The disciplinary differentiation of sciences attracted Leibniz’s attention for a long period of time. From nowadays prospects it looks very well grounded as soon as in Leibniz’s manuscripts a modern scholar finds clue ideas of any research field which would tempt him to consider Leibniz as one of the founders of this particular discipline. We argue that this is possible only in retrospection and would significantly distort the essence of Leibniz’s epistemology. Our approach implies, in contrary, the investigation of the (...) Leibniz doctrine of signs on the background of the related philosophical problem, that of expression. The choice of semiotics is justified by the fact that it took a central place in his theoretical constructions, both those of natural sciences and of philosophy. In Leibniz system of knowledge the concept of notes (notae) and sings (signa) served a theoretical foundation of his most important and long-life aspiration to build up practical science of universal characteristics (characteristica universalis). In his eyes this practical science was the science of sciences (Scientia scientiarum), and we can consider it as the matrix for all possible scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Pelczar and Rainsbury advance a theory of proper names which purports, inter alia, to implement Kripke’s causal theory of name reference in order to explain reference change. The key tool for accomplishing this is the notion of a dubbing-in-force. In this paper I aim to show that this special appeal to dubbings does not sustain any real advance over Kripke’s account at least with respect to the problem of inadvertent referential shift. I argue that this theory has not offered any (...) theory of reference transmission, which I take as a precondition for explaining the problem of reference change, and that the notion of a dubbing-in-force is unnecessary for name reference. (shrink)

Medical students newly arrived on the wards encounter frustrating ethical predicaments that are complicated by students' place in the hospital hierarchy. A careful scrutiny of medical social structure and culture may enable medical schools to offer their students a more effective ethics education.

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

At Statesman (Plt.) 291a–c and 303c–d, Plato compares the so-called statesmen of all existing constitutions to a motley crew of lions, centaurs, satyrs, and other beasts, and the entire section of the Statesman devoted to law and constitutions (291c–303c) to a satyr-play of sorts. This paper argues that these thought-provoking images are best understood as literary devices which, in addition to other dramatic elements in the Theaetetus and Sophist, help to bolster the unity of the Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman trilogy and its apologetic (...) agenda concerning Socrates. (shrink)

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a (...) theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

We describe a neural monitor of environmental and physiological resources that informs effort expenditure. Depending on resources and environmental stability, serotonergic and dopaminergic neuromodulations favor different behavioral controls that are organized in corticostriatal loops. This broader perspective produces some suggestions and questions that may not be covered by the foraging approach to vigor of Shadmehr and Ahmed (2020).

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

I argue that a distinction between three autoimmunities is implied in Derrida’s _Rogues_. These are the autoimmunities of democracy as a regime of power, of democracy to come and of sovereignty. I extrapolate the relations between three different autoimmunities using the figure of the internal enemy in order to argue for an agonistic conception of democracy.

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Le Politique est généralement conçu comme un dialogue décousu et manquant d'unité, au mieux comme une succession de méthodes et de voies de recherche différentes (division dichotomique, mythe, paradigme) visant chacune à définir le politique. Le présent article vise au contraire à montrer que l'unité du dialogue est coextensive au développement d'une unique diaíresis, et ce en soulignant, à partir de ce que le texte dit lui-même, que le mythe, la méthode par paradigme et l'analyse des constitutions existantes ne sont (...) que des moyens permettant à la division de tracer le sentier qui mène au politique tel qu'il devrait être. L'ensemble des passages méthodologiques du dialogue permet ainsi d'expliquer comment le Politique explore les possibilités et souligne les limites de la méthode diairétique. Plato's Statesman is usually read as a tedious and carelessly written exercise in dialectic, or, more charitably, as a patchwork of loosely connected applications of different methods of definition of statesmanship (division, myth and paradigm). In this paper, I argue that this much disputed problem of the unity of the dialogue can be solved, provided one reads the whole dialogue as what it claims to be, i.e. the developpment of a single diaíresis. It can be shown that the Eleatic Visitor makes use of the myth, of the analysis of paradigms and of the treatment of non-ideal constitutions as means to following a single path, throughout the whole dialogue, that leads to the definition of statesmanship as it should be. The Statesman emerges as Plato's most profound reflection on the possibilities and the limits of the diairetic method. (shrink)

The article examines the concept of duty with reference to Ibsen's play "Ghosts." It offers a brief genealogy of duty while linking the concept of duty to a deconstructive approach.

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its (...) Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

The articles considers how the "death of the subject" influences ways in which we understand the aestheticization of the political." It explores how Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" can contribute to a conception of the political implications of thinking the subject. It also turns to Solon's conception of subjectivity as a way of mediating the current discussion on the subject.

