A PICTURE MAY BE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS-- BUT A FEW CHOICE WORDS CAN SPEAK VOLUMES! _ If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't More People Happy? Bottled Water Is for Suckers Clones Are People Too At Least the War on the Environment Is Going Well Don't Believe Everything You Think The Revolution Will Be Tweeted _ Long before blogs, tweets, and sound bites, people were telling the world how they felt in brief, blunt bursts of information plastered on the backs (...) of their cars. Whether they're political or religious, passionate or proud, controversial or corny, these brightly colored, boldly lettered mini manifestos are declarations of who we are, where we stand, and what we'd rather be doing. But as bestselling author and noted philosopher Jack Bowen reveals, there's much more to the pop-culture phenomenon of bumper stickers than rolling one-liners and drive-by propaganda--no less, in fact, than a wise, funny, poignant, contentious, and truthful discourse on the human condition. _ Mixing pop culture with the ideas of historically prominent philosophers and scientists, If You Can Read This exposes the deeper wisdom couched behind these slogans--or, as need be, exposes where they have gone wrong. If you brake for big ideas, now's the time. _. (shrink)

_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ , 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in _The Philosopher's Annual_ , Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., _Cognitive Science_ , Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.

Damasio remarks, it "informs virtually all research on mind and brain, explicitly or implicitly." Indeed, serial information processing models generally run this risk (Kinsbourne, 1985). The commentaries provide a wealth of confirming instances of the seductive power of this idea. Our sternest critics Block, Farah, Libet, and Treisman) adopt fairly standard Cartesian positions; more interesting are those commentators who take themselves to be mainly in agreement with us, but who express reservations or offer support with arguments that betray a continuing (...) allegiance to one or another tenet of the view we sought to discredit. (shrink)

The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece traces the odyssey of "truth," Aletheia, from mythoreligious to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Marcel Detienne's starting point is a simple observation: In archaic Greece, three figures - the diviner, the bard, and the king - all share the privilege of dispensing truth by virtue of the religious power of divine memory which provides them with knowledge, both oracular and inspired, of the present, past, and future. Beginning with this definition of the (...) prerational meaning of truth, Detienne proceeds to elaborate the complex conceptual and historical contexts from which emerges the philosophical notion of truth still influencing Western philosophy today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading as a Philosophical Practice by Robert PierceyIris Vidmar JovanovićReading as a Philosophical Practice, by Robert Piercey, 130 pp. London: Anthem Press, 2021.Robert Piercey's Reading as a Philosophical Practice is dedicated to exploring the passion of reading, and to explaining ways in which common readers, as Virginia Woolf calls them, rather than professionals, engage with reading. Piercey's answer to this question, which is also the central claim of (...) the book, is that reading—independently of the subject or a genre—is a philosophical activity, that is, "a kind of reflection on experiences and capacities that are distinctive to human beings" (p. 3). As Piercey argues, reading inevitably invites one to consider issues that fall within three main philosophical domains: those related to selfhood; those related to ethical questions, primarily the ones asking about a valuable life; and those concerning ontological questions regarding the true nature of things. Inspiration for this account comes from the writings of Henry James, Stanley Cavell, and Marcel Proust, each of whom describes reading as an experience in which one's self enlarges and new dimensions of subjectivity are revealed. Piercey's ambition is to understand precisely what happens in such moments of discovery, and he sets out to offer an account of the essence of the experience of reading that explains why reading matters so profoundly to so many people.Piercey finds a philosophical grounding for his main claim in Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological account of reading and Alasdair MacIntyre's account of practice. Piercey praises Iser's account of reading as an activity prolonged in time, during which a reader is situated within the text, and tries to rebuild that text by constantly going through interpretative stages. Such a "wandering viewpoint" (p. 20) generates in one a sense of living through an altered subjectivity. As Piercey argues, the greatest value of this explanation is its capacity to account for how a text is given to one's consciousness.Insightful as it is, however, Iser's account has limits, given his focus on fictional classics and his belief that the aim of reading is to arrive at the correct interpretation of a text. To overcome these shortcomings, Piercey adopts MacIntyre's account of practice and argues that understanding reading as a [End Page 468] type of social practice means recognizing it as "embedded in, and expressive of, a full range of human activities and a full picture of the human person." Moreover, thinking of reading as a practice encourages us to see it "as a space where one reflects on what kind of a person one should become, and tries earnestly to make oneself into that kind of a person" (p. 25).What such a project looks like is examined in the third chapter, where Piercey analyzes writings on reading by novelist Nick Hornby. This chapter is particularly interesting in tackling questions that pop up when one pursues reading as important for one's well-being: questions concerning which books to read and which to skip, issues regarding rereading, and the like. The rhetorical power of this chapter is immense, in raising one's awareness of the many nuances that a reflective approach to reading invites. This awareness is further advanced in the sixth chapter, in which Piercey presents "descriptive hermeneutical ontology" (p. 71) to explain how readers discover what is valuable and meaningful about the nature of things and attachments in the process of reading. Interesting here is the dual nature of books that Piercey describes, namely their material copies and their content, or virtual reality, and the instrumental and intrinsic ways in which each of the two can acquire meaning for individual readers. He concludes that reading matters to so many people because it lets them experience and reflect on the fragmentation built into their encounters with things.In chapter 4, Piercey discusses one of the cornerstones of literary aesthetics: the view—as developed by, among others, Martha Nussbaum—that reading makes us morally better. Piercey acknowledges the relevance of empirical challenge to this view, particularly as advanced by Gregory Currie. Piercey claims that the Nussbaum-like approach to getting ethical lessons from reading is an... (shrink)

