Gerrie ter Haar, James J. Busuttil (eds.) Bridge or barrier: religion, violence and visions for peace Ed. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2005.

Delia Cristina Balaban, Informationsvermittlung und öffentliche Meinungsbildung im rumänischen Fernsehen Editura Presa Universitarã, Cluj- Napoca, 2003.

Constantin Radulescu-Motru, Scrieri Politice Editura Nemira, Bucuresti, 1998.

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Considering biblical, political, and literary intertexts (Las Casas, Shakespeare, Marino/Brockes, Schiller) with regard to the ideological correlation of sex, rule, and salvation, the paper reads Kleist’s Erdbeben in Chili as a subversive Passion narrative and salvation history following the Marian matrix of Chile’s colonial toponymy: St. Jago after the first visionary of Mary, St. Jacob, La Concepción according to the immaculate conception of Mary, and Valparaíso, Kleist’s »Tal von Eden« in the illusive utopian spirit of the Holy and the whole (...) human family. Starting from this toponomastic key inspiration of the novella, the paper tries to take the colonial setting literally in order to contour more sharply, against the background of Chile’s colonial history, the social and political conflicts around the tutor’s liaison with his pupil, their prosecution, the earthquake, the utopian communitarisation, and the lynchings. Located within the colonial power tussle between the archbishop, the vice-king, the local gentry, and the Spanish bourgeoisie, and staged according to iconographic models, Kleist’s salvation history features Josephe Asteron who, as a novice, incarnates the Body of Christ in an illegitimate child, and, after the earthquake, advances from a femina sacra to a (sexually attractive) Marian nursing mother. The massacre by the ruled, that she finally falls victim to, mimetically inverts, in René Girard’s terms, the colonial rulers’ force without giving up their ideological framework, Christian eschatology. As radical a subversion as it may be, Kleist’s novella itself proves fueled by the persuasive energies of the Christian promise of salvation. (shrink)

Defining ‘presentism’ in a way that saves it from being trivially false yet metaphysically substantively distinct from eternalism is no mean feat, as the first part of this collection testifies. In Wuthrich (forthcoming), I have offered an attempt to achieve just this, arguing that this is best done in the context of modern spacetime theories. Here, I shall refrain from going through all the motions again and simply state the characterization of an ersatzist version of presentism as it has emerged (...) from considerations there. Any acceptable formulation of presentism should remain neutral among competing spacetime theories in order to enable the present project of assessing the compatibility of presentism with various theories of modern physics, including both spacetime theories and theories of physical processes situated in a spatiotemporal setting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST? FORTY YEARS AGO, few students would have called St. Thomas Aquinas a Platonist. At that time he was almost universally recognized as a brilliant exponent of medieval Aristotelianism. In fact, St. Thomas was considered by many to be a " pure " Aristotelian. This position was aptly expl'essed by Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy : Aquinas, unlike his predecessors, had (...) a really competent knowledge of Aristotle. His friend William of Moerheke provided him with translations from Greek, and he himself wrote commentaries. Until his time, men's notions of Aristotle had been obscured by Neoplatonic accretions. He, however, followed the genuine Aristotle, and disliked Platonism, even as it appears in Saint Augustine. He succeeded in persuading the Church that Aristotle's system was to be preferred to Plato's as the basis of Christian philosophy, and that Mohammedans and Christian Averroists had misinterpreted Aristotle.1 Russell, however, although correct in saying that St. Thomas "had a really competent knowledge of Aristotle," neither knew how his philosophy was different from that which had come before nor had any idea of the extent to which the overpowering influence of Neoplatonism had been elt by almost all medieval thinkers, including St. Thomas. Concerning St. Thomas's Aristotelianism, Wayne Hankey has observed the following: Indeed one might say that his Aristotelianism should be seen within the context of his Neoplatonism. Certainly he generally reads Aristotle through Neoplatonic spectacles, but more significant is that the movement toward a more positive view of Aristotle is a feature of the later Neoplatonism and especially of its Christian 1 Bertrand Russell, A. History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 453. 209 210 LUIS CORTEST adherents. Nor is it exclusively a feature of the Iamblichan tradition ; for Porphyry's view of the first principle is closer to Aristotle's than are the positions of either Plotinus or Iamblichus and his followers, and he is responsible for the assimilation of Aristotle's logic into Neoplatonism after Plotinus's critique. It is perhaps enough to mention that Porphyry, Boethius, and the Arabs provide the main western medieval sources for the knowledge of Aristotle until the time of St. Thomas.2 On the surface, it would seem that Russell, never an admirer of Thomistic philosophy, was neither accurate nor objective in his evalu::tion of St. Thomas's Platonism. This judgment of Russell's position, however, might perhaps be too severe. It must be remembered that modern Neoplatonic studies were only in their infancy when Russell's text was first published in 1945. Actually, this scholarship dates, for the most part, from the time of Dodd's edition of Proclus's Elements of Theology in 1933.3 In fact, only in recent years have these studies been cultivated by an impressive number of scholars. Even in the early years of Neoplatonic scholarship, however, there were a few works devoted to St. Thomas Aquinas and Platonism. In 1939, Cornelio Fab:m published his important study, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d'Aquino in Milan. This work not only stressed the importance of the Platonic doctrine of participation in the works of St. Thomas, but also considered the Thomistic corpus in terms of medieval Neoplatonism. Along with Fabro's works, many others soon appeared focusing on the Platonic side of St. Thomas, including those of L. B. Geiger,4 Joseph Santeler,5 and Arthur Little.6 Some concluding remarks f:mm Little's 2 Wayne Hankey, ".Aquinas' First Principle: Being or Unity?" Dionysius, IV (1980), 147-148. a Eric Robertson Dodds, Proclus. The Elements of Theology (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933). 4 L. B. Geiger, La Participation dans la Philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942). 5 Joseph Santeler, Der Platonismus in der l!Jrkenntnislehre des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin (Innsbruck: F. Rauch, 1939). s.Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagles Books, 1950). WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST( 211 book, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism, are indicative of the scholarship from this period in Thomistic studies: Whether wittingly or unwittingly he [St. Thomas] taught a Platonic doctrine rejected by Aristotle when he taught... (shrink)

