Cognitive Gadgetsoffers a new, convincing perspective on the origins of our distinctive cognitive faculties, coupled with a clear, innovative research program. Although we broadly endorse Heyes’ ideas, we raise some concerns about her characterisation of evolutionary psychology and the relationship between biology and culture, before discussing the potential fruits of examining cognitive gadgets through the lens of active inference.

The first English translation of the major political works of Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), one of the most important of the French political figures in the aftermath of the revolution of 1789, and a leading member of the liberal opposition to Napoleon and later to the restored Bourbon monarchy. The texts included in this volume are widely regarded as one of the classic formulations of modern liberal doctrine.

S’agissant des actes de langage participant à la construction de la réalité sociale, les philosophes contemporains se sont restreints aux déclarations. Nous avançons qu’il existe une autre catégorie qui contribue à la fabrique et au maintien des faits sociaux : celle des incantatifs, actes de langage dont le but est l’expression et la génération d’émotions collectives, et qui contribuent ainsi à la création et au maintien des communautés.

Il volume contiene la traduzione della Prefazione e del Libro I dell'opera di Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) - teorico della democrazia liberale, storico e filosofo nel dominio delle religioni, romanziere, politico che debutta nella Rivoluzione francese, matura sotto il regime napoleonico, invecchia durante la monarchia della Restaurazione - De la Religion, pubblicata in cinque tomi tra il 1824 e il 1831. Corredato di un ampio saggio introduttivo del curatore, il libro colma una lacuna della cultura filosofica italiana, ossia l'assenza (...) di una traduzione dell'opera religiosa di Constant, di cui viene proposta la parte iniziale contenente l'introduzione generale alla vasta storia comparata delle religioni antiche - dal feticismo al politeismo - che compone il lavoro constantiano. "Opera capitale per intendere compiutamente il Constant" - scrive Fulvio Tessitore nella Presentazione - e, ancor più, l'età nevralgica in cui essa apparve e della quale è uno dei vertici letterari e teoretici--OCLC. (shrink)

This is the first full-length English translation of Benjamin Constant's massive study of humanity's religious forms and development, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1831. Constant (1767-1830) regarded On Religion, worked on over the course of many years, as perhaps his most important philosophical work. He called it "the only interest, the only consolation of my life," and "the book that I was destined by nature to write." While the recent revival of interest in Constant's (...) thought has been welcome and fruitful, it has been incomplete, tending to leave out of account his writings on religion. In this connection, On Religion is essential reading and of interest for many reasons. As an analysis of humanity's religious experience, the work is notable for its methodology. Unlike previous writers with dogmatic commitments, whether theological or philosophical, Constant aimed to work with well-established facts and to relate religious forms to their historical contexts and civilizational developments. In this way, he was a precursor of the scientific study of religion. This objectivity, however, was not tantamount to moral-political neutrality. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, he wanted partisans of the new order to recognize that the religious impulse was natural to the human heart: to extirpate religion was therefore a fool's errand and worse. Likewise, he instructed religious reactionaries that history had left them behind: now the natural state of the religious sentiment was an unfettered "spirituality" left free to find new forms of expression. His counsel to contemporaries has proven prescient concerning subsequent religious developments in democratic and totalitarian societies. In his day, Constant was a consistent liberal, a life-long advocate of representative government, as well as of the central liberal arrangement concerning religion: separation of church and state. But On Religion demonstrates that principled liberalism can turn a sympathetic as well as analytic eye toward religion and, in an unbegrudging way, find an important place for it in free society. There are signs that this is a lesson that contemporary liberalism would do well to relearn. Peter Paul Seaton Jr. teaches philosophy at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore. His scholarly interests focus on the intersection of religion, politics, and philosophy. He has translated a number of works in French thought, especially political philosophy. These include works by Pierre Manent, Democracy without Nations? and Modern Liberty and Its Discontents (with Daniel J. Mahoney), Chantal Delsol, Unjust Justice, and Rémi Brague, On the God of the Christians and The Legitimacy of the Human. (shrink)

Volume X presents a critical edition with commentary of all the texts published by Constant between July 1815 and April 1818. We are dealing here with political journalism, an instrument of public opinion deployed with great virtuosity by Constant to realise his liberal programme, with texts on political theory and the fundamental debates on the state budget, with publications composed in connection with the 1817 parliamentary elections. This volume contains an engagement with one of Chateaubriand’s key works (La (...) Monarchie selon la Charte), articles on the politics of the day and publications on important contemporary personalities such as Madame de Staël or Joseph Fouché. The importance of the texts always reaches beyond their particular concern to encompass fundamental principles of liberalism in Restoration Europe. (shrink)

