Spence develops and applies a normative model based on rationalist and virtue ethics as well as stoic philosophy to assess the impact of technology on wellbeing. Through developing this model, Spence offers a novel and important examination of the benefit of technology to our society as a whole.

The justification of the theory -- Gewirth's argument for the principle of generic consistency -- Objections to Gewirth's argument -- Positive rights and community -- Agents and persons : the dignity-conferring value of rights -- A reconstruction of Gewirth's argument for the PGC around the concept of self-respect -- The unity of the right and the good : rights, virtues, and sentiments -- The unity of the right and the good -- Conflicts of duties : special obligations -- The resolution (...) of the conflict between self-interest and morality -- Justification, motivation, and compliance -- The conflict between self-interest and morality -- The practical application of the theory : a neo-stoic perspective -- The ethical foundations of professional practice -- The application of the PGC in professional ethics -- The neo-stoicism of Gewirth's rationalist ethics. (shrink)

Using a general model of corruption that explains and accounts for corruption across different corporate and professional activities, the paper will examine how certain practices in the media, especially in areas where journalism, advertising and public relations regularly intersect and converge, can be construed as instances of corruption. By applying this general model of corruption the paper will then offer a taxonomy of media corruption by identifying most if not all the major types of media corruption. It will be argued (...) that such corruption is regular and systematic. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how some of the information and communication practices of the Tech Media and specifically of Facebook, constitute media corruption. The paper will examine what the professional role of Facebook is regarding its information/communication practices and then demonstrate that Facebook is essentially a media company and not merely a “platform,” therefore liable to the same normative responsibilities as other media companies. Design/methodology/approach Applying the dual obligation information theory, a normative information and communication (...) theory that applies generally to all media companies that disseminate and share information, the paper demonstrates that Facebook’s role of mediating and curating the information of its users places upon it a normative editing responsibility, to ensure both the preventive detection and corrective editing of fake news, as well as other forms of misinformation disseminated on its platform. Finally, applying a philosophical model of media corruption the paper will demonstrate that Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica case was not only unethical but moreover, constituted media corruption. Findings The paper concludes that Facebook’s media corruption illustrated in the Cambridge Analytica case is not a one-off case but the result of a systemic and inherent conflict of interest between its business model of selling users’ information to advertisers and its normative media role rendering the conflict of interest between those two roles conducive to media corruption. Originality/value The paper's originality is twofold. It demonstrates that Facebook is a media company normatively accountable on the basis of an original theory the DOIT and moreover, on the basis of an original media corruption theory its actions in the Cambridge Analytica case constituted media corruption. (shrink)

The recent transnational wave of destruction that was caused by the earthquake-induced tsunamis in South East Asia has raised the issue of global justice in terms of the rights of victims to expect aid relief and the moral responsibility of the rest of the world to provide it. In this paper I will discuss the issue of global ethics in terms of positive rights that people have to assistance from others when they cannot provide such assistance themselves. The main object (...) of the paper is to demonstrate that positive rights are universal and global in scope and cannot therefore be restricted by any national, religious, cultural or other social boundaries. Such rights provide a rational and ethical foundation for global justice that is cosmopolitan. The argument for the position offered in the paper will be broadly based on the moral philosophy of Alan Gewirth.1. (shrink)

Beginning with the initial premise that as the Internet has a global character, the paper will argue that the normative evaluation of digital information on the Internet necessitates an evaluative model that is itself universal and global in character. The paper will show that information has a dual normative structure that commits all disseminators of information to both epistemological and ethical norms that are in principle universal and thus global in application. Based on this dual normative characterization of information the (...) paper will seek to demonstrate: that information and internet information specifically, as a process and product of communication, has an inherent normative structure that commits its producers, disseminators, communicators and users, everyone in fact that deals with information, to certain mandatory epistemological and ethical commitments; and that the negligent or purposeful abuse of information in violation of the epistemological and ethical commitments to which its inherent normative structure gives rise is also a violation of universal rights to freedom and wellbeing to which all agents are entitled by virtue of being agents, and in particular informational agents. (shrink)