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between letters and numbers in the case of ancient Greek and, other writing systems and, supports that priority must be given to the numbers, that is to say the use of letters of the alphabet was constrained, by the necessities of mathematics. In the case of Ancient Greece the ‘24 letters of the alphabet’ plus ‘3 additional signs’ were used to notate the numbers. These 27 signs formed the three enneads of the Greek Numeral System, (...) which was in use in Eastern Mediterranean and parts of Europe for almost 2,000 years. So, the 24 letter-signs were also digit-signs. The arithmetic use of letters is considered by epigraphologists and Hellenists a later development, occurring two or three centuries after the invention of the Greek alphabet. This paper supports that, from the very beginning, the alphabet should, have had, 27 signs in order to meet the needs of mathematics, that is to meet the necessity of using the enneads of the Egyptian numeral system, which probably was transferred, to Greeks via the Semitic writing system. This hypothesis is based, on the contradictions which arise between the choice of signs and their use, from ancient Greek ‘Logistikē’, from archaeological finds and from the examples of other writing systems, which were also created so as to serve the needs of mathematics — namely Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and, other alphabets. Consequently, the alphabet should, not be considered, as a secondary system of signs, which was created, in order to record, the spoken word, but as a subset of a broader semiotic system that attempts to express human Reason in general. (shrink)

Dimitri Lorrain est chercheur en sciences humaines (EHESS), spécialisé dans l'étude de l'art et de la littérature (il a publié des articles sur Michel-Ange, Alberti, ainsi que sur l'art des «?nouveaux commanditaires?»). Installé à Francfort-sur-le-Main, il chronique la vie intellectuelle allemande pour la revue Panorama des idées.

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

A collection of documents from antiquity to the 16th century in the historical West (Bactria to the Atlantic), in the original languages with an English translation and introductory essays, about the motivations and purposes of translation from and into Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, as given in the personal statements by the translators, scholars, and historians of each society.

One of the main philosophical outcomes of Plato’s Statesman is to define statesmanship as a prescriptive form of knowledge, exercising control over subordinate tekhnai. Against a widespread scholarly view according to which the Statesman offers a radically critical view of laws, this paper argues that the art of legislation has pride of place among these subordinate arts which also include rhetoric, strategy, the art of the judge and education.

Debate on the nature of representation in cognitive systems tends to oscillate between robustly realist views and various anti‐realist options. I defend an alternative view, deflationary realism, which sees cognitive representation as an offshoot of the extended application to cognitive systems of an explanatory model whose primary domain is public representation use. This extended application, justified by a common explanatory target, embodies idealisations, partial mismatches between model and reality. By seeing representation as part of an idealised model, deflationary realism avoids (...) the problems with robust realist views, while keeping allegiance to realism. (shrink)

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

Vardoulakis argues that the notion of law as developed in chapter 4 of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise does not rely on a notion of legitimacy but rather on how authority justifies itself. To demonstrate this point, Vardoulakis analyzes closely the example of Adam and the Fall used by Spinoza in that chapter of the Treatise.

Brenner's ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’ has induced a flood of responses, the vast majority of them critical, especially on grounds of method and theory. Tony Smith1 is an exception in seeking to defend Brenner, mostly by pushing his arguments further and by attacking his critics, including ourselves. In part, Smith interprets Brenner and credits him with positions that he can either defend for himself or, as we suspect, reject. Our concern in this reply is not to address issues through (...) the prism of Brenner but to assess Smith's own contribution critically on its own terms and merits. (shrink)

1. The opening sentences of Being and Time (§1) indicate that, according to Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle raised the question of being. A page later, Heidegger asserts that Aristotle discovered th...

Outre les constats sur la crise du gouvernement représentatif insistant sur la défiance des citoyens, la crise climatique est perçue comme révélant l’impuissance de cette forme politique basée sur l’élection. Des voix s’élèvent dans le champ académique, militant et politique, en faveur de l’utilisation de mini-publics tirés au sort pour résoudre divers enjeux politiques, en particulier le changement climatique. Si les assemblées citoyennes sur le climat se sont récemment multipliées, il convient d’examiner leur précurseur : l’assemblée citoyenne irlandaise (ACI). Ce (...) dispositif délibératif a certes proposé la légalisation de l’avortement en 2017, approuvée par référendum, mais il a également traité du climat. Grâce à une longue étude de terrain, on analyse les délibérations de l’ACI sur le climat, et notamment la tension entre pouvoir des citoyens participants et contrôle par les organisateurs et experts. Puis, on comparera le cas irlandais à la Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat française, qui a également fait l’objet d’une étude de terrain intégrale. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

Placing the notion of sin in the context of a meontic account of evil, and emphasizing the effect of sin on the sinner himself, this commentary exposes the insufficiency of restricting oneself to human efforts at atonement, and of thus underemphasizing the role of Christ. Collange’s claim that the teaching of “predestination” is rooted in Paul and that the doctrine of merits and indulgences is rooted in Augustine is criticized, and Luther’s “forensic” understanding is linked with Augustine, rather than with (...) Paul. Collange’s reduction of the concern for holiness to respect and trust is contrasted with holiness’s essential context of loving unification with God. The commentary closes by exposing the unsatisfactory scantiness of Collange’s treatment of cloning, health-care economy, and of the evils of life. (shrink)

Vardoulakis argues that the concept of equality is determined by the distinction between three different types of equality in Aristotle. He then shows how Spinoza overcomes the Aristotelian conception by determining equality through a notion of differential power.