La polémica Constant-Kant tuvo lugar cuando Inmanuel Kant replico directamente a una observación crítica formulada por Constant en su panfleto Des Réactions Politiques. El tema sobre el que se debatía era la existencia de un deber incondicionado de decir siempre y en cualquier situación la verdad. Frente a las tesis del imperativo universal moral de la verdad del filósofo de Koënisberg, Constant opone los ejemplos concretos de situaciones en las que decir la verdad puede equivaler a hacer (...) el mal. Gabriel Albiac no explica en el Estudio introductorio que precede a la edición de los textos completos de la querella, cuanto anticipan las tesis que aquí se debaten, los problemas que generará el totalitarismo y el terror en el mundo de las ideologías holistas. Pero más allá de las consecuencias que pueden deparar las reflexiones en este libro relativas al derecho a decir y exigir la verdad - que es un de los postulados de la sacralización de la teología operada a partir del Renacimiento y de la Ilustración-, la polémica Constant/ Kant oculta otro segundo debate sobre el valor de los principios, la forma de construirlos y su eficacia para regir y explicar la realidad que se demuestra de excepcional interés en un siglo como el XXI, desbordado por su incapacidad de comprender los hechos que todos los días ofrece un mundo empírico en continua efervescencia, debido a la carencia de un sistema de categorías de principio generalmente aceptados que pueda servir de referente para unificar la multiplicidad de lo singular. En esta polémica que surge entre, un gran filósofo consagrado, que no tuvo reparo en salir al quite de un argumento que consideraba digno de réplica, y un joven aventurero dotado de extraordinaria inteligencia que iba a demostrarse capaz de comprender el mundo en que iniciaba su singladura, están contenidos en ciernes los supuestos básicos de alguno de lo problemas centrales de nuestra difícil postmodernidad. (shrink)

Le deuxième tome des OEuvres complètes contient, en deux volumes, les deux versions de la traduction que Benjamin Constant a faite de l'ouvrage de William Godwin intitulé Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, en même temps que le texte anglais intégral. Le lecteur dispose ainsi de l'ensemble du dossier de ce travail important que Constant a mené entre les dernières semaines de 1798 et le début de 1800 en vue d'une publication (...) pour laquelle il avait passé un contrat mais qui ne se fera pas en raison des circonstances. Edité aujourd'hui par les soins de Laura Saggiorato, sous la direction de Lucia Omacini et d'Etienne Hofmann, cet ensemble imposant est d'un intérêt capital, à la fois pour la connaissance de l'évolution de la pensée politique de Constant à une époque où il commence à confronter ses idées aux réalités de la vie quotidienne et pour l'étude de ses méthodes de travail à partir d'un grand texte qu'il traduit, retravaille et commente d'une manière critique. (shrink)

Moral deliberation involves a constant interplay among specific judgments, general moral values and principles, and background beliefs about the world. We may also construct broad moral theories to explain how our judgments and general commitments hang together, but there is little hope of settling on any one comprehensive moral theory.

This essay addresses the theoretical foundations of Danto’s vision of performance art. In his writings, Danto rarely mentions this art form and when he does so, it is for the most part in a negative way. Still, there is one clue to Danto’s deeper engagement with performance art. This is his constant references to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Danto finds in Nietzsche a critical tool for engaging with contemporary artists: what he calls the “Euripidean dilemma”. This approach provides (...) a basis for discussing the relevance of Nietzschean thought in developing a philosophical understanding of performance art. (shrink)