Good journalism is based—and to some extent thrives—on a diversity of perspectives from those who supply information and informed opinions to the public. New media journalism is a contemporary newsgathering and disseminating method with enormous communication potential because it is an online forum that can connect a great number of diverse contributors and audiences. Citizen journalism—performed on a global level through the Web—is a potential marvel because of its wide reach and range of diversity. This paper offers an examination and (...) philosophical analysis that shows which facets of new media information ethics and epistemology can be reconciled with universal ethical and epistemological principles and which, if any, cannot. To that end, we wish to provide groundwork for the description and critical evaluation of universal ethical and epistemic standards consistent with the phenomenon of new media journalism. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenon of Internet addiction and its possible amelioration, from both Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives. Internet addiction is caused by the excessive use of the Internet and its resulting dependence, having negative effects on human well-being. The ideas of a key ancient Chinese Daoist thinker Zhuangzi 莊子 and his Western contemporaries, the Stoics, as viewed through the world, the things and beings in it, and their relationships, offer insights which may be used to alleviate these effects. (...) The application of and comparison between the two ancient philosophies in addressing the issue of Internet addiction can give us inspiration to confront the challenges of technological enslavement in general and Internet addiction in particular. This is no doubt a help in our pursuit of well-being. (shrink)

Spence develops and applies a normative model based on rationalist and virtue ethics as well as stoic philosophy to assess the impact of technology on wellbeing. Through developing this model, Spence offers a novel and important examination of the benefit of technology to our society as a whole.

This paper aims to systematically explore and provide answers to the following key questions: When is government secrecy justified? In a conflict between government secrecy and the public's right to be informed on matters of public interest, which ought to take priority? Is Julian Assange a journalist and what justifies his role as a journalist? Even if Julian Assange is a journalist of the new media, was he justified in disseminating classified information to the public? Who decides what is in (...) "the public interest"? Is it only journalists of the Fourth Estate who decide that or also journalists of the Fifth Estate ? This paper will answer the aforementioned questions by arguing that the media in the form of both the Fourth and Fifth Estates should inform the public on matters of public interest truthfully and ethically, even if sometimes they have to breach government secrecy. (shrink)

The title refers to the question addressed in this paper, namely, to what degree if any technology, including nanotechnologies, in the form of products and processes, is capable of contributing to a good life. To answer that question, the paper will develop a meta-normative model whose primary purpose is to determine the essential conditions that any normative theory of the Good Life and Technology (T-GLAT) must adequately address in order to be able to account for, explain and evaluate the Contributive (...) Capability of Technology for a Good Life (CCT-GL). By CCT-GL understand the capability of any technological product or process in its design and/or its use to contribute in some way, if any, to the good life of individuals and society at large. In this paper, the all-embracing term “technology” will be used to refer to both the products and processes of different technologies. (shrink)

This book provides an applied model of corruption to identify, analyse, and assess the ethics of major types of corruption in the media involving practices such as cash-for-comment, media release journalism, including video news releases, fake news, deep fakes, and staged news. The book starts with a conceptual philosophical analysis of corruption in general, followed by an in-depth analysis of media corruption, across its various transformations, from the legacy media of the 4th Estate to the digital media of the 5th (...) Estate to the Network Media of the 6th Estate, and provides key case studies as practical illustrations and contextualisation of those major types of media corruption. It explains how the conversion of the two forms of media communication, corporate and social digital communication, as expressed in the symbiotic relationship between the 4th Estate and the 5th Estate exposes and enables the reporting of corruption, signalling a major shift in the way the media itself can provide an effective means for anti-corruption measures against major practices of corruption that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. (shrink)

The paper will seek to demonstrate that information as communication has a dual inherent normative structure that commits its disseminators, especially the media, offline and online, to epistemological and ethical principles that are universally mandatory. With regard to the dissemination of information by the media, its business intelligence constituted by its commercial interests as a media market must always be congruent with moral intelligence on the basis of the epistemological and ethical universal principles that the dual normative structure of information (...) gives rise and to which the media itself is committed. When the media?s business intelligence comes into conflict with moral intelligence, the latter must always take precedent over the former. Moreover, the communication of information to the public by the media, offline and online, even if conceived merely as another market commodity, commits the media to ethical conduct regardless of any other commercial interests that may come into conflict with the media's ethical commitments to the public. (shrink)

PurposeBeginning with the initial premise that the internet has a global character, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the normative evaluation of digital information on the internet necessitates an evaluative model that is itself universal and global in character. To this end, the paper aims to demonstrate and support a universal model for the normative evaluation of information on the internet.Design/methodology/approachThe design and application of a dual normative model of information show how such a model commits all (...) disseminators of information to universal epistemological and ethical norms.FindingsBased on the dual normative characterization of information, the paper demonstrates that information and internet information specifically, have an inherent normative structure that commits its disseminators to certain mandatory epistemological and ethical commitments; and that the negligent or purposeful abuse of information in violation of those commitments is also a violation of universal rights to freedom and wellbeing to which all agents are entitled by virtue of being agents, and in particular informational agents.Research limitations/implicationsOwing to space constraints it is impractical to provide in this paper a detailed account of how the argument for informational universal rights can deal with other competing moral obligations.Originality/valueThe findings based on an innovative dual normative model of information demonstrate and support the initial thesis of the paper, namely, that the dissemination of internet information due to its global nature commits all informational agents to universal epistemological and ethical principles. (shrink)