Vardoulakis explores the connection between sovereignty and stasis in the work of Agamben. It considers some of Agamben's most famous formulations of sovereignty, such in Homo Sacer. But the focus is on some seemingly obscure references to Spinoza in Agamben's works. Vardoulakis argues that these references reveal the logic of Agamben's political philosophy -- including a politics of reading that influences his account of the philosophical tradition.

O século XX trouxe uma ciência impossível: a ciência da mente. Esta ciência ignora os problemas semiológico, nosológico e sociocultural a ela inerentes e que a inviabilizam. Como resultado, observamos a criação de uma pandemia global de transtornos mentais, majoritariamente administrados através de psicofármacos. Em contraponto, o pensamento filosófico desafia esta logica desde Canguilhem, passando por Michel Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, dentre tantos outros. E da Éticaespinosana dos afetos e afecções, nasceu a Heterogênese Urbana (HU), que tem como objeto original (...) a revitalização criativa das potências humanas através do contato entre subjetividades diversas. Etimologicamente, “criação a partir e com a diversidade”. Com a circulação dos afetos, dos desejos, das ideias nos espaços públicos, a HU promove, fenomenologicamente, a expressão daquilo que, antes permanecia invisível e indizível face o silêncio da vida da cidade. Os campos de afetações intersubjetivo e intercorpóreo entre vidas tão distintas desloca e descola o olhar fundado na psicopatologia clássica para atravessar a vida da cidade pelas potências que cada indivíduo é capaz nas experiências coletivas.A HU denuncia a multicomplexidade do conceito “produção de saúde”, que apenas inicia-se nas práticas biomédicas, compreendendo todos os saberes para a construção do cidadão autônomo e afetivo. (shrink)

Known today mostly as an author of Romantic short stories and fairy tales for children, Prince Vladimir Odoyevskiy was a distinguished thinker of his time, philosopher and bibliophile. The scope of his interests includes also history of magic arts and alchemy, German Romanticism, Church music. An attempt to understand the peculiarity of eight specific modes used in chants of Russian Orthodox Church led him to his own musical theory based upon well-known writings by Zarlino, Leibniz, Euler, Prony. He realized his (...) theoretical ideas in an enharmonical piano with nineteen notes for every octave. His call for a different musical scale remained largely ignored in the nineteenth century, until the topic was raised anew by twentieth-century composers and musicians. (shrink)

Structuralist foundations of mathematics aim for an ‘invariant’ conception of mathematics. But what should be their basic objects? Two leading answers emerge: higher groupoids or higher categories. I argue in favor of the former over the latter. First, I explain why to choose between them we need to ask the question of what is the correct ‘categorified’ version of a set. Second, I argue in favor of groupoids over categories as ‘categorified’ sets by introducing a pre-formal understanding of groupoids as (...) abstract shapes. This conclusion lends further support to the perspective taken by the Univalent Foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

In the Univalent Foundations of mathematics spatial notions like “point” and “path” are primitive, rather than derived, and all of mathematics is encoded in terms of them. A Homotopy Type Theory is any formal system which realizes this idea. In this paper I will focus on the question of whether a Homotopy Type Theory can be justified intuitively as a theory of shapes in the same way that ZFC can be justified intuitively as a theory of collections. I first clarify (...) what such an “intuitive justification” should be by distinguishing between formal and pre-formal “meaning explanations” in the vein of Martin-Löf. I then go on to develop a pre-formal meaning explanation for HoTT in terms of primitive spatial notions like “shape”, “path” etc. (shrink)

Il s’agit ici de faire valoir ceci que la question de l’origine, telle qu’elle se dépose et se laisse décrire respectivement chez Franz Rosenzweig et chez Walter Benjamin, recèle un certain nombre d’enjeux conceptuels qui déterminent quelque chose comme une éthique et une gestuelle conjointe de sauvetage. Une éthique vers laquelle se sont réorientées la « pensée nouvelle » de Rosenzweig et « la philosophie à venir » de Benjamin. Par sauvetage j’entends : sauvetage de l’ordre de l’existentiali...