For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention. This article identifies two aporias in the discourse of intercultural communication : first, that it contains an unstated movement towards a universal consciousness; second, that its claims to truth are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified.These features constitute IC discourse as ‘totality’, or as ‘metaphysics of presence’.The article draws on the work of Levinas ; and Derrida (...) to propose more considered ethical grounds for intercultural praxis. Contra a Hegelian impetus towards universal consciousness,we posit an irreducible distance and separation between the self and other. In so doing, not only are we able to supersede the field’s implicit appeal to the transcendental as a source of truth but also to counter perceptibly ‘exorbitant’ claims and actions of the intercultural other. In this vein, the article proposes a discourse ethics of responsibility by which it still becomes possible for a critical intercultural praxis to make value judgements and to take potentially transformative action vis-à-vis cultural acts that challenge the limits of intercultural tolerance and hospitality. (shrink)

This article draws on the conceptualisation of ‘discursive formation’ to examine the particular configuration of the ‘objects, subjects, concepts and strategies’ which constituted ‘nuclear proliferation’ between 2006 and 2012. While previous studies have mostly explored the discourse of nuclear proliferation through the analysis of newspaper texts, few have considered corpora from different sites or considered the changes, transformations and contradictions that take place when meanings are delocated from one site and relocated in another. Elements of poststructuralist discourse theory, critical linguistics (...) and corpus linguistics are brought together to consider how events were constructed within two corpora: UN Security Council resolutions and newspaper articles published in prominent UK and US broadsheets. WordSmith Tools was used to analyse word frequencies, statistical patterns of keywords, word collocation profiles and concordance patterns. Results indicate that the most salient lexical items refer to actors, strategic actions and technologies. As these constituents of nuclear proliferation are delocated from the political sphere and relocated in the public sphere, three discursive strategies unfold: personalisation, normalisation or exceptionalisation, and reification. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Plato is the best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers. Malcolm Schofield, a leading scholar of ancient philosophy, offers a lucid and accessible guide to Plato's political thought, enormously influential and much discussed in the modern world as well as the ancient. Schofield discusses Plato's ideas on education, democracy and its shortcomings, the role of knowledge in government, utopia and the idea of community, money and its grip on the psyche, and ideological uses of (...) religion. (shrink)

Externalism in the philosophy of mind has been thought by many to pose a serious threat to the claim that subjects are in general authoritative with regard to certain of their own intentional states.¹ In a series of papers, Tyler Burge (1985_a_, 1985_b_, 1988, 1996) has argued that the distinctive entitlement or right that subjects have to self- knowledge in certain cases is compatible with externalism, since that entitlement is environmentally neutral, neutral with respect to the issue of the individuation (...) dependence of subjects' intentional states on factors beyond their bodies. His reason is that whereas externalism—the view that certain intentional states of persons are individuation-dependent on objects and/or phenomena external to their bodies—is a metaphysical thesis, authoritative self-knowledge is an epistemological matter. This being so, there is no reason to suppose that the two need conflict with one another. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the conflictual history and future implications of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the ...

At a time when interest in the Wittgensteinian tradition has quickened, this volume brings together fourteen essays by Norman Malcolm, a prominent philosopher ...

While for Louis Althusser ideology was very much an affair of the unconscious, it fell to his Spanish student, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, to fully articulate the concept of the ‘ideological unconscious’ per se, the latter understood as secreted by the relations of production operative respectively within the various modes of production. Rodrí-guez elucidates the workings of this unconscious through the associated notion of an ideological matrix, with particular reference to the transition from ‘substantialism’, the dominant ideology of feudalism, to ‘animism’, (...) the earliest form of bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology is understood as turning crucially upon the opposition between ‘society’ and the free‘individual’, free to exploit and be exploited. The present paper assesses the challenge the Spaniard’s work poses to those intellectual traditions, which include critical realism and some versions of Marxism, that take ‘society’ and the ‘individual’ to be ontological realities. (shrink)

From very early on, Western philosophers have been obsessed with the understanding of a relatively few works of philosophy which have played a disproportionately large and fundamental role in developing the Western philosophical canon, dominating the curriculum in the past and in the present; there is no indication that they will not do so in the future.Uses and Abuses of the Classics examines the various ways in which the different periods of the history of philosophy have approached these texts. The (...) editors have chosen for analysis some of the major philosophers from periods of the history of philosophy in which the interpretation of the classics has been particularly significant.Contributions to this book include entries on: Aristotle's reading of Plato; Averroes on Aristotle; Nietzsche on the Beginnings of Western Philosophy; and Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. (shrink)

THE PROTAGONISTS David Sedley The primary object of this historical introduction1 is to enable a reader encountering Hellenistic philosophy for the first ...