This paper provides a general philosophical groundwork for the theoretical and applied normative evaluation of information generally and digital information specifically in relation to the good life. The overall aim of the paper is to address the question of how Information Ethics and computer ethics more generally can be expanded to include more centrally the issue of how and to what extent information relates and contributes to the quality of life or the good life , for individuals and for society. (...) To answer that question, the paper explores and provides by way of a theoretical groundwork for further research, the concept of wisdom understood as a type of meta - knowledge as well as a type of meta - virtue , which can enable one to both know in principle what a good life is and how to successfully apply that knowledge in living such a life in practice. This answer will be based on the main argument presented in this paper that the notion of wisdom understood as being at once a meta - epistemological , meta - axiological and meta - eudemonic concept, provides the essential conceptual link between information on the one hand and the good life on the other. If, as we are told, this is the Age of Information, both the theoretical examination and analysis of the question of how information relates to the good life and the provision of an adequate answer to that question are essential for developing a deeper understanding of how to evaluate the theoretical and practical implications and ramifications of information for the good life, for individuals and societies generally. (shrink)

As one of the most important ethicists to emerge since the Second World War, Alan Gewirth continues to influence philosophical debates concerning morality. In this ground-breaking book, Gewirth's neo-Kantianism, and the communitarian problems discussed, form a dialogue on the foundation of moral theory. Themes of agent-centered constraints, the formal structure of theories, and the relationship between freedom and duty are examined along with such new perspectives as feminism, the Stoics, and Sartre. Gewirth offers a picture of the philosopher's theory and (...) its applications, providing a richer, more complete critical assessement than any which has occurred to date. (shrink)

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

Adalah hal yang lumrah bila dalam tiga dasa warsa terakhir ini muncul minat yang semakin tinggi terhadap kajian dan seluk-beluk korupsi mengingat berbagai kerusakan yang ditimbulkannya. Bahkan, topik korupsi menjadi agenda internasional para ahli politik dan pembuat kebijakan. Kendati demikian, literatur kajian mengenai korupsi dalam tradisi filsafat masih dapat dikatakan minim. Oleh karena itu, kajian filsafat terapan mengenai korupsi yang dilakukan oleh Seumas Miller, Peter Roberts, dan Edward Spence layak diapresiasi. Dalam buku ini, para penulis (selanjutnya akan disingkat (...) menjadi Miller, dkk.) menegaskan bahwa korupsi merupakan suatu spesies imoralitas (hlm. xvi). Melalui titik pijak tersebut, Miler dkk. memperlihatkan perbedaan kerangka konseptual yang halus antara korupsi dan tindakan imoralitas lainnya. Dengan kata lain, tindakan korupsi sudah pasti merupakan perbuatan imoral, tetapi tidak semua perbuatan imoral adalah tindakan korupsi. Dengan menempatkan persoalan korupsi pada ranah moralitas, Miler dkk. seakan menegaskan bahwa korupsi adalah suatu gejala khas manusiawi dan dilakukan secara sadar. Hal ini diungkapkan secara eksplisit oleh Miller dkk. Mereka mengstakan bahwa tindakan korupsi adalah laku kebiasaan yang salah secara moral, dan karenanya tidak didorong oleh keyakinan sejati yang benar secara moral (hlm. 13)................... Berdasarkan uraian-uraian yang cermat dan halus mengenai korupsi, Miller dkk. juga memaparkan lokus tanggung jawab moral untuk memerangi korupsi. Secara detail, paparan tersebut diuraikan dalam bab ke-6 hingga ke-10 yang memuat berbagai alternatif untuk menghadapi korupsi, seperti pengembangan sistem-sistem antikorupsi, peran “peniup peluit” (whistleblower), pranata yuridis, serta mekanisme hukuman yang sesuai dengan teori keadilan yang bersifat memulihkan (restorative theory of justice). Bagi Miller dkk., berbagai pertimbangan tindakan antikorupsi yang ditawarkannya harus dilandaskan pada tanggung jawab moral. Pendasaran ini konsisten dengan kerangka konseptual yang diajukan pada bagian awal buku ini: bahwa korupsi merupakan persoalan moral. Mereka juga menegaskan bahwa tanggung jawab moral tersebut bersifat kolektif (hlm. 211). Tidak hanya itu, sistem antikorupsi yang digagas juga perlu bersifat menyeluruh: berupa pengembangan unsur-unsur reaktif maupun preventif sekaligus (hlm. 156). Miller dkk. juga berharap bahwa pranata yuridis dan mekanisme hukuman seharusnya dapat menentukan inti dari sistem keadilan dengan mengambil inspirasi pemikiran politik yang dikembangkan dari tradisi filosofis Aristoteles, John Locke, David Hume, Imanuel Kant, dan John Stuart Mill. Selain itu, baik pranata yuridis mapun mekanisme hukuman diharapkan dapat berperan untuk memulihkan (mengintegrasikan) kembali hal-hal yang korup (rusak) pada masyarakat dan sekaligus menghalau korupsi dari masyarakat. Melalui rangkaian paparan buku tersebut, kajian Miller dkk. mengenai korupsi dan antikorupsi merupakan masukan yang berharga dari tradisi filsafat, khususnya filsafat moral. Hal ini sangat berguna untuk mengembangkan kajian korupsi serta antikorupsi secara mendalam dan serius dalam konteks kekinian. (Yulius Tandyanto, Mahasiswa Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, Jakarta). (shrink)