A journey surveying the land of space, time and motion Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9575-8 Authors Christian Wüthrich, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST? FORTY YEARS AGO, few students would have called St. Thomas Aquinas a Platonist. At that time he was almost universally recognized as a brilliant exponent of medieval Aristotelianism. In fact, St. Thomas was considered by many to be a " pure " Aristotelian. This position was aptly expl'essed by Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy : Aquinas, unlike his predecessors, had (...) a really competent knowledge of Aristotle. His friend William of Moerheke provided him with translations from Greek, and he himself wrote commentaries. Until his time, men's notions of Aristotle had been obscured by Neoplatonic accretions. He, however, followed the genuine Aristotle, and disliked Platonism, even as it appears in Saint Augustine. He succeeded in persuading the Church that Aristotle's system was to be preferred to Plato's as the basis of Christian philosophy, and that Mohammedans and Christian Averroists had misinterpreted Aristotle.1 Russell, however, although correct in saying that St. Thomas "had a really competent knowledge of Aristotle," neither knew how his philosophy was different from that which had come before nor had any idea of the extent to which the overpowering influence of Neoplatonism had been elt by almost all medieval thinkers, including St. Thomas. Concerning St. Thomas's Aristotelianism, Wayne Hankey has observed the following: Indeed one might say that his Aristotelianism should be seen within the context of his Neoplatonism. Certainly he generally reads Aristotle through Neoplatonic spectacles, but more significant is that the movement toward a more positive view of Aristotle is a feature of the later Neoplatonism and especially of its Christian 1 Bertrand Russell, A. History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 453. 209 210 LUIS CORTEST adherents. Nor is it exclusively a feature of the Iamblichan tradition ; for Porphyry's view of the first principle is closer to Aristotle's than are the positions of either Plotinus or Iamblichus and his followers, and he is responsible for the assimilation of Aristotle's logic into Neoplatonism after Plotinus's critique. It is perhaps enough to mention that Porphyry, Boethius, and the Arabs provide the main western medieval sources for the knowledge of Aristotle until the time of St. Thomas.2 On the surface, it would seem that Russell, never an admirer of Thomistic philosophy, was neither accurate nor objective in his evalu::tion of St. Thomas's Platonism. This judgment of Russell's position, however, might perhaps be too severe. It must be remembered that modern Neoplatonic studies were only in their infancy when Russell's text was first published in 1945. Actually, this scholarship dates, for the most part, from the time of Dodd's edition of Proclus's Elements of Theology in 1933.3 In fact, only in recent years have these studies been cultivated by an impressive number of scholars. Even in the early years of Neoplatonic scholarship, however, there were a few works devoted to St. Thomas Aquinas and Platonism. In 1939, Cornelio Fab:m published his important study, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d'Aquino in Milan. This work not only stressed the importance of the Platonic doctrine of participation in the works of St. Thomas, but also considered the Thomistic corpus in terms of medieval Neoplatonism. Along with Fabro's works, many others soon appeared focusing on the Platonic side of St. Thomas, including those of L. B. Geiger,4 Joseph Santeler,5 and Arthur Little.6 Some concluding remarks f:mm Little's 2 Wayne Hankey, ".Aquinas' First Principle: Being or Unity?" Dionysius, IV (1980), 147-148. a Eric Robertson Dodds, Proclus. The Elements of Theology (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933). 4 L. B. Geiger, La Participation dans la Philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942). 5 Joseph Santeler, Der Platonismus in der l!Jrkenntnislehre des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin (Innsbruck: F. Rauch, 1939). s.Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagles Books, 1950). WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST( 211 book, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism, are indicative of the scholarship from this period in Thomistic studies: Whether wittingly or unwittingly he [St. Thomas] taught a Platonic doctrine rejected by Aristotle when he taught... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. GhodseeMark A. AllisonKristen R. Ghodsee. Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 352 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9781982190217.Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. (...) Everyday Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition [End Page 285] that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co... (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has argued that from a realist perspective, quantum mechanics stands in need of an interpretation. Ironically, this hypothesis may appear vulnerable against arguments drawing on Putnam's own work. Nancy Cartwright has urged that his 1962 essay on the meaning of theoretical terms suggests that quantum mechanics needs no interpretation and thus stands in tension with his claim of three years later. She furthermore contends that this conflict should be resolved in favour of the earlier work, as quantum mechanics, (...) like all successful theories, does not need an interpretation. The first part of this essay deflates both of these objections. The second part addresses and evaluates Putnam's own assessments of the main interpretative options available in 1965 and 2005. Although we may disagree on some aspects, his pessimistic conclusion will come out largely unscathed, and, in fact, enhanced. I will close by briefly stating the historical relevance of this work. (shrink)

