Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the (...) colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research. (shrink)

Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the (...) colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the place of utopia in realist political theory, by examining the ways in which the literary genre of critical utopias can productively unsettle ongoing discussions about “how to do political theory.” I start by analyzing two prominent accounts of the relationship between realism and utopia: “real utopia” and “dystopic liberalism”. Elaborating on Raymond Geuss’s recent reflections, the essay then claims that an engagement with literature can shift the focus of these accounts. Utopian fiction, I maintain, is useful (...) for comprehending what is and for contemplating what might be. Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed deploys this double function in an exemplary fashion: through her dynamic and open-ended portrayal of an Anarchist community, Le Guin succeeds in imagining a utopia that negates the status quo, without striving to construct a perfect society. The book’s radical, yet ambiguous, narrative hence reveals a strategy for locating utopia within realist political theory that moves beyond the positions dominating the current debate. Reading The Dispossessed ultimately demonstrates that realism without utopia is status quo–affirming, while utopia without realism is wishful thinking. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, cosmopolitan theories have been benefiting greatly from the dialogue between defenders and critics of world citizenship. Yet, the decidedly polemic aspect of this debate, while allowing for intellectual progress, is also responsible for overdrawn generalizations. Instead of entering into the debate directly, this article attempts to refute a specific anti-cosmopolitan claim raised by Chantal Mouffe. Her realist objection to cosmopolitanism, derived from the conceptual framework of agonistic pluralism, is mistaken at a crucial point: a firm (...) dichotomy between politics and morality cannot provide an alternative to theories of world citizenship, because Mouffe’s embrace of multipolarity as a principle of global politics must equally appeal to a set of universal norms governing international relations. This article argues that even the realist model of multipolarity needs to conceive of a minimal morality to create the symbolic ground on which various power centres can be held accountable. (shrink)

Should we be concerned with, or alarmed or outraged by, the insincerity and hypocrisy of politicians who apologize for historical injustice? This paper argues that the correct reply to this question is: sometimes, but not always. In order to establish what types of insincerity must be avoided, Judith Shklar?s hierarchy of ordinary vices is critically revisited. Against Shklar?s overly benign account of hypocrisy, the paper then tries to demonstrate that only institutional and harmful forms of hypocrisy must be rejected in (...) political apologies for historical injustice. Employing Melissa Nobles? ?membership theory?, this paper defends the claim that the sincerity standard for political apologies is, in stark contrast to apologies between individuals, agent independent. This means that in political apologies, rather than focusing on the remorse and regret of the agent who apologizes, we must primarily examine the apology?s consequences in terms of renegotiating the legal, political and affective dimensions of citizenship. In domestic affairs, the paper shows that apologies can only be considered sincere if they push the polity towards a more inclusive conception of membership in the political community. (shrink)

I argue that musical education in Plato’sRepublicis not aimed at developing a moral discriminatory faculty in the spirited part, but rather that its benefits are predominantly intellectual, and become fully apparent only at the philosophical stage of the guardians’ education. In order to prove this point, I discuss the intellectual state which the guardians’ philosophical education is meant to bring about, and then show why it is dependent on the earlier cognitive effects of musical education. Ultimately, I show that musical (...) education allows guardians to provide a unified analysis of both culture and nature. (shrink)

Ennead VI.7, the thirty-eighth treatise in order of composition, opens with a sustained attack on the idea that the form and function of various animal organs are the result of divine forethought and deliberation. In the first three chapters of the treatise, Plotinus argues that no formulation of the notion of deliberation can be made consistent with the facts about the nature of the intelligible2 and its priority over the physical world. As has been noted in the past,3 Plotinus's arguments (...) against the Platonic idea that teleological thinking is a genuine cause in the sphere of biology can also be taken, from the standpoint of his own philosophical principles, to be effective against an Aristotelian .. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

I make three points. First, the i-frame and s-frame are not helpful frameworks for thinking about behavioral public policy. Second, the authors ignore the role of politics: Policies (and the s-frame) require laws and regulations. Third, the research on retirement savings, which is all about the system, undercuts their claims.