Intended for high school and college students studying ancient Greece and Rome as part of a larger world history curriculum, this book's coverage of key wars and battles; important leaders, armies, organizations, and weapons; and other aspects of conflict will enable readers to better understand the complex role warfare played in ancient Western civilization.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

Professor J. B. Schneewind's recent excellent volume Mill's Ethical Writings has drawn attention to the necessity of studying Mill's notes to chapter XXIII of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind for a clear understanding of his theory of the moral sentiments. There are notes, however, by J. S. Mill to other chapters of that work, which should not be forgotten, because they elucidate the associationist theory of motivation which is obscurely appealed to in chapter IV of (...) Utilitarianism. Critics of Mill from F. H. Bradley onwards have made erroneous statements about the psychology that underlies Mill's justification of the principle of utility. But if Mill was going to support his ethics with a psychological theory, he should have expressed that theory at length and unambiguously in his ethical treatise. In what follows, it is pointed out where critics have been unfair to Mill through their apparent ignorance of his notes to the Analysis and of his conception of sympathy; but it is also shown that there is a puzzling inconsistency between the notes and a key passage in Utilitarianism, chapter IV. Finally, the theory of habitual volition, which is expressed at the close of that chapter, is examined. Critics have paid little attention to this theory, but it entails a serious modification of psychological hedonism, and Mill obviously attributed great importance to it. (shrink)

How can I give you a reason to believe what I tell you? I can influence the evidence available to you. Or I can simply invite your trust. These two ways of giving reasons work very differently. When a speaker tells her hearer that p, I argue, she intends that he gain access to a prima facie reason to believe that p that derives not from evidence but from his mere understanding of her act. Unlike mere assertions, acts of telling (...) give reasons directly. They give reasons by inviting the hearer’s trust. This yields a novel form of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. The status of testimony as a sui generis source of epistemic warrant is entailed by the nature of the act of telling. We can discover the nature of this illocution, and its epistemic role, by examining how it functions in the real world of human relations. (shrink)

In this article we take further the debate on the ethics of competitive intelligence gathering, which until now has been very limited. Drawing on empirical research from a mobile telephone company in the United Kingdom, we present the case that while mystery shopping is not the worst activity in which an organization might be involved, it is basically unethical. Mystery shopping involves deception and the obtaining of competitive information under false pretences. Common arguments are that ‘everyone is doing it’ and (...) that the information is in the public domain. Neither of these points convincingly justifies the requirement for an employer to ask an employee to lie and deceive others on behalf of the company. The use of students and those in low power positions in the organization is a further concern. (shrink)

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

An assurance theory of trust begins from the act of assurance – whether testimonial, advisorial or promissory – and explains trust as a cognate stance of resting assured. My version emphasizes the risks and rewards of trust. On trust’s rewards, I show how an assurance can give a reason to the addressee through a twofold exercise of ‘normative powers’: (i) the speaker thereby incurs an obligation to be sincere; (ii) if the speaker is trustworthy, she thereby gives her addressee the (...) reason. Each claim is controversial; my contribution lies in how I defend them together, linking the sincerity obligation to the provision of reasons. On trust’s risks, I defend a popular thesis about the nature of trust – that trust differs from mere reliance in how it risks betrayal – against the objection that the thesis ‘moralizes’ trust. Such betrayal need not be moral, I argue, because it may derive entirely from how the assurance purports to provide a reason. (shrink)