Nietzsche distinguished between two forces in art: Apollonian, which represents order and reason, and Dionysian, which represents chaos and energy. Economists, Ward argues, have operated for too long under the assumption that their work reflects the scientific, Apollonian principals that inform physics when they simply do not apply to economics: 'constants' in economics stand in for variables, and the core scientific principles of prediction and replication are all but ignored by economists. Ward encourages economists to reintegrate the standard rigor of (...) the scientific method into their work while embracing the fact of the shape-shifting changeability of human beings. Economists can still aspire to scientific standards, as is demonstrated by the success of biology, in which there is considerable Dionysian variability. Economists must avoid the temptation to wish away dynamic complexity and diversity and must recognize, among other things, that the desire to take risks is fundamentally human. The second half of the book takes some first steps toward creating this new Dionysian Economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham by Carl A. VaterBenjamin R. DeSpainVATER, Carl A. God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. xi + 294 pp. Cloth, $75.00Carl Vater skillfully blends historical and constructive concerns in his study of medieval theories of the divine ideas. (...) The book, first, makes a significant contribution to the body of scholarly resources on medieval philosophy by systematically mapping out the complex intellectual history of the divine ideas between the years 1250 and 1325. Throughout the work Vater displays a staggering command of the relevant literature, figures, and ideas from this period of philosophical development. Second, he provides a robust defense and promotion of John Duns Scotus’s theory of the divine ideas, which he regularly insists is the best theory. Through careful analysis of the often subtle differences in medieval articulations of the divine ideas to answer the questions of how God knows and produces creatures, Vater makes the case that Scotus avoided certain pitfalls in earlier theories that rely on a flawed understanding of relations influenced, principally, by Avicenna’s notion of essence.The book itself is divided into five parts with each systematically detailing a particular theory, beginning with the “imitability theory” represented by Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Bonaventure—the one figure, in Vater’s narrative, capable of escaping Scotus’s subsequent critiques. According to Vater, the imitability theory is defined by several notable characteristics, including that the divine ideas are “secondary objects of the divine intellect when it knows the divine essence,” that they perform both cognitive and causal roles, that they are relations, and that there are many of them. The “infinite intellect theory” critiques the imitability theory for depending on a notion of relations that is mistaken for supposing that relations can be known before the terms of the relation are themselves known. In this section, Vater examines the works of Peter John Olivi and his student Petrus de Trabibus. The third part considers what Vater calls the “objectum cognitum theory” developed by James of Viterbo. Here, according to Vater, we encounter the first signs, following Olivi and de Trabibus’s critique of the imitability theory, of the shift away from identifying the divine ideas with relations to defining them as creatures themselves. This shift culminates in the “creatura intellecta theory” introduced by Richard of Mediavilla, but it is not properly developed until Scotus, who concludes that “God knows relations because he knows possible creatures.” The section ends with an analysis of Scotus’s influence on the theories of early Thomists and Scotists, including John of Paris, Thomas of Sutton, and Henry of Harclary. In the fifth part, Vater turns to the “nominalist theory” of Peter Auriol and [End Page 373] William of Ockham. Although both Auriol and Ockham offer accounts of the divine ideas, these are, as Vater says, little more than nods to the Augustinian tradition that ultimately amount to a rejection of the divine ideas.Vater’s approach to these medieval theories has many strengths. By not only classifying the prominent theories during this period but also systematically organizing his interpretation of each respective author, he is able to create a comparative framework for assessing the central issues at play in the divine ideas, such as their status, definition, cognitive and causal roles, plurality and unity, exemplarity, and the question of nonexistent possibles, and he traces variations in each area to identify where change, development, and critique are actually occurring within this seventy-five years of intellectual history. He also is attentive to figures often overlooked in larger narrations of medieval philosophy, and he locates their contributions to the varied development of the divine ideas. More importantly, however, Vater is able to maintain coherence in his evaluation of these complex, intertwining layers of medieval philosophical reflection by constantly returning to the overarching theme of relations in the movement from identifying the divine ideas with relations to approaching them as creatures themselves. Vater is correct when he notes that the divine ideas form a... (shrink)

Technology takes an unprecedented position in contemporary society. In particular, it has become part and parcel of governmental attempts to manufacture life in new ways. Such ideas concerning the governance of life organize around the same contention: that technology and life are, in fact, highly interconnectable. This is surprising because if one enters the sites of techno-scientific experimentation, those visions turn out to be much frailer and by no means “in place” yet. Rather, they afford or enforce constant interfacing (...) work, a particular mode of manufacturing life, rendering disparate, sturdy, and often surprisingly incompatible things available for one another. Here, we contend that both of those aspects, pervasive rationalities of interconnectability and practices of interfacing mark the cornerstones of what we call a new techno-bio-politics of life. In order to grasp the government of life under the technological condition, we must understand how both human and non-human entities are being rendered interconnectable and re-worked through practices of interfacing. We take neuro-technology and care robotics as two illustrative cases. Our analysis shows that the contemporary government of life is not primarily concerned with life itself in its biological re-constitution but rather with life as it is interfaced with and through technology. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight of subjecthood. (...) Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period. Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

This engrossing study, first published in 1989, explores the basic mutuality between philosophy and translation. By studying the conceptions of translation in Plato, Seneca, Davidson, Walter Benjamin and Freud, Andrew Benjamin reveals the interplay between the two disciplines not only in their relationship to language, but also at a deeper, cognitive level. Benjamin engages throughout with the central tenets of post-structuralism: the concept of a constant yet illusive ‘true’ meaning has lost authority, but remains a problem. (