Within a German sample, the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used as (...) a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”. (shrink)

This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy of values and his (...) account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science. (shrink)

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

Unternehmen sind nicht nur wirtschaftliche, sondern auch politische Akteure. Vor allem aber sind sie entgegen verbreiteter Ansichten auch moralische Akteure, das heißt, sie sind grundsätzlich fähig, den moralischen Standpunkt einzunehmen, auch wenn sie dies in der Praxis selten tun. Daraus erwächst eine politische und moralische Verpflichtung: Auch für Unternehmen gelten die Menschenrechte als moralischer und rechtlicher Maßstab, daran müssen sich ihr Handeln und erst recht ihr Unterlassen messen lassen. Christian Neuhäuser zeigt mit beeindruckenden philosophischen Mitteln und anhand exponierter Beispiele (...) unternehmerischen Handelns, inwiefern und inwieweit Unternehmen moralisch zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden können. Dies hat weitreichende philosophische, ethische und nicht zuletzt politische Konsequenzen. (shrink)

Relational views of equality put forward a social and political ideal of equality that aims at being a better interpretation of what social justice requires than the prevailing distributive conceptions of equality, especially luck egalitarian views. Yet it is unclear what social justice as relational equality demands in distributive terms; Elizabeth Anderson's view seems to vacate a large part of the terrain of distributive justice in favor of a minimalist, sufficiency view. Against that, this paper argues that relational equality, properly (...) understood, requires setting stringent limits to distributive inequality, for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. First, the relational egalitarian conception of society as a cooperative enterprise among equals gives rise to a presumption of equality in socially produced goods (and bads); inequalities in these goods have to be justified by justice-relevant reasons. Second, relational egalitarianism also delivers instrumental reasons to limit inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunities, because such inequalities may generate both opportunities for domination and inegalitarian status norms that threaten the social bases of self-respect of the worse off. (shrink)