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with significantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modifiers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often defies current phrase-based statistical decoders. We present a conditional random field sequence classi- fier that detects the full scope of Arabic noun phrase subjects in (...) verb-initial clauses at the Fβ=1 61.3% level, a 5.0% absolute improvement over a statistical parser baseline. We suggest methods for integrating the classifier output with a statistical decoder and present preliminary machine translation results. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to the CommentariesSean A. SpenceIn “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry,” I have attempted to present an argument from the perspective of materialist neuroscience, pushing the latter to its logical conclusion: that if the human nervous system is consistent in its properties, then the only place for “free will” is in the non-conscious processes which underpin conscious awareness. This argument I have based on two supports: the (...) “spatial” and the “temporal” (Spence, 1995).I have contended that the sense of freedom may be lost from certain actions, thereby implying that “freedom” is a sensory process distinct from action. This might be conceptualized as having a distinct functional distribution within the nervous system (a spatial distinction). I have also argued that conscious awareness of events occurs at a finite delay, the period of “neuronal adequacy,” after those events themselves. The point here is that neurochemical events giving rise to phenomenology are likely to require a period of time (no matter how short) for their genesis. The process is “on line” before we perceive it (a temporal distinction). Thus the “freedom to act,” a motor process, is necessarily non-conscious at the point of initiation.I am grateful to Frith, Libet and Stephens for their comments. In the most part our disagreements are likely to be those of emphasis, perhaps compounded by my uses of the term “free will.”I have no major disagreement with Frith’s comments. I would, however, emphasize that it is likely that the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, does tell us something regarding intended actions. It is, for example, absent prior to the involuntary movements seen in Tourette’s syndrome (Obeso et al. 1982), and reduced in akinetic patients with Parkinson’s disease (Dick et al. 1989) or medial frontal lobe lesions (Deecke et al. 1987). The latter groups have difficulty initiating intended, internally generated, actions.With regard to the suspicion of dualism in my diagrams, the point is well taken, but I am attempting to describe a functional distinction, the precise coordinates of which remain obscure. It may well be that “consciousness” occupies no fixed location but is an activity temporarily co-extant with that association cortex (or cortices) subserving the sensory modality (or modalities) experienced phenomenologically (see Bottini et al. 1995).I have based much of my “temporal” argument on Libet’s work, and I am grateful for his response. Nevertheless, I am still of the opinion that there is a central inconsistency with his argument that conscious control exerts a veto on acts which is somehow free of material constraints. [Indeed he states that he has “no quarrel with the view that even a fully voluntary act is initiated unconsciously (non-consciously)”.] Whereas I can [End Page 99] not prove that this power of veto does not evade neurochemical processes, or that it somehow acts instantaneously and independently, with no origin in unconscious processing, I can say that I have restricted myself to arguing within a materialist perspective, with the aim of “pushing it” to its extreme. The free will which Libet retains in consciousness is one which is unique, and unconstrained by materialism. It is dualism in disguise!Stephens implies that there is a non-argument regarding consciousness acting as an initiator of events. The suggestion is that no one would argue this. Yet this is Libet’s argument. It cannot be disproved, but it is clearly (internally) inconsistent with Libet’s own impressive body of work.As for the role of consciousness in action, I have, I think, invoked a position similar to that adopted by Stephens; that consciousness is more a sensory state, allowing awareness of actions, and their consequences, and perhaps thereby facilitating the function of non-conscious initiators. It is clearly necessary for the performance of the “higher” acts which we equate with human nature, but it is not sufficient. (Indeed many of the most creative insights have “emerged” into consciousness [see Boden, 1992].) The man with a paralyzed arm may wish for his arm to move but to no avail. Over time function may slowly reappear. But if his lesion is such that he is unaware of his impairment (anosognosia), then his prognosis may... (shrink)

The biggest obstacle to understanding Aquinas's account of the soul may be the word “soul”. On hearing it, many people are prone to think of ghosts, ectoplasm, or Rene Descartes's notion of res cogitans. None of these has anything to do with the soul as Aquinas understands it. But even the standard one‐line Aristotelian‐Thomistic characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead. As is well known, the word “soul” is in Aristotelian‐Thomistic philosophy essentially (...) a technical term for the substantial form of a living thing. Material substances can be destroyed by other natural objects because they do have an inherent tendency toward corruption. A human being is the kind of substance which, in its mature and normal state, exhibits both the properties and causal powers characteristic of animality and those characteristic of rationality. (shrink)

In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz's life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz's attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed in (...) the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience. (shrink)

The first full exploration of the political thought of Jan Patocka, student of Husserl and Heidegger and mentor to Václav Havel.