This essay defines Maoism as an experiment in intimate governance and an attempt—albeit a failed one—to dismantle the divide between political leaders and ordinary people. The Communist Party’s claim to intimacy with the people needs to be constantly reenacted in the relationship between party cadres and ordinary citizens––a cadre’s gestures, habits, and attitudes are magnified and scrutinized under the lens of party legitimacy. The special privileges (tequan, 特权) of party leaders are what I call metrics of exceptionality, which separate the (...) party from the people. The promise to govern on the basis of intimacy with the people did not eradicate ruling class entitlements and arrogance but delegitimized them and opened them up to public scrutiny. Although the process of eradicating privileges was always several steps behind their elaboration and intensification, the former was a normative goal that shaped how ordinary citizens perceived and interacted with party cadres. This dual movement in opposing directions still constitutes the fundamental contradiction of China’s political system as seen from within. This essay revisits and examines crucial historical junctures in the People’s Republic of China as framed by popular contestations of special privilege. The fact that in the post-Mao period, party leaders still speak in the language of intimacy, proximity, and distance indicates the aesthetic importance of this relationship in party ideology, despite public complaints regarding its absence. Even when intimacy as a political mode of communication is able to communicate nothing but its own failure, the proximity between the party and the people takes center stage as the aesthetic foundation of party legitimacy. (shrink)

Alain Badiou's political thought revives the revolutionary aspiration to create the “emergence of another humanity.”3 However, Badiou's project is not a nostalgic attachment to Leninism; it is a response to Leninism's failure and a call to experiment beyond the exhausted political forms of the twentieth century. In a recent lecture, “Is the Word Communism Forever Doomed,” Badiou argues that the model of the Leninist party-state is no longer a viable option for composing a “new mode of existence.”4 The emancipatory goals (...) of both Leninism and Maoism were crushed by their institutionalization in the party-state. Although the following sentence sounds like…. (shrink)

The special issue’s editors introduce the rationale for the following articles, all of which take up aspects of the relations among the production of artworks, the behavior of audiences, and the state’s interest in assembling, regulating, and transforming what it knows as its people through the responses to art.

Epstein et al.'s “full access to Universal Grammar” position is conceptually and empirically problematic. Its shortcomings are illustrated through a brief discussion of the following issues: (1) initial versus final states of grammatical knowledge in a second language, (2) knowledge of gradience of grainmaticality, (3) optionality and retention in non-native grammars, and (4) the empirical measurement of syntactic knowledge.

This study investigates the choice of genitive forms (the woman’s book vs. the book of the woman) in the English of Japanese-English bilingual returnees (i.e. children who returned from a second language dominant environment to their first language environment). The specific aim was to examine whether change in language dominance/exposure influences choice of genitive form in the bilingual children; the more general question was the extent to which observed behaviour can be explained by cross linguistic influence (CLI). First, we compared (...) the choice of genitive form between monolingual Japanese speakers and bilinguals who had recently returned to Japan from an English monolingual environment. Second, we tracked changes in genitive preference within bilingual children, comparing their performances upon return to Japan to those of one year later. Results show that CLI alone is insufficient to explain the difference in genitive evaluation between bilinguals and monolinguals, as well as the intra-group bilingual variation over time. We suggest that both CLI and general processing considerations couple together to influence the changes in genitive preference. (shrink)

Identitat ist unter den Bedingungen der Postmoderne kein festes Ganzes mehr. Die unuberschaubare Anzahl an Moglichkeiten in Ausbildung, Studium, Beruf, aber auch Partnerschaft und Lebensformen fuhren zu der Einsicht, dass Identitat sich immer neu konstituieren muss. Tatsachlich ist Identitat das, was mich als unverwechselbares Ich korperlich und geistig - und das heisst: leiblich - konstituiert. Zugleich entzieht sie sich mir und muss immer wieder neu errungen werden. Dies gilt gerade dann, wenn fruhere Ideale zusammenbrechen oder das zuvor Selbstverstandliche nicht mehr (...) tragt. Identitat und Identitatsbildung betreffen den Einzelnen ebenso wie politische oder religiose Gemeinschaften. In Zeiten, in denen vieles in Bewegung ist, ist Identitat eng verbunden mit der Frage nach den gemeinsamen Werten - das, wofur es sich zu leben lohnt und was wir an die nachste Generation weitergeben mochten. Besondere Beachtung verdienen in diesem Kontext phanomenologische Ansatze, die den leiblichen, sinnlichen und affektiven Dimensionen des Lebens Rechnung tragen. Auf diese Weise lassen sich Erfahrungen, die unsere Identitat begrunden und ausmachen, als Momente einer breiter angelegten Spiritualitat der Wahrnehmung verstehen. Mit Beitragen von Johannes Bundgens, Natalie Depraz, Stephan Gratzel, Caroline Horch, Antje Kapust, Rolf Kuhn, Elmar Nass, Simone Paganini, Michaela Puzicha, Bertin Rautenberg, Holger Zaborowski u. a. (shrink)

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure -- e.g., some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This paper describes and evaluates three general approaches to this "problem of structural diversity": structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multi-stage (...) aggregation. All three approaches have notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multi-stage aggregation as least bad of the three. (shrink)

Kants Musikästhetik wird weithin unterschätzt. Dabei bietet sie die entscheidenden Ansätze zur Befreiung der Musik aus den Fängen der Nachahmungsästhetik, wie sie vor allem E.T.A.Hoffman kongenial umgesetzt hat.

