This article explores the appeal of President Donald Trump’s persona in North American society, appeal that enabled the formation of a fan-base-like loyal and passionate constituency. The analysis...

This article explores covid-19 as a social traumatic event that thoroughly disrupted our ordinary plane of existence. In doing so, it opened a window to an uncanny world, in which the virus, manife...

The study discusses the paradox of the failure of the Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic (RCUR) to assert itself after 1990, in the context of a revival of the life of all other religious communities. The significant decrease in the number of Greek-Catholic believers and the difficulties in exercising their rights are germane to the limits of democracy in Romania. No other vulnerable communities, neither immigrants, gays, Roma,nor Jehovah's Witnesses, have been denied, all this time, the protection of the (...) Romanian state, as Greek-Catholics have been. The systematic denial of the rights of the Romanian Church United with Rome (Greek-Catholic) is explained by the feature which distinguishes RCUR faithful from the members of other vulnerable communities: their organisation is perceived by the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) as an adversary. The Romanian Orthodox Church constantly proclaimed the illegitimacy of the RCUR in the first half of the twentieth century, and participated in its dissolution when the opportunity arose in 1948. It holds today the same explicit goal. The societal circumstances, specific to anarchic democracy, allow a major player like the ROC to impose its policy of undermining the RCUR. In accordance with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's concept, the material and symbolic competition between the RCUR and the ROC is interpreted as an example of "bad behavior as good politics". The ROC strategy finds an optimal framework for maximizing gain in the circumstances of the Romanian anarchic democracy. (shrink)

A relação entre patroas e empregadas constitui uma privilegiada situação para a discussão sobre os conflitos de gênero e classe, uma vez que está inserida em um contexto considerado essencialmente feminino, o ambiente doméstico. Diante deste cenário, Preuss (1997) e Kofes (2001) realizaram, em diferentes épocas, estudos que exploravam esta relação. Suas pesquisam evidenciam que os conflitos gerados entre patroas e empregadas domésticas são um reflexo da disputa entre as classes pelo domínio do poder simbólico. Com base nos resultados obtidos (...) pelas autoras e utilizando o conceito de poder simbólico do teórico Pierre Bourdieu, é feito um estudo da representação das classes nas tramas das telenovelas Cheias de Charme e Avenida Brasil exibidas pela Rede Globo em diferentes horários no ano de 2012. (shrink)

Hofstede’s cultural values framework has been applied in a study looking at possible relations between migration streams and their country of destinations. The study is based on a model which consists of three factors: Human Resources Management, Culture Dimensions and Migration and it points out their non-linear relationship. Migration outflows from Poland in 2002 are measured against culture dimensions (both in Poland and destinations countries) and power distance emerges as the most influential possible “pull” factor. A list of positive and (...) negative implications of the Human Resources Management, Migration and Culture Dimensions relationship on a personal, corporate and national level is presented. (shrink)

"In 2022, two cans of tomato soup were thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London by two climate activists. The aim of this paper is not to explain the motives behind the protest in terms of environmental activism, but to address the implications of this phenomenon for the status of artistic images in our time. The protest in question is one of the many symptoms of the fact that images associated with a pure state of gaze (...) have become morally dubious due to a certain moralistic turn in contemporary discourses on art. Consequently, what seems to be lost in today’s movements of moralizing aesthetics, whether in art or in environmental activism, is not only the “aura” of an artwork, but also the idea that the contemplation of beauty in and for itself would provide a foundation for humans’ moral vocation. In a gaseous state of art (Y. Michaud) in which the transient effects of things are more important than their essence, the moralistic tendencies combined with the lack of moral foundations can no longer conceive of the ethical effects of images without explicit moral content, thus calling for a new form of heteronomy in art. Keywords: Kantian aesthetics, ethics, contemplation, natural beauty, autonomy of art, environmental activism. ". (shrink)

This paper looks at the state of research on churchstate relations in post-communist Romania in order to provide an outline of the most important questions which need to be addressed in the coming years. The article consists of two parts. First, a survey of academic studies published over the past two decades on the relationship between the country’s churches and state after 1990. Secondly, a breakdown of pressing churchstate issues today, accompanied by short discussions of existing studies and suggestions as (...) to what future research should probe into. (shrink)

The article distinguishes between the various arguments traditionally offered as justifications for the principle of academic freedom. Four main arguments are identified, three consequentialist in nature (the argument from truth, the democratic argument, the argument from autonomy), and one nonconsequentialist (a variant of the autonomy argument). The article also concentrates on the specific form these arguments must take in order to establish academic freedom as a principle distinct from the more general principles of freedom of expression and intellectual freedom.

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the principle of academic freedom and religiously-affiliated higher education. The arguments advanced are based on a general theory concerning the role of universities in a democratic society, and as such they are intended to apply to any such society, irrespective of the particulars of religious higher education in a specific national context. The article looks at three classes of arguments advanced against a “secular” standard of academic freedom: arguments on the nature of academic disciplines (...) in religious colleges; arguments concerning the relationship between the institutional mission of religious universities and academic freedom; and arguments from democracy and religious freedom. The paper concludes that none of these arguments are successful in claiming a different standard of academic freedom for religiously-affiliated universities; and that, further, a “secular” standard leaves such institutions adequate room to express their religious dimension. (shrink)

Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive in (...) relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions. (shrink)

The paper discusses the context, substance and likely implications of the European Court of Human Rights’ very recent but, in our view, historic decision in the case of Lautsi v. Italy. The article offers an outline of the case and of the decision’s motivation, a presentation of the responses, and a brief discussion of its relevance to the similar Romanian case. We examine in some detail the objections leveled against the ruling, track the progress of the Court’s relevant jurisprudence on (...) the issue, and suggest some possible consequences. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