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

An interpretation of Plato's earlier dialogues which argues that the few cases of self-predication contained therein are acceptable simply as statements concerning universals and that therefore Plato is not vulnerable in these cases to the "third man argument".

Saving the City provides a detailed analysis of the attempts of ancient writers and thinkers, from Homer to Cicero, to construct and recommend political ideals of statesmanship and ruling, of the political community and of how it should be founded in justice. Also, Malcolm Schofield debates to what extent the Greeks and Romans deal with the same issues as modern political thinkers.

‘Introspection’ is a term used by philosophers to refer to a special method or means by which one comes to know certain of one's own mental states; specifically, one's current conscious states. It derives from the Latin ‘spicere’, meaning ‘look’, and ‘intra’, meaning ‘within’; introspection is a process of looking inward. Introspectionist accounts of self-knowledge fall within the broader domain of theories of self-knowledge, understood as views about the nature of and basis for one's knowledge of one's own mental states, (...) including one's beliefs, desires, conscious thinkings, and sensations. Theories of self-knowledge are motivated by the apparent need to account for a number of striking features of at least some such knowledge, which ordinary empirical knowledge, including knowledge of the mental states of others, is typically thought to lack. (shrink)

Le débat sur la confrontation entre Socrate et Calliclès dans le Gorgias s’est principalement concentré sur ses deux premières étapes : l’exposé par Calliclès de ses thèses et leur tentative de réfutation par Socrate (481-500), ainsi que ses tentatives subséquentes de leur substituer sa propre conception de la vie bonne (501-509). On a accordé beaucoup moins d’attention à la dernière étape (509-522). C’est pourtant celle dans laquelle Platon met en scène la discussion la plus soutenue du dialogue entre les réponses (...) concurrentes (et leurs conséquences) à ce qu’on a montré être sa question centrale : le plus grand mal est-il de commettre l’injustice ou d’en être victime? Cet article examine en détail les étapes clefs de ce débat, auquel Calliclès est à nouveau invité à participer par Socrate, après qu’il a refusé de continuer à mi-chemin de la seconde phase du parcours dialectique. La thèse défendue est que le but de Platon dans cette dernière section est de montrer exactement pourquoi et comment Socrate peut entamer et poursuivre avec succès une confrontation intellectuelle avec un jeune politicien intelligent, désireux de réussir sa carrière dans la démocratie athénienne, tel qu’a été décrit Calliclès. Il échoue à le convaincre. Mais contrairement à ce qui est parfois supposé, cela n’a rien d’un échec en termes de communication intellectuelle ; la question est de savoir plutôt quels engagements fondamentaux différents Platon cherche à nous faire distinguer. (shrink)

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...) processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. "Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science. Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University. (shrink)

These essays are the fruit of many years' research by one of the world's leading Hobbes scholars. Noel Malcolm offers not only succinct introductions to Hobbes 's life and thought, but also path-breaking studies of many different aspects of his political philosophy, his scientific and religious theories, his relations with his contemporaries, the sources of his ideas, the printing history of his works, and his influence on European thought.

Explores the complexity of truth and the ways that people take advantage of this complexity to use and abuse neutral truths to suit their own agendas in politics, business, the media, and everyday life. -- Provided by publisher.

This volume is a comprehensive survey of contemporary thought on a wide range of issues and provides students with the basic background to current debates in metaphysics.

Are extreme beliefs constitutive of echo chambers, or only typically caused by them? Or are many echo chambers unproblematic, amplifying relatively benign beliefs? This paper details the conceptual relations between echo chambers and extreme beliefs, showing how different conceptual choice-points in how we understand both echo chambers and extreme beliefs affects how we should evaluate, study, and engage with echo chambering groups. We also explore how our theories of extreme beliefs and echo chambers shape social scientific research and contribute in (...) a practical way when treating these phenomena, focusing on examples of climate change scepticism. (shrink)

Nanotechnology research is beginning to see widespread coverage in the media and popular science literatures, but discussions of hopes and fears about nanotechnology have already become polarised into utopian and dystopian visions. More moderate discussions focus on the near-term applications of nanotechnologies, and on potential benefits and harms. However, in exploring the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology, important lessons should be learned from experiences in other fields. In particular, studies of the ethical, legal, and social issues of genetics research (...) have successfully mapped out many of the issues that arise when new technologies are deployed. It is our contention that, for the most part, the ethical and social issues arising in nanomedicine are not altogether new, and thus do not require novel ethical principles or frameworks, nor a massive investment in ‘NELSI’ research. Instead, what is needed is support for the development of a culture of ethics amongst scientists and clinicians, basic scientific and medical knowledge for bioethicists, and a social competency for citizens to participate actively in debates about the implications of new technologies in general. (shrink)