In _An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics_, Christian Wenzel discusses and demystifies Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, guiding the reader each step of the way and placing key points of discussion in the context of Kant’s other work. Explains difficult concepts in plain language, using numerous examples and a helpful glossary. Proceeds in the same order as Kant’s text for ease of reference and comprehension. Includes an illuminating foreword by Henry E. Allison. Offers twenty-six further-reading sections, commenting briefly (...) on books and articles from the English, German, and French, that are relevant for each topic Provides an extensive bibliography and a chapter summarizing Kant's main points. (shrink)

Scholars have debated the role that altruistic considerations play—and should play—in recruitment and decision-making processes for clinical trials. Little empirical data are available to support their various perspectives. We analyzed 140 audiotaped pediatric informed consent sessions, of which 95 (68%) included at least one discussion of how participation in a cancer clinical trial might benefit: 1) the pursuit of scientific knowledge generally; 2) other children with cancer specifically; and 3) “the future” and other vaguely defined recipients. Clinicians initiated most (80%) (...) of these discussions of altruism. The enrollment rate of children in the clinical trial was high (83%) overall, but not higher among children whose parents were involved in an altruism-oriented discussion. These findings suggest that: (1) clinicians invoke a spectrum of altruistic considerations rather than a single monothematic notion of altruism, and (2) the effect of altruistic considerations on subsequent enrollment decisions is marginal. While further research on this topic is warranted, bioethical debate should strive to reflect the diversity of altruistic discourse in clinical research encounters and to place this discourse in the context of other, including nonaltruistic, considerations. (shrink)

Cette étude formule l'hypothèse critique d'une opération de remythologisation par une réactualisation théologico-politique de la tragédie chez Heidegger. Cette opération ne saurait simplement coïncider avec une revalorisation " irrationnelle " du mythe, car elle procède d'abord d'une mise en question, non moins problématique, de la dualité supposée entre muthos et logos pour culminer dans ce qu'une note des années 1950 appellera la " mytho-logie de l'événement ". La réélaboration de la notion de mythe s'accomplit à partir du poème de Hölderlin (...) qui doit préfigurer les dieux de l'" autre commencement " post-judéo-chrétien, selon le projet spéculatif d'une " religion " censée relier le peuple à ses dieux nouveaux via l'être comme événement. L'hypothèse d'une remythologisation théologico-politique doit ainsi permettre d'éclairer non seulement le rôle matriciel de Hölderlin pour la pensée de l'être, mais aussi le surinvestissement illusoire du national-socialisme censé donner lieu au " peuple de Hölderlin ". Pour interroger cette réactualisation théologico-politique du mythe, l'étude se concentre sur les cours que Heidegger consacra à Hölderlin, tout en sollicitant l'intégralité du corpus des années 1933-1945, c'est-à-dire les cours fribourgeois, les traités inédits rédigés dans le sillage des Contributions (Beiträge) et les Cahiers noirs (Schwarze Hefte). (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread belief, this book establishes that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together.

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

Practical reasoning is a process of reasoning that concludes in an intention. One example is reasoning from intending an end to intending what you believe is a necessary means: 'I will leave the next buoy to port; in order to do that I must tack; so I'll tack', where the first and third sentences express intentions and the second sentence a belief. This sort of practical reasoning is supported by a valid logical derivation, and therefore seems uncontrovertible. A more contentious (...) example is normative practical reasoning of the form 'I ought to φ, so I'll φ', where 'I ought to φ' expresses a normative belief and 'I'll φ' an intention. This has at least some characteristics of reasoning, but there are also grounds for doubting that it is genuine reasoning. One objection is that it seems inappropriate to derive an intention to φ from a belief that you ought to φ, rather than a belief that you ought to intend to φ. Another is that you may not be able to go through this putative process of reasoning, and this inability might disqualify it from being reasoning. A third objection is that it violates the Humean doctrine that reason alone cannot motivate any action of the will. This paper investigates these objections. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that though symbolism performs many roles in different cultures, it has a uniquely moral one in Igbo land. That unique role which symbolism performs in the pristine communalistic Igbo society concerns the regulation of human freedoms and actions in order to maintain social order. But is this something that can be sustained in a modern Igbo society that is more individualistic than communalistic? This paper is of the view that through the proper maintenance of such (...) symbolism: social control between individuals and groups shall be more coordinated in the contemporary Igbo world; regulate and checkmate the Igbo moral consciousness of oneness; control some cultural maladjustment and bring more about social unity in Igbo land. Keywords: Symbol, Symbolism, Social Order, Igbo, Oji. (shrink)

