process that (...) escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly.In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations.Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally observes a set of optimality principles. (shrink)

While psychopathy research has been growing for decades, a relatively new area of research is corporate psychopathy. Corporate psychopaths are simply psychopaths working in organizational settings. They may be attracted to the financial, power, and status gains available in senior positions and can cause considerable damage within these roles from a manipulative interpersonal style to large-scale fraud. Based upon prior studies, we analyze psychopathy research pertaining to 23 moral emotions classified according to functional quality and target. Based upon our review, (...) we suggest that psychopaths are high in moral emotions associated with other-directed negative signals, low in self-directed negative signals, and low in other-directed positive signals. We found no empirical articles related to self-directed positive signals. This understanding of the specific moral emotion deficits of corporate psychopaths provides greater theoretical understanding and practical implications of knowing which individuals not to promote, though more research is needed on moral emotions that are faked for manipulative reasons. (shrink)

Combining the philosophy and musicology of T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze, Joseph Weiss makes an original contribution to the field of aesthetics and critical theory. Highlighting previously hidden connections between these philosophers' work brings into focus a new perspective on the dynamic relationship between music, nature, history, and technology. Musical expression in this study is presented as one of the core ways in which human beings are able to escape their more base natures and instincts. The (...) complex ways in which song is taken up across time and place is viewed through the prism of different technologies and histories. This historical process, which Weiss refers to as the 'instrumentalization of the voice', following Deleuze, is illuminated though a wide-ranging analysis encompassing lullaby, jazz, classical music, and the electroacoustic avant-garde. Deepening the aesthetic analysis of music in relation to the conceptual problems of continental philosophy, Weiss reveals enlightening theoretical consequences. By engaging with an eclectic range of 20th century theorists, including Primo Levi, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Angela Davis, Weiss makes the argument that advanced music remains a refuge for political hopes that are as yet blocked from realization. Speaking to contemporary debates on post-humanism, memory, and the threat of neo-fascist social relations, the author outlines a bold new aesthetics of music. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to help clarify the nature of so-called 'occurrences' by attributing distinct modes of existence and persistence to processes and events. In doing so, we break with the perdurantism claimed by DOLCE’s authors and we distance ourselves from mereological analyzes like those recently conducted by Guarino to distinguish between 'processes' and 'episodes'. In line with the works of Stout and Galton, we first bring closer (physical) processes and objects in their way of enduring by proposing for (...) processes a notion of dynamic presence (contrasting with a static presence for objects). Then, on the events side, we attribute to them the status of abstract entities by identifying them with objects of thought (by individual and collective subjects), and this allows us to distinguish for themselves between existence and occurrence. We therefore identify them with psychological (or even social) endurants, which may contingently occur. (shrink)

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts—pure difference and complex repetition&mdasha;and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, _Difference and Repetition_ moves deftly (...) to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics. (shrink)

Firms located in communities in which people are, on average, more trusting enjoy some benefits in terms of the power of CEO contracts. We present two pieces of empirical evidence to support this claim: (1) higher average trust in a county is associated with “flatter” executive contracts and (2) when an exogenous shock occurs (such as a scandal involving an important social institution), both trust and contracting move in similar directions. We obtain the first result in a panel specification and (...) the second in a “difference-in-difference” specification that uses the revelation of sex scandals involving the Catholic Church across different U.S. localities. (shrink)

The problem of deviant causation has been a serious obstacle for causal theories of action. We suggest that attending to the problem of deviant causation reveals two related problems for causal theories. First, it threatens the reductive ambitions of causal theories of intentional action. Second, it suggests that such a theory fails to account for how the agent herself is guided by her reasons. Focusing on the second of these, we argue that the problem of guidance turns out to be (...) related to a number of other issues in the literature on action explanation, and that it is much more general: it threatens not only causal theories but any theory of action. Finally, we suggest that a certain version of the view that acting has a constitutive or formal aim can overcome this problem. (shrink)

À quelles conditions peut-on, dans un discours réel, utiliser un énoncé comme argument en faveur d’un autre? La réponse semble aller de soi, au moins si l’on assimile l’argumentation à une espèce de raisonnement - peut-être lâche et flou, mais analogue en son fond à la démonstration étudiée par les logiciens. Dans ce cas, l’enchaînement des énoncés se fonde sur les informations qu’ils véhiculent, sur ce qu’ils disent de la réalité. C’est justement l’inverse que veut montrer la théorie des échelles (...) argumentatives. Selon elle, la structure des énoncés, au sens le plus étroitement grammatical du terme, contient, indépendamment des informations qu’ils donnent, des indications sur le type de conclusions qu’ils peuvent servir. Le sens même de nos paroles doit alors être vu comme étant, de façon intrinsèque, un moyen pour orienter le discours de l’autre, l’intention de dire ne se distinguant pas de l’intention de faire dire. Ce qui fait triompher le structuralisme là où on l’attend le moins, en sémantique - la valeur sémantique d’un énoncé est constituée par allusion à la possibilité d’un autre énoncé - l’énoncé de l’autre. (shrink)

An English language translation accompanies the original Greek text of Aristotle's book about the nature of the state, constitutions, revolutions, democracy, and oligarchy.

The Gendered Cyborg brings together material from a variety of disciplines that analyze the relationship between gender and technoscience, and the way that this relationship is represented through ideas, language and visual imagery. The book opens with key feminist articles from the history and philosophy of science. They look at the ways that modern scientific thinking has constructed oppositional dualities such as objectivity/subjectivity, human/machine, nature/science, and male/female, and how these have constrained who can engage in science/technology and how they have (...) limited our ideas of the possibilities for both humanity and science. Later sections contain readings that present key feminist theories about representation to examine how gender and technoscience are represented in areas of particular contemporary interest: the new human reproductive technologies, science fiction, film and the Internet. The readings constantly ask "Is this for women, for human beings?" Contributors: Alison Adam, Anne Balsamo, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Barbara Creed, Mary Ann Doane, Dion Farquhar, Jennifer González, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Donna Haraway, Fiona Hovenden, Luce Irigaray, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, Nina Lykke, Sadie Plant, Rosalind Pollack Perchesky, Londa Schiebinger, Vivian Sobchack, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Nancy Leys Stepan, Nina Wakeford, Kathryn Woodward. (shrink)

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature of (...) creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question. (shrink)

"Gill's and Ryan's Parmenides is, simply, superb: the Introduction, more than a hundred pages long, is transparently clear, takes the reader meticulously through the arguments, avoids perverseness, and still manages to make sense of the dialogue as a whole; there is a fine selective bibliography; and those parts of the translation I have looked at in detail suggest that it too is very good indeed." --Christopher Rowe, _Phronesis_.