This volume is the second instalment in the new critical edition of Lev Shestov's complete works which has been entrusted to the Director of the Lev Shestov Society, Dr Ramona Fotiade, by the French publisher, Le Bruit du Temps.

Ainslie’s Picoeconomics presents an ingenious theory, based on a remarkably simple basic law about the rate of discounting the value of future prospects, which explains a vast number of psychological phenomena. Hyperbolic discount rates result in changes in the ranking of interests as they get closer in time. Thus quasi-homuncular “interests” situated at different times compete within the person. In this paper I first defend the generality of scope of Ainslie’s model, which ranges over several personal and subpersonal levels of (...) psychological analysis. I raise a problem which results from the temporal relativity of assessments of value, and affects the possibility of objective values. Finally, I offer one example of a form of time-related irrationality on which Ainslie’s scheme does not seem to have a grip, namely one which relates not to a situation’s relative position in time, but to its temporal (‘progressive’ or ‘perfect’) temporal aspect. (shrink)

Living donation provides important access to organ transplantation, which is the optimal therapy for patients with end-stage liver or kidney failure. Paired exchanges have facilitated thousands of kidney transplants and enable transplantation when the donor and recipient are incompatible. However, frequently willing and otherwise healthy donors have contraindications to the donation of the organ that their recipient needs. Trans-organ paired exchanges would enable a donor associated with a kidney recipient to donate a lobe of liver and a donor associated with (...) a liver recipient to donate a kidney. This article explores some of the ethical concerns that trans-organ exchange might encounter including unbalanced donor risks, the validity of informed consent, and effects on deceased organ donation. (shrink)

Welch :263–279, 2017) has recently proposed two possible explanations for why the field of evolutionary biology is plagued by a steady stream of claims that it needs urgent reform. It is either seriously deficient and incapable of incorporating ideas that are new, relevant and plausible or it is not seriously deficient at all but is prone to attracting discontent and to the championing of ideas that are not very relevant, plausible and/or not really new. He argues for the second explanation. (...) This paper presents a twofold critique of his analysis: firstly, the main calls for reform do not concern the field of evolutionary biology in general but rather, or more specifically, the modern evolutionary synthesis. Secondly, and most importantly, these calls are not only inspired by the factors, enumerated by Welch, but are also, and even primarily, motivated by four problematic characteristics of the modern synthesis. This point is illustrated through a short analysis of the latest reform challenge to the modern synthesis, the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis. We conclude with the suggestion that the modern synthesis should be amended, rather than replaced. (shrink)

Nothing seems to follow strictly from 'X believes that p'. But if we reinterpret it to mean: 'X can consistently be described as consistently believing p'--which roughly renders, I think, Hintikka's notion of "defensibility"--we can get on with the subject, freed from the inhibitions of descriptive adequacy. But defensibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth: it tells us little, therefore, about the concept of belief on which it is based. It cannot, in particular, specify necessary conditions for the consistent (...) ascription of belief--as opposed to rational belief. If there are no such conditions, all belief ascriptions must be treated as atomic: which is implausible. If there are some, they must be settled on before an account of consistency can be complete. The reason is simple: it is that we have beliefs about our own beliefs. A set of first order beliefs is consistent if they can all be true together; but it is a lesson of Moore's paradox that consistency of second-order beliefs requires additional constraints. If someone both believes that p and that he does not believe that p, the propositions he believes might all be true together, yet he is inconsistent. And the characterization of second order consistency will remain incomplete, so long as nothing is said about the consistency of first order belief ascriptions. Suppose someone says and believes: "I am inconsistent: I believe both p and ~p." This is "indefensible": but is it insight, or nonsense? Breast-beating of this sort is guaranteed success: something he believes is bound to be false. But that remains diagnostically frustrating: is he inconsistent because what he said is true, or on the contrary because it is inconsistent? (shrink)

