In recent years, it has become widely accepted that linguistic questions were much more central to the philosophical tradition of German idealism than had been previously thought. However, most of the key texts for this discussion remain largely unknown. The present work makes available, for the first time in English, what is the seminal work for this issue: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's monograph of 1795 entitled On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language, together with other closely related essays. The (...) translations are accompanied by a detailed interpretive essay that seeks to place these materials in their historical context, relate them to the systematic concerns of German idealism, and evaluate them in relation to later approaches to language, especially those of semiotics and poststructuralism. It also explores the role played by the linguistic thought of the German idealists in the emergance of modern "scientific linguistics" with wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as its connections with the origins of German romanticism. While the book draws upon state-of-the-art scholarship in these areas, it is written in such a way as to be accessible to any serious student of philosophy, intellectual and literary history, and linguistics. (shrink)

: The article investigates the earliest appearance of a group of words which are identified in the literature as the shahāda but are rarely defined on the assumption that everyone knows what the shahāda is. The basic argument is that there was more than one version of the shahāda circulating in the Islamic world at the beginning of the eighth decade A.H./690s C.E. and that scholars need to define which version they mean when using the term “shahāda” for this early (...) period. Evidence for the argument includes data from stelae from Aswan to the Fatimid era, the Dome of the Rock and early Muslim coinage. (shrink)

_The first anthology exclusively devoted to Hegel’s linguistic thought._.

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative tweets, investigating (...) which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

Selfridge is a corporate administrator for the Resources Development Administration (RDA) Corporation. Selfridges's dastardly deeds on behalf of RDA shareholders would be denounced by a variety of ethical umpires, religious and secular. But maybe such denunciations are beside the point. The RDA unleashes torrential firepower on Hometree to gain access to unobtanium, a priceless mineral. This destruction of a culture for profits screams immorality. Selfridge accepts his prime directive to be the maximization of RDA profits by any means necessary. “Their (...) damn village happens to be resting on the richest unobtanium deposit within 200 klicks in any direction,” grumbles Selfridge, who wants the priceless rocks underneath Hometree. Philosophers generally think that a being has natural rights by virtue of possessing certain traits, such as consciousness, self‐awareness, creativity, willfulness, or rationality. Tragically, human beings can drift from their moral values, especially when they act as members of groups. (shrink)

This article explores a sequence of events, a combination of Orthodox Christian village and chapel festivals, associated processions and a cross-border procession, through the theoretical concept of ritualisation. The sequence of events takes place annually in the Finnish villages of Saarivaara and Hoilola, the Pörtsämö wilderness cemetery and the former Finnish municipality of Korpiselkä, located today in Russia; it attracts participants with religious and other motives, including nostalgia and family history. An analysis is made of how different and sometimes contradictory (...) modes of action are structured and intertwined to form a coherent ritual event. On the basis of original anthropological research undertaken near and over the border between Finland and Russia, in Karelia, it emerges that the ritual mastery by Orthodox priests and shared goals and motives of heritage and culture give the journey a necessary structure, which can be studied and explained in terms of ritualisation. (shrink)

"Odious debts" have been the subject of debate in academic, activist, and policymaking circles in recent years. The term refers to the debts of a nation that a despotic leader incurs against the interests of the populace. When the despot is overthrown, the new government — understandably — does not wish to repay creditors who helped prop up the despot. One argument has focused on whether customary international law supports a "doctrine" of odious debts that justifies the nonpayment of sovereign (...) debts when three conditions are met: the debts were incurred by a despotic ruler ; the funds were used in ways that did not benefit the populace; and the creditors were aware of the likely illegality of the loans. Advocates of this doctrine, which was synthesized by Alexander Sack in 1927, typically cite two examples of U.S. state practice for support: the negotiations between the United States and Spain following the Spanish-American War, in which the United States repudiated Cuba’s colonial debt, and the Tinoco arbitration, which repudiated certain debts of the deposed Costa Rican dictator, Frederico Tinoco. Those historical precedents do not support the first condition of Sack’s doctrine of odious debts, but do support the second two requirements. In addition to these two instances, United States history is rich with examples of debt repudiation by states. Those examples suggest a doctrine of odious debts that is broader and more flexible than the one written by Sack. Indeed, it may be appropriate to speak of the doctrines of odious debts. (shrink)

The first anthology exclusively devoted to Hegel’s linguistic thought.