Les disciplines historiques, littéraires et philosophiques font un emploi abondant des catégories historiographiques. Parmi celles-ci, les termes en ismes sont très fréquents pour référer à une doctrine, un courant artistique, une idéologie ou des événements spécifiques. On fait cependant remarquer que ces désignations posent de nombreux problèmes d’interprétation. En particulier, que l’origine exacte d’une catégorie est souvent méconnue et que sa signification est plus équivoque qu’on ne le croit habituellement. La formation d’un terme en isme s’explique souvent dans un contexte (...) polémique et sert à condamner ou critiquer plutôt qu’à comprendre une pensée, un mouvement ou des faits historiques. Les catégories d’athéisme, de classicisme ou de féminisme en sont de bons exemples. Le présent volume vise à contribuer à l’étude critique des catégories historiographiques et des notions en isme en s’attardant à l’époque moderne (XVI e XVIII e siècles). Il s’agit d’un moment clef de l’histoire européenne pendant laquelle nombre de ces notions apparaissent ou pour laquelle l’historiographie en a fait un emploi abondant. Les chapitres en examinent la valeur théorique par rapport à une origine ou des usages, et déterminent de quelles manières elles contribuent à l’interprétation de l’histoire, de la littérature ou de la philosophie, de la Renaissance jusqu’à la Révolution française. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the (...) vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral (...) status of practices such as offsetting personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this article we propose a criterion for distinguishing between cases where pairing risk-increasing and risk-reducing actions makes each action permissible, and those where it does not: the Principle of Aggregate Risk-Imposition. We work towards this by considering a range of examples that illustrate various illegitimate ways of pairing risk-increasing actions with risk-reducing ones, and asking what goes wrong in each case. We then use this criterion to evaluate GHG offsetting. Is offsetting a legitimate way of removing the risk-imposition associated with GHG emissions, or not? Controversially, we argue that this turns out to depend on the form that the offsetting takes. (shrink)

Legal theorists have proposed several theories to justify statutes of limitations in the criminal law, but none of these normative theories is generally accepted. This chapter investigates the related descriptive question as to whether ordinary people have the intuition that legal punishment becomes less appropriate as time passes from the date of the offense and, if they do, what factors play a role in these intuitions. Five studies demonstrate that there is an intuitive statute of limitations on both legal punishment (...) and moral criticism, and that these intuitions arise, in part, from judgments about changes in psychological connectedness over time. (shrink)

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

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.

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment (...) gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

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 ...

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

Abstract:Organizational justice is a behavioral science concept that refers to the perception of fairness of the past treatment of the employees within an organization held by the employees of that organization. These subjective perceptions of fairness have been empirically shown to be related to 1) attitudinal changes in job satisfaction, organizational commitment and managerial trust beliefs; 2) behavioral changes in task performance activities and ancillary extra-task efforts to assist group members and improve group methods; 3) numerical changes in the quantity, (...) quality and efficiency of divisional outputs; and—though this is far more tentative—4) eventual changes in the competitive advantage and financial performance of the full organization. The authors propose that these constructs can be applied to all stakeholders, rather than just to the current employees of the firm, and that objective determinations of fairness by the managers can be related to subjective perceptions of fairness by the stakeholders that will result in the sequential series of attitudinal, behavioral and numerical changes that will lead to performance improvements. In short, the authors propose a normative stakeholder theory of the firm, based upon ethical principles, that will have testable descriptive hypotheses derived from the behavioral constructs. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience: the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, we still lack a satisfying way to avoid logical omniscience within (...) a Bayesian framework. Some proposals merely replace logical omniscience with a different logical idealization; others sacrifice all traits of logical competence on the altar of logical non-omniscience. We think a better strategy is available: by enriching the Bayesian framework with tools that allow us to capture what agents can and cannot infer given their limited cognitive resources, we can avoid logical omniscience while retaining the idea that rational degrees of belief are in an important way constrained by the laws of probability. In this paper, we offer a formal implementation of this strategy, show how the resulting framework solves the problem of logical omniscience, and compare it to orthodox Bayesianism as we know it. (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)

The first impacts of climate change have become evident and are expected to increase dramatically over the next decades. Thus, it becomes more and more pressing to decide who has to compensate those people who suffer from negative impacts of climate change but have neither contributed to the problem nor possess the resources to cope with the consequences. Since the frequently invoked Polluter Pays Principle cannot account for all climate-related harm, I will take a closer look at the much more (...) controversial Beneficiary Pays Principle. It is argued that, appropriately qualified, the Beneficiary Pays Principle can help to identify additional duty-bearers. Based on these results, I briefly comment on three different policy options to generate funds for compensation. (shrink)

The Continuum Companion to Ethics offers a definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Fourteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, the exciting new directions (...) the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution, and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including important technical terms in ethics, a historical chronology, an extensive overview of contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical ethics. (shrink)

In A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , Christian Delacampagne reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course and shows that its greatest figures, even the most unworldly among them, were deeply affected by events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- one who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of (...) the Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes. From Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism. From the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work of philosophers as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. The thinking of these philosophers, and scores of others, cannot be understood without being placed in the context of the times in which they lived. (shrink)

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinema: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a (...) reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [ Film Language ] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen. (shrink)

In this book, Christian Barry and Sanjay G. Reddy propose ways in which the international trading system can support poor countries in promoting the well-being of their peoples.

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

Rev. version of the author's Habilitationsschrift, Martin-Luther-Universitèat.

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)