Political theory between moralism and realism -- Telling stories : on art's role in dispelling genocide blindness -- How to do things with hypotheticals : assessing thought experiments about torture -- Genealogy as critique : problematizing definitions of terrorism -- The conceptual tapestry of political violence.

This article deals critically with the process of coming to terms with ‘genocide’. It starts from the observation that conventional philosophical and legal approaches to capturing the essence of ‘genocide’ through an improved definition necessarily fail to adapt to the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the article suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed (...) in the public sphere. The main purpose of this article is to contribute, from the vantage point of political theory, to this debate by offering a novel normative perspective on negative reactions to genocide. Hence I argue that it is productive to speak of ‘genocide blindness’ in cases when the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To establish this claim, the article introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘aspect-seeing’ so as to underline the importance of changing the way that political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the article turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the main issue of this book by affording a side look at a discipline other than economics, namely political theory. It is argued that the contemporary debate in political theory hinges on the question of 'realism'. Through a discussion of Raymond Geuss's work, the paper seeks to show that political theory remains caught between the conflicting requirements of deep contextual analysis and radically critical engagement with the world 'as it is'. Finally, the idea of a (...) 'division of labour' between contextualist and critical approaches to political theory is introduced. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article contributes to a better understanding of dystopia’s practical aims by offering a critical defense of what Gregory Claeys calls the “Atwood Principle.” Derived from the writings of Canadian author Margaret Atwood, it establishes a yardstick for separating speculative fiction from science fiction. I argue that, rather than elevating it to the status of a genre definer, the Atwood Principle should be vindicated in terms of a heuristic device for contextually identifying the central mechanism underpinning dystopias: warning through (...) extrapolation. The real challenge, then, is how to make sense of the complex functioning of extrapolation. Instead of viewing it in mechanistic terms, my suggestion is to envisage extrapolation as a dynamic process involving both realism and estrangement. I illustrate this through a contrast between two kinds of stories about the current climate emergency: cautionary and post-cautionary tales of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

By allowing one artificial neural network to govern the synaptic noise injected into another based upon its appraisal of patterns nucleating from such disturbances, a contemplative form of artifici...

In this paper, I examine several key issues relating to the definition of knowledge as perception in the first part of Plato's Theaetetus. I begin by explaining the workings of the ‘secret doctrine’ of perception, which is introduced in order to support the idea that perception is incorrigible, and then turn to examine the two refutations of the definition of knowledge as perception which appear at the end of the first part of the Theaetetus. I shall present and explain distinct (...) lines of interpretation pertaining to these passages and explore the consequences they attempt to draw regarding Plato's views on the perceptual world, the nature of perception and how these bear on his conception of knowledge. (shrink)

In this second installment on the Theaetetus, I discuss Theaetetus' second and third definitions of knowledge, namely, ‘true judgment’ and then ‘true judgment with the addition of an account’. I offer a brief description of Socrates' intricate examination of these suggestions, concentrating especially on the discussion of false judgment and that of the so-called ‘Dream Theory’. I then proceed to map different lines of interpretation for these passages that have been offered by scholars writing in the last 40 years.

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on political judgment by proposing that the faculty of judgment is essential for responsibly coping with the undeniable fact of distant suffering and the controversial duty of humanitarian intervention. To achieve this end, Mahmood Mamdani’s text ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ will be mobilized for a constructive dialogue about which specific conception of political judgment is at stake when we debate a situation like Darfur today. The main claim is (...) that political judgment in times of acute crisis requires the members of the public sphere to strike a precarious balance between two contradictory impulses: the deliberative impulse to enlarge the pool of particular standpoints, and the decisionist impulse to finally bring the conversation to a halt and adopt a normative stance. The theoretical framework for this balanced view of the faculty of judgment will be articulated through a hybridization of Hannah Arendt’s notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’ and Jacques Derrida’s concept of an ‘aporetic decision’. (shrink)