The ability of managers to identify and interpret challenges in the external environment is one of the micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities. The underlying literature on strategic issue interpretation suggests that interpreting environmental challenges as opportunities rather than threats is more likely to lead to proactive and innovative responses, but there are also potentially positive effects of threat interpretation, for instance high levels of commitment and risk-seeking behaviour. In this paper, I use the context of climate change to explore the link (...) between threat interpretation and innovation in more detail. I use exploratory cluster analysis and illustrative case studies to develop a set of propositions to explain when threat interpretation can in fact encourage innovation. I identify two ethical mechanisms that positively mediate the relationship between threat interpretation and innovation: enlarged concept of responsibility to society and moral legitimacy. The paper contributes to the literature by identifying the importance of ethics in linking managerial interpretation to innovation, particularly in the context of global environmental and social challenges. (shrink)

Businesses frequently exclude spiritual values, viewing such values as impositions that belong in business as much as a priest belongs at a bachelor party. Yet spirituality should not be viewed as impositions from without, but as inclusions from within. Spiritual values should be included in a company to the extent that these values are shared by the principals of a firm. Excluding spiritual values found in a “convergent consensus” runs contrary to freedom and liberty that Milton Friedman, among others, champions. (...) Furthermore, the exclusion of such values from a business threatens to alienate business persons from their moral integrity. By cultivating what I will call “the spiritual imagination,” businesses can facilitate fidelity between the convergent values of its principals, and the actions, policies, and culture of a company. (shrink)

In Giorgio Agamben’s eyes, Immanuel Kant’s work is the modern philosophical harbinger of the catastrophic ‘state of exception’. By focusing on the latter’s ‘author/subject corrective’, I make the connection between Agamben and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason more apparent. In doing so, I show how Kant’s corrective instrumentalises autonomy in such a way that it compromises the validity it seeks to rationalise; it does so by separating the individual from actuality, by ostracising law from political challenge, and by conflating individual (...) and state interests. Taken together, these three undercurrents are defining features of Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series. (shrink)

Dorion Cairns was one of Husserl’s closest pupils, his closest American pupil, and a leading translator, interpreter, and teacher of phenomenology in the United States. His translations of Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic remain authoritative, his Guide forTranslating Husserl and Conversations with Husserl and Fink are classic texts in the history of phenomenology, and a number of his students from his years at the New School for Social Research are leading figures in contemporary phenomenology.The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (...) is Cairns’s previously unpublished 1933 Harvard dissertation. It is also the first volume of what will likely be six volumes of the Philosophical Papers of Dorion Cairns.The Editorial Committee for this project is comprised of Lester Embree, Fred Kersten , and Richard Zaner, the latter of whom serves as Cairns’s literary executor. Cairns composed the dissertation in the six months .. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian nihilism (...) that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

In Giorgio Agamben’s eyes, Immanuel Kant’s work is the modern philosophical harbinger of the catastrophic ‘state of exception’. By focusing on the latter’s ‘author/subject corrective’, I make the connection between Agamben and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason more apparent. In doing so, I show how Kant’s corrective instrumentalises autonomy in such a way that it compromises the validity it seeks to rationalise; it does so by separating the individual from actuality, by ostracising law from political challenge, and by conflating individual (...) and state interests. Taken together, these three undercurrents are defining features of Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Virtual Reality: Immersive Pornography Welcome to the Hyperreal World The Future Obsolescence of Real Women Hyper‐Romance is Porn Too Down the Rabbit Hole: Sexual Deviancy Flourishes in Unbounded Realities Conditioned to be Sexually Deviant Indulging in Forbidden Fruits Online User Malfunction: Virtue Theory for a Virtual World The Pornographic Singularity: A Bleak Prophecy Notes.

Only by presenting war as a game was the I.F. able to get brilliant children— Ender in particular—to accomplish its military tasks. Representing war as a game is a common, effective misrepresentation that allows otherwise moral human beings to commit the inhumane violence war requires. This chapter explores the masquerade of war as a game and how it manipulates human psychology to effectively accomplish destructive goals. It looks at philosophy, psychology, and sociology to illuminate the I.F. High Command's strategy of (...) using child's play to destroy an alien race, and thereby save humanity. To save the human race, Ender deceives himself into believing war games are but child's play, that starships are mere points of light, and that an entire alien planet is mere pixels. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Can a Serial Killer Ever Be Good? Dexter on Trial Four Ethical Tests Dexter Dreams Darkly: An Overview of Showtime's Dexter Morgan Killing to Maximize Happiness Kant's Dark Champion A Virtuous Devil or a Moral Monster? Hypothetical Consent: Would You Want Dexter in Your Neighborhood? Closing Arguments.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Linguistic Inheritance Hegel's Early View of Language in the Jena Period (1804–1806) Language in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Language in Hegel's ‘Mature System’ ( The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences ) (1818–1830) The Philosophy of Language: The Unwritten Volume.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Myth of Christmas Elfs Ho‐Ho, Ho‐Ho: Off to Work Elfs Go Ho‐Ho Hopelessness: The Failure of Entitlement Theory Elf‐Self‐Deception Elfs: Magically Exploitable Santa's Little Helpers: A “Magical” Mere Means “He knows when you are sleeping” Christmas Joy = Elfploitation Sleigh the Myth of Santa: Boycott Christmas.