For so long a time it has been getting increasingly formidable, if not possible, to define art in general ever since the advent of the so-called “found art” or “ready-mades” of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, among other avant-garde or pop artists. But this does not have too much constraint over some philosophers who have made persistent attempts in this regard. What have turned out to be considerably influential are the “artworld” framed by Arthur C. Danto and the “institutional (...) theory” proposed by George Dickie. Nevertheless, Li Zehou, a contemporary Chinese philosopher, argues that the two theories aforementioned are not self-sufficient and convincing enough. For they could not well explicate the distinction between art and non-art, not to speak of the difference between artworks as artifacts and those as aesthetic objects. He then continues to treat art as sedimentation from an anthropo-historical viewpoint peculiar of his practical aesthetics (shijian meixue). His argument is underlined by a transcultural approach that is deployed to expand the intellectual horizon and consequently bear the theoretical fruit. (shrink)

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future (...) of contemporary art. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives. The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on `man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. "Homo Viator - "Homo Viator - or as Marcel calls him, `itinerate man' (...) - is an outstanding example of the philosophy concerned, not with technical problems, but with the urgent problems of man. Marcel talks to our condition, emphasizing our urgent need of hope, thus discovering beyond the lack of stability the values on which we may depend. "A subtle mind, a dramatist as well as a philosopher, close to the texture of human experience, he goes far beyond current platitudes to show that our Western tradition contains living truths that are as essential to our contemporary life as they were to our ancestors when they discovered them." - Eliseo Vivas "The theme of Marcel's Homo Viator is close to the center of all preoccupations: man in his pilgrim condition. With great virtuosity in the use of his own philosophical method, he probes into interpersonal relations and the threat to ethical values. Marcel excels here in his concrete analyses of the attitude of hope, the family community in its temporal and supratemporal aspects, and the forgotten virtue of personal fidelity." - James Collins. (shrink)