Fundamental questions in evolution concern deep divisions in the living world and vertical versus horizontal information transfer. Two contrasting views are: (i) three superkingdoms Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukarya based on vertical inheritance of genes encoding ribosomes; versus (ii) a prokaryotic/eukaryotic dichotomy with unconstrained horizontal gene transfer (HGT) among prokaryotes. Vertical inheritance implies continuity of cytoplasmic and structural information whereas HGT transfers only DNA. By hypothesis, HGT of the translation machinery is constrained by interaction between new ribosomal gene products and vertically (...) inherited cytoplasmic structure made largely of preexisting ribosomes. Ribosomes differentially enhance the assembly of new ribosomes made from closely related genes and inhibit the assembly of products from more distal genes. This hypothesis suggests experiments for synthetic biology: the ability of synthetic genomes to “boot,” i.e., establish hereditary continuity, will be constrained by the phylogenetic closeness of the cell “body” into which genomes are placed. (shrink)

This volume brings together eleven papers written by specialists of ancient philosophy, focusing on philosophical polemics from the Classical to the Roman period, by way of Hellenistic philosophy.

This book offers a definitive and wide-ranging overview of developments in behavioral finance over the past ten years. In 1993, the first volume provided the standard reference to this new approach in finance--an approach that, as editor Richard Thaler put it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Much has changed since then. Not least, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the subsequent market decline further (...) demonstrated that financial markets often fail to behave as they would if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors who populate financial theories. Behavioral finance has made an indelible mark on areas from asset pricing to individual investor behavior to corporate finance, and continues to see exciting empirical and theoretical advances. Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II constitutes the essential new resource in the field. It presents twenty recent papers by leading specialists that illustrate the abiding power of behavioral finance--of how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. As with the first volume, it reaches beyond the world of finance to suggest, powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. The contributors are Brad M. Barber, Nicholas Barberis, Shlomo Benartzi, John Y. Campbell, Emil M. Dabora, Daniel Kent, François Degeorge, Kenneth A. Froot, J. B. Heaton, David Hirshleifer, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Josef Lakonishok, Owen A. Lamont, Roni Michaely, Terrance Odean, Jayendu Patel, Tano Santos, Andrei Shleifer, Robert J. Shiller, Jeremy C. Stein, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Richard H. Thaler, Sheridan Titman, Robert W. Vishny, Kent L. Womack, and Richard Zeckhauser. (shrink)

SummaryEarly modern Europe experienced an expansion of both governmental institutions and the responsibilities they assumed. These changes were accompanied by protracted conflict. This article traces the philosophy of state developed by Austria's estatist opposition during the early decades of the seventeenth century. In the writings of Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl, especially, an alternative vision of state and governance took shape, whose implementation would have transformed the history of Central Europe. It took a continental war to resolve this fundamental ideological discord (...) in favour of the Habsburg dynasty. (shrink)