The paper offers a survey of the debate on the introduction, in the Preamble of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, of references to God and Europe’s Christian tradition. It examines the question of European identity and values which motivates these proposals in relation to (1) the nature of the EU as an essentially political construction; (2) the issue of human rights in the EU; (3) the protection of cultural and religious diversity within the EU. The study shows that (...) the confessionalization of Europe promoted by strong churches on the Continent, which are legitimate actors of civil society, betray a failure to understand the logic of the European construction. To the extent to which they represent an attempt to secure a privileged position with respect to other religious or non-religious actors, they run against the functional principles and values of the Union. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess selected municipalities’ performance of citizen-centric investment planning, governance and transparency, financial management, and support for youth programming in Kosovo. In completing this assessment, the Municipal Performance Management System of the Ministry of Local Government Administration in Kosovo was utilized. Selected municipalities are based on the Municipal Performance Report of 2019. Eight from Albanian majority municipalities in the top ranking, and two municipalities with higher scores from minority municipalities. The paper aims to highlight three critical local (...) government issues in ten selected municipalities: 1) The way of governing municipalities assessed according to the applicable legislation and 2) The provision of services in terms of quantity and quality, when possible and 3) Youth-oriented capacity building for municipal staff for better youth services. The paper will produce findings on capacity building needs and support needed on youth and citizen-centric investment and capacity building needs. A non-exhaustive list of needed capacities is produced, while the findings from the evaluation will be used to develop a capacity-building manual for municipal staff on youth-oriented municipal services. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

The paper discusses self-plagiarism and associated practices in scholarly publishing. It approaches at some length the conceptual issues raised by the notion of self-plagiarism. It distinguishes among and then examines the main families of arguments against self-plagiarism, as well as the question of possibly legitimate reasons to engage in this practice. It concludes that some of the animus frequently reserved for self-plagiarism may be the result of, among others, poor choice of a label, unwarranted generalizations as to its ill effects (...) based on the specific experience (and goals) of particular disciplines, and widespread but not necessarily beneficial publishing practices. (shrink)

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests - including the comic poet Aristophanes and, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates - each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness. And then into the party bursts the drunken Alcibiades, the (...) most popular and notorious Athenian of the time, who insists on praising Socrates himself rather than love, and gives us a brilliant sketch of this enigmatic character. The power, humour, and pathos of Plato's creation engages the reader on every page. This new translation is complemented by full explanatory notes and an illuminating introduction. (shrink)

"This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition..., offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship"--Front flap of dust jacket, volume 1.

Why do moral people so often fail to act morally? Standard scientific answers point to poor moral judgment (based on deficient character development, reason, or intuition) or to situational pressure. I consider a third possibility: a relative lack of truly moral motivation and emotion. What has been taken for moral motivation is often instead a subtle form of egoism. Recent research provides considerable evidence for moral hypocrisy—motivation to appear moral while, if possible, avoid the cost of actually being moral—but very (...) little evidence for moral integrity—motivation to actually be moral. The lack of truly moral motivation may, in turn, be linked to a lack of truly moral emotion, at least in response to violation of certain moral standards. (shrink)

forthcoming in R. Cameron, B. Hale and A. Hoffmann (ed.s), The Logic, Epistemology and Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford University Press. Presents a concept-grounding account of modal knowledge.

Анотація. У статті проаналізовані досягнення Соціального Вчительства Католицької Церкви, репрезентовані працями Лева ХІІІ, Пія ХІ, Пія ХІІ, Івана Павла ІІ, що розкривають змістовні характеристики поняття «принцип субсидіарності», його роль і значення в системі християнських цінностей. Принцип субсидіарності робить можливими такі взаємовідносини в соціальному житті, коли спільнота вищого порядку не втручається у внутрішнє життя спільноти нижчого порядку, перебираючи на себе належні тій функції; заради спільного добра, спільного блага вона надає їй у разі потреби підтримку й допомогу, узгоджуючи у такий спосіб її (...) взаємодію з іншими соціальними структурами. Принцип субсидіарності скеровує соціальну практику на утвердження спільного блага в людському співтоваристві. Поширення і застосування принципу субсидіарності протистоїть небезпеці «одержавлення» суспільства та найзагрозливіших проявів колективізму, обмежує абсолютизацію влади, бюрократизацію державних і соціокультурних структур, стає одним із гарантів дотримання прав і свобод громадян своєї країни. (shrink)

I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology typically pose questions about individuation by asking “what is an individual?” For example, we ask, “what is an individual species”, “what is an individual organism”, and “what is an individual gene?” In the first part of this chapter, I present my account of the gene concept and how it is used in investigative practices in order to motivate a more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking “what is a gene?”, I ask: “how do biologists individuate genes?”, “for what (...) purposes?”, and “do their practices of individuating genes serve these purposes?" In the second part of this chapter, I propose that we use this approach when analyzing concepts of organisms and biological individuals. Following philosophical pragmatism, I argue that we should abstain from attempts to situate individuation of Darwinian individuals or of holobionts in a philosophy of nature. Instead, we should analyze practices of individuating organisms in terms of three-place relations between the world, ideas, and human purposes and actions. I conclude with three lessons: an ontological, an epistemological, and a meta-philosophical lesson, which I suggest, apply to philosophy of science generally and to philosophy and metaphysics at large. (shrink)

In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This third edition offers increased coverage of sustainability and more chances for illustration and discussion of ethics in the messy day to day practicalities ...

Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

This edition of Martin Ostwald's revised version of J. B. Skemp's 1952 translation of _Statesman_ includes a new selected bibliography, as well as Ostwald's interpretive introduction, which traces the evolution in Plato's political philosophy from _Republic_ to _Statesman to Laws_--from philosopher-king to royal statesman.

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition (...) from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields. (shrink)