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was (...) dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)

This paper explores a Rastafari perspective on consciousness development and relates this to developmental stage theories of consciousness evolution from the psychology of religion. The empirical material is from fieldwork on an online Rastafari community with global reach but run by a group based in Trinidad. The people on this particular forum align with the “spiritual, but not religious” trend in contemporary religiosity, which means they are more focused on interior questions of consciousness raising than on religious externals. This paper (...) interprets empirical material from the dialogues on this forum in light of Rastafari theorist Dennis Forsythe. It compares this Rastafari theory of stages of consciousness, symbolized by the animals Anancy, lion, and lamb, to developmental theories of consciousness evolution. These are drawn from psychology and the psychology of religion (Maslow 1970; Kohlberg 1981; Fowler 1981; Gilligan 1982; Wilber 2007), which focus on preconventional, traditional, modern, pluralist, and integral stages. (shrink)

Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps ‘localized’, form of ‘becoming’. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that the analogue of Stein’s theorem from special relativity does not hold in causal set theory. Despite this, we find that in many ways, the debate concerning becoming parallels the well-rehearsed lines it follows in the domain of relativity. We present, however, some new twists (...) and challenges. In particular, we show that a novel and exotic notion of becoming is compatible with causal sets. In contrast to the ‘localized’ becoming considered compatible with the dynamics of causal set theory by its advocates, our novel kind of becoming, while not answering to the typical A-theoretic demands, is ‘global’ and objective. (shrink)

In a case study of the growth of cognitive science, we analyzed the activities of the Cognitive Science Society with a particular emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Analyses of departmental affiliations, training back‐grounds, research methodology, and paper citations suggest that the journal Cognitive Science and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society are dominated by cognitive psychology and computer science, rather than being an equal division among the constituent disciplines of cognitive science. However, at many levels, (...) a growing percentage of work was found to involve a conjunction of multiple disciplines, such that approximately 30–50% of recent work in the Cognitive Science Society is multidisciplinary. In a questionnaire study of cognitive scientists involved in collaborative research, multidisciplinarity was found to shape the research process and affect the factors associated with successful research. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that 1 participants are reluctant to accept a conclusion as certainly true when it is derived from a valid conditional argument that includes a doubtful premise, and 2 participants typically link the degree of uncertainty found in a given premise set to its conclusion. Two experiments were designed to further investigate these phenomena. Ninety adult participants in Experiment 1 were first asked to judge the validity of three conditional arguments Modus Ponens, Denial of the Antecedent, and (...) Affirmation of the Consequent . They were then required to evaluate conclusion uncertainty as a function of two degrees of asserted uncertainty in the major conditional premise If p then it is very probable that q and if p then it is not very probable that q of the arguments from the first task that were otherwise unchanged. Results revealed an effect for asserted-uncertainty in two of the three argument forms. Marginal support was found for the hypothesis that perceived argument validity would be a predictor of performance. Experiment 2 investigated the way 40 adult participants combined two sources of asserted uncertainty, one in the major premise and another in the minor premise, when they had to score the uncertainty of the conclusion. The two most prominent kinds of responses were to choose the same likelihood as the weaker of the two expressed in the premises, or a lower one. However, the within-subject consistency was poor. Theoretical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This article suggests that the deconstruction of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in the Letter on Humanism is a precondition for what Derrida attempts to do in his commentary of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. This preliminary deconstruction, through a constellation of Hölderlinian motifs, controls the topology of Geschlecht III and determines Derrida’s approach to the themes of “nationality” and “philosophical nationalism”.

In this article, I investigate how phenomenologists have analysed the relation between man and animal with respect to death. The common tendency of most phenomenologists is to grant man a specific mode of being and to attribute a parallel but deficient mode to the animal. In this way, phenomenology fails to accomplish a positive phenomenological description of the animal’s mode of being or of animality as such. I turn to Heidegger’s decisive analysis of human/animal death since Heidegger would constantly hold (...) on to the idea that the animal, in contrast to man, has no explicit relation to death and is therefore not capable of death as death. This leads to his very provocative claim that only man “dies” whereas the animal just “perishes.” Hence, the problem of the man/animal-relation becomes a very distinct problem in relation to death since death concerns the very way in which a certain form of being relates to the world. I aim to shed light on the genesis of the problem in order to put the question of the animal’s death in a proper perspective. I argue that it is precisely death where phenomenology loses its firm grip on the differentiation between man and animal and hence it is this distinction that has to be put back into question. (shrink)