In recent years, debates about the legitimate place of religion in the public sphere have gained prominence in political theory. Departing from Rawls’s view of public reason, it has lately been argued that liberal regimes should not only be compatible with, but endorsing of, arguments originating in religious belief systems. Moreover, it has been maintained that the principle of political autonomy obliges every democratic order to enable all its citizens, be they secular or religious, to become the authors of the (...) laws to which they are subjected. Mere toleration, it is often said, strengthens social cohesion in the wrong way because it narrowly defines it as the product of bargaining processes, posited against the backdrop of power structures. The consensus many liberal defenders of religion in the public sphere wish to advance, however, aims at something radically dissimilar: particular institutions and arrangements need to be endorsed “for the right reasons”, i.e. based on arguments to which all citizens could hypothetically agree. This paper primarily grapples with the contractarian idea as a lens through which the legitimate place of religion in the public sphere is negotiated. I argue that the emphasis on “right reasons” is mistaken in an essential way: it underrates the impact of power structures on the ways in which particular institutions and arrangements are actually justified or criticized. I shall claim that public reason must rather be conceived in terms of a discursive and dynamic modus vivendi. This implies acknowledging the pervasiveness of power structures in society at all times, without giving up on the potential for deliberation among secular and religious citizens. As a case study, the paper looks into the findings of the Bouchard/Taylor commission in Québec (2007-2008) and maintains that the context-sensitive method used by the authors exemplifies this novel, more useful approach to public reason and modus vivendi. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how (not what) we should think about human rights and religious arguments. Thinking about this relationship is today particularly important, because conflicts over human rights in practice often turn around their theoretical problems. Should religious arguments be used to justify human rights? Or do we want human rights to be free from any partisan endorsement so as to avoid divisive interpretations of universal principles? Underlying these hard questions is the issue of justification in view (...) of a plurality of cultural and religious traditions around the globe. If human rights can be transformed so as to defy the charge of Euro-centrism (of being parochially rooted in only one cultural and religious tradition), they need to creatively draw on, not pit themselves against, this plurality. This paper suggests a framework for such a positive and inclusive engagement with various cultures and religions that goes beyond the mainstream liberal model of “public reason”. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Untersuchung wird von der Frage geleitet, ob und wie sich philosophische Aussagen zur Kunst mit kunsthistorischen Sichtweisen verbinden und für die Rezeption nichtgegenständlicher Kunst fruchtbar machen lassen. Sie basiert auf der Analyse von Positionen des kunsthistorischen Kanons sowie auf der Untersuchung fünf philosophisch-ästhetischer Theorien essentialistischer und antiessentialistischer Art. Aufgrund dieses hermeneutischen Prozesses wird eine Systematik der Bildbefragung entwickelt, die sich als Interpretationsansatz insbesondere für nicht gegenstandsbezogenere Werke eignet. Die interdisziplinäre Arbeit gliedert sich in vier Kapitel. Sie beginnt mit (...) der Untersuchung Elemente Zeigen und Sagen. Im zweiten Kapitel werden Elemente der ikonischen Logik untersucht, die das Sein des Bildes als sein Scheinen definieren. Dabei werden vier Typen ikonisch absenter Charakteristiken systematisiert. Das dritte Kapitel analysiert signifikante Texte zur Ästhetik von G.W.F. Hegel, M. Weitz, N. Goodman, M. Heidegger und H.-G. Gadamer. Aus ihnen werden Leitgedanken deduziert, die im vierten Kapitel die Grundlage von drei systematischen Bildbefragungen bilden. Die kunstwissenschaftliche Relevanz dieses philosophischen Ansatzes wird durch die damit generierten Werkinterpretationen belegt. (shrink)

"Recent decades have witnessed a sharp rise in the number of state apologies for historical and more recent injustices, ranging from enslavement to displacement and from violations of treaties to war crimes, all providing the backdrop to displays of official regret. Featuring a host of leading authors in the field, this book seeks to contribute to the growing literature on official apologies by effectively combining philosophical reflection and empirical analysis. It achieves two interrelated goals: it enriches the theoretical debates on (...) the nature and functions of apologies while bringing forth new insights from hitherto unexamined normative horizons. It further addresses often overlooked aspects of political apologies, such as their non-verbal dimension as well as religious overtones, while testing theoretical reflections through encounters with real practices of state apologies. Finally, the book explores the obstacles to, and the limitations of, political apologies. The result is an excellent interdisciplinary volume that affords the reader a better understanding of conditions for a legitimate and successful state apology. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction PART I: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS 2. Beyond the Ideal Political Apology; Alice MacLachlan 3. Political Apologies and Categorical Apologies; Nick Smith PART II: RITES AND RITUALS OF REGRET 4. From Mea Culpa to Nostra Culpa: A Reparative Apology from the Catholic Church?; Danielle Celermajer 5. The Power of Ritual Ceremonies in State Apologies: An Empirical Analysis of the Bilateral Polish-Russian Commemoration Ceremony in Katyn in 2010; Michel-André Horelt 6. Confessing the Holocaust: The Evolution of German Guilt; Stefan Engert PART III: CHALLENGING CASES 7. Revisiting the 'Membership Theory of Apologies': Apology Politics in Australia and Canada; Melissa Nobles 8. The Canadian Apology To Indigenous Residential School Survivors: A Case Study of Re-Negotiation of Social Relations; Neil Funk-Unrau 9. What Makes a State Apology Authoritative? Lessons from Post-Authoritarian Brazil; Nina Schneider PART IV: OBSTACLES AND LIMITATIONS 10. The Apology in Democracies: Reflections on the Challenges of Competing Goods, Citizenship, Nationalism and Pluralist Politics; Michael Cunningham 11. An Apology for Public Apologies; Juan Espindola 12. Reasoning Like a State: Integration and the Limits of Official Regret; Cindy Holder". (shrink)