The European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF) is, among other concepts, based on a phase-wise development approach as described by Clare Graves' Levels of Existence Theory. As much as corporate sustainability has a sequence of adequate interpretations, aligned with each development level, also the notion of business excellence can be defined at multiple levels, as this paper demonstrates. Furthermore, the authors analyze the current EFQM Excellence Model for particular biases towards various development levels and suggest a new and innovative two-step approach (...) to assessing organizational performance with respect to organizational excellence (OE) and corporate sustainability. According to the organization's ambition, the assessment is either limited to a shareholder approach, mainly focusing at optimal usage of resources, or it also includes an additional assessment format based on the stakeholder approach, with specific reference to the organization's performance on the financial, social and ecological bottom line. This paper demonstrates the need and feasibility of an EFQM-Based assessment tool with a combined focus on corporate sustainability and OE. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

Introduction Moral concern for animals is commonly formulated in terms of concern for their welfare. Yet, besides the welfare issue, although highly ...

Ce travail s’interroge sur les raisons de ce qui a fait le succès de la sociologie de Georges Gurvitch de 1945 à sa mort , et entend se démarquer d’une explication qui se contente de faire valoir le rôle institutionnel actif qu’eut Gurvitch dans ce qu’on a coutume d’appeler la « refondation » de la sociologie française après 1945. En effet, un examen du contenu de ses textes suggère que son projet intellectuel était en phase avec les préoccupations de nombre (...) de sociologues à ce moment-là, certes soucieux de construire une sociologie plus empirique inspirée du modèle américain, mais aussi de conserver une ambition théorique susceptible de fournir des concepts opérationnels pour traiter les grandes questions sociales. Ainsi Gurvitch a proposé un paradigme alternatif qui, tout en illustrant une volonté certaine de « reconstruire » la sociologie, a défendu l’idée d’une continuité de la tradition sociologique en France. Il semble que sa réception a été plus favorable que ce que les textes consacrés à la question laissent entendre.This paper considers the reasons for the success of the sociology of Georges Gurvitch from 1945 until his death in 1965. The approach proposed here intends to differentiate itself from the widespread explanation that focuses essentially on the active institutional role that Gurvitch played in the rebuilding of French sociology after 1945. An examination of the contents of his texts suggests that, at that time, the focus of Gurvitch’s interests were in line with the preoccupations of other sociologists who were certainly anxious to construct a more empirical sociology inspired by the American model, but also to conserve a theoretical ambition capable of providing the operational concepts to address the significant social questions. So Gurvitch proposed an alternative paradigm, while proclaiming his desire to « rebuild » sociology, also defended the idea of a certain continuation of the sociological tradition in France. It seems that its reception was much more favourable than we are led to believe by current texts that consider the question today. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article se propose d’examiner comment la notion de « culture de guerre », avancée par certains historiens pour qualifier l’engagement des intellectuels français dans l’Union sacrée contre l’Allemagne dès 1914, se décline dans le cas de Durkheim. À travers l’exemple de son texte de propagande le plus connu : L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout, on se propose de débusquer les arguments sociologiques plus ou moins implicites qu’il mobilise pour dénoncer la « mentalité allemande ». Il en résulte qu’au regard (...) de sa vision de l’évolution des sociétés, la conception du rôle de l’État défendue par l’Allemagne en guerre doit être comprise comme une régression, un « retour vers le primitif », donc comme une énigme sociologique impensée et impensable dans la logique rationaliste qui était la sienne. (shrink)

The classic study of commentaries written 'from the voice of'. An unpublished translation from French by Victor Caston is in the library of the Institute for Classical Studies in London.

In this paper we investigate a particular two-stage supply chain network design problem with fixed costs. In order to solve this complex optimization problem, we propose an efficient hybrid algorithm, which was obtained by incorporating a linear programming optimization problem within the framework of a genetic algorithm. In addition, we integrated within our proposed algorithm a powerful local search procedure able to perform a fine tuning of the global search. We evaluate our proposed solution approach on a set of large (...) size instances. The achieved computational results prove the efficiency of our hybrid genetic algorithm in providing high-quality solutions within reasonable running-times and its superiority against other existing methods from the literature. (shrink)

1. Philosophie anthropologique--2. Philosophie du savoir scientifique.