This paper uses social network analysis to examine the interaction between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in a virtual community, we show the potential of online platforms to document corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and to engage with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware stakeholder base. The results of this study show that stakeholder involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable (...) new practice for CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. It also opens new horizons for communicating CSR issues to key constituencies online. (shrink)

Global capitalism is a transnational “operational space” which is produced by the practices of states, policy- and issue-specific government networks, and private organizations such as transnational corporations, global law firms, and standard-setting agencies. This “operational space,” which I call the transnational constellation, works through and beyond distinct spatial settings, endowing them with a global financial capitalistic logic and limiting the scope of democratic self-determination. In the second section, I analyze political protest against this transnational constellation in terms of democratic theory. (...) I argue that transnational protest and activism have to be appreciated for their reshaping of spaces of the political, for developing and delivering a genuinely global perspective on political problems, and for their politicization of the transnational constellation by revealing and contesting structures and strategies of domination. However,... (shrink)

We bring out syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents [normal indicative conditionals and biscuit conditionals ] and two types of left dislocation constructions in German, which mark two types of topicality. On the basis of these similarities we argue that NCs and BCs are aboutness topics and relevance topics, respectively. Our analysis extends the approach to aboutness topicality of Endriss to relevance topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution of left-dislocated DPs and applies (...) it to an analysis of conditionals as pluralities of possible worlds. We show how this uniform approach to the interpretation of topicality accounts for the nominal left dislocation constructions as well as for the semantic and pragmatic effects observed in connection with the two types of conditionals. We furthermore discuss the potential of our proposal to deal with subjunctive biscuit conditionals, if-clauses modifying speech acts different from assertions, conditionals with right-dislocated if-clauses, and nested conditionals. (shrink)

The importance of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) not only to socially responsible investors but also to the mainstream of the financial community is gaining importance in a more competitive capital market environment. This article looks at how equity analysts at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – individuals who are not particularly involved in socially responsible investment (SRI) research – perceive economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility strategies. The evidence obtained in our interviews suggests that responsibility issues are increasingly (...) becoming part of mainstream investment analysis. However, for them to play a larger part in the future, investor relations personnel must frame responsibility strategies in a way that is more consistent with the financial community's perspective. In particular, the impact of CSR measures on strategic development, competitive anticipation and creating trust with stakeholders are key in leveraging CSR in financial communications. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and discusses a proof of God’s existence by Anselm of Canterbury’s friend Ralph of Battle, developed in his recently edited De nesciente, a fictitious dialogue between a Christian and an atheist. Without precedent in antiquity and the Middle Ages, Ralph’s proof has never been examined in detail. It combines a “cogito” argument with a two-part cosmological argument. The paper first presents the textual basis and an exegetical interpretation of Ralph’s reasoning, classifies the parts of the proof (...) historically and systematically, and then compares these with the proofs of God’s existence as well as other arguments in Anselm’s Proslogion and Monologion. Finally, it points out some similarities between Ralph’s “cogito” argument and a passage in the Liber pro insipiente, which may suggest that this anonymous critique of Anselm’s Proslogion proof was authored not by Gaunilo, as traditionally thought, but by Ralph. (shrink)

For Descartes, consciousness is closely connected to the intellective perception of thought. This paper argues that the prevalent interpretations of Descartes's account of consciousness in terms of higher-order perception and self-representation fail. These interpretations mistakenly assume that Cartesian consciousness possesses the same theoretical structure in all cases. It is shown by a close analysis of relevant passages that for Descartes the consciousness of perceptions and the consciousness of volitions have different theoretical structures. From this analysis a more adequate picture of (...) Cartesian consciousness is developed and, finally, compared with a recent reconstruction provided by Vili Lähteenmäki. (shrink)

Lorsqu’il revient sur l’« inachèvement » de Sein und Zeit, Heidegger souligne volontiers que la non-publication de la troisième section a favorisé une série de malentendus parmi lesquels, au premier chef, la lecture anthropologique de l’analytique du Dasein annoncée dans le plan de l’ouvrage comme « provisoire » par rapport à la question de l’être. C’est ce malentendu que nous voudrions examiner en faisant intervenir Blumenberg qui ne se réfère à la troisième section absente, censée développe...