Este texto procura traçar algumas linhas gerais da articulação entre música e ironia (ou audição musical e hermenêutica) no romantismo. Procura-se explorar a apropriação original que Søren Kierkegaard fez das “técnicas” hermenêuticas desenvolvidas por Friedrich Schlegel e Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Modelos neurocognitivos têm sido propostos para investigar a consciência. O objetivo é responder à pergunta sobre como o cérebro é capaz de produzir estados conscientes qualitativos. Os modelos são representações teóricas baseadas em algumas pesquisas empíricas. Contudo, a questão central, aparentemente trivial para alguns autores, refere-se à representatividade e confiabilidade dos modelos, i.e., saber se são capazes de explicar como a consciência emerge de processos neurais. Esses modelos são considerados como guia no estudo científico da consciência: os modelos cognitivos de (...) Dennett e Baars, os modelos neurobiológicos de Edelman, Dehaene et al., de Damásio, e o modelo neurodinâmico proposto por Freeman. O presente texto visa a analisar a coerência e a plausibilidade dos modelos, i.e., se realmente explicam a “consciência” e suas propriedades em termos neurais ou se explicam apenas mecanismos neurobiológicos subjacentes no cérebro. O objetivo é avaliar escopo e limites dos modelos além da aplicabilidade na resolução do problema da consciência. Neurocognitive models are proposed in order to study the problem of consciousness. The models are attempts to answer the question of how the brain can generate conscious and qualitative states. Models are theoretical representations based on empirical data. Nonetheless, the central question concerns the reliability and the representativeness of the models, i.e., whether they in fact represent what they are supposed to explain, viz., how consciousness can emerge from neuronal processes. Such models are taken to be a guide for the scientific study of consciousness. Presently, there are six models: the multiple draft, the global workspace, the dynamic core, the global neuronal workspace, the somatic markers hypothesis, and the neurodynamic model. This text is a survey and a philosophical analysis of the models of consciousness, and it considers their plausibility and coherence. I will concentrate on two points: whether the neuroscientific models are able to explain ‘consciousness’ and its properties in neural terms, or whether the models only explain the neural correlates of conscious states, and the scope, limitations and applicability of the models in the attempt to solve the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Introduction. Bert HAMMINGA and Neil DE MARCHI: Préface. Bert HAMMINGA and Neil DE MARCHI: Idealization and the Defence of Economics: Notes Toward a History. Part I: General Observations on Idealization in Economics. Kevin D. HOOVER: Six Queries about Idealization in an Empirical Context. Bernard WALLISER: Three Generalization Processes for Economic Models. Steven COOK and David HENDRY: The Theory of Reduction in Econometrics. Maarten C.W. JANSSEN: Economic Models and Their Applications. Adolfo GARCÍA DE LA SIENRA: Idealization and Empirical Adequacy in Economic (...) Theory. Izabella NOWAKOWA and Leszek NOWAK: On Correspondence between Economic Theories. Uskali MÄKI: Isolation, Idealization and Truth in Economics. Part II: Case Studies of Idealization in Economics. Nancy CARTWRIGHT: Mill and Menger: Ideal Elements and Stable Tendencies. Wolfgang BALZER: Exchange Versus Influence: A Case of Idealization. Kees COOLS, Bert HAMMINGA, Theo A.F. KUIPERS: Truth Approximation by Concretization in Capital Structure Theory. Daniel M. HAUSMAN: Paul Samuelson as Dr. Frankenstein: When an Idealization Runs Amuck. Hugo A. KEUZENKAMP: What if an Idealization is Problematic? The Case of the Homogeneity Condition in Consumer Demand. Werner DIEDERICH: Nowak on Explanation and Idealization in Marx's 'Capital'. Gérard JORLAND: Idealization and Transformation. Jack BIRNER: Idealizations and Theory Development in Economics. Some History and Logic of the Logic Discovery. Discussions. Leszek NOWAK: The Idealizational Methodology and Economics. Replies to Diederich, Hoover, Janssen, Jorland and Mäki. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Translation of Levinas’s Review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential PhilosophyJames McLachlan (bio)In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.1 In one of the first studies in English on Levinas, Edith Wyschogrod claims: “What Levinas writes of Shestov’s analysis of Kierkegaard might well be taken as a program for his own future work.”2 The review of Shestov’s Kierkegaard book shows Levinas (...) sympathy with Shestov’s rebellion against rationalism and totalism, his complaint that the individual and all her concerns, desires, and suffering were crushed by the world and ignored by philosophy. But his review of Shestov’s book also shows Levinas’s concern the rebellion could end in “the vanity of personal protest” and substitute subjective imprisonment for the imprisonment of history.3 Such irrationalism could lead to its own forms of violence, which in 1937 were becoming apparent.Like Levinas, Shestov helped introduce Husserl in France, although in Shestov’s case as an adversary to Husserl with whom he developed a friendship.4 The exchange between Shestov and Levinas’s Strasbourg teacher Jean Hering helped publicize Husserl in France.5 As an [End Page 237] exile in Europe, Shestov published his most powerful works Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balances, Athens and Jerusalem, and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Shestov sought, through a continued hammering, to escape the trap of Being toward radical freedom.6 The form of Shestov’s escape attempt can be situated between Levinas and Kierkegaard. He shares with Levinas the desire to escape ontology but, like Kierkegaard, Shestov’s version of the escape is into a radically individual relation with God through a violent repudiation of the universal; thus, both Levinas’s disagreement with and attraction to Shestov in his 1937 review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy prefigure his rejection of Kierkegaard.One must be wary of reading Shestov as a kind of introduction to any thinker he engages, and thus the inclusion for many years of Shestov’s book on short bibliographies on Kierkegaard was extremely misleading. The book was quite influential when it appeared in 1936 around the same time as Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes. Shestov’s work is filled with hyperbole, exaggeration, and polemic. All of his writings are more literary essays than works of scholarship. And it is this mesmerizing writing that Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky called “the tidiest, the most elegant, the most concentrated... in short, the most classical prose in the whole of modern Russian Literature.”7 A more perceptive reader than many Kierkegaardians who have read Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Levinas wrote in 1937 that “the philosophical project of M. Shestov often takes on the allure of brilliant literary essay. It is a ‘poem’ rather than a ‘work.’ The author is more present therein than his subject.”8Here Levinas notes several important points about Shestov’s Kierkegaard book. Perhaps the most important is that it is not primarily about Kierkegaard that “the author is more present therein than his subject.” Levinas sees Shestov had indeed seized on one of the central aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought but “what affects us more deeply still, and this is not its smallest attraction, the ideas of M. Shestov.”9 This is true of all of Shestov’s work. It is a “vast symposium” around the problems that agitated Shestov. [End Page 238]________Emmanuel Levinas, review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Vox clamantis in deserto), by Leon Chestov, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer, Revue des Études Juives 101, nos. 1–2 (1937): 139–41.The thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, dead in 1855, has known for some time a rare good fortune. Jaspers and Heidegger in German, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, are some of the names that permit us to measure the quality of the influence, which, in a very solid manner, he has also exercised on the only modern philosopher of Judaism worthy of the name, Franz Rosenzweig. This good fortune is not just a mode. The moral crisis opened by the War of 1914 has given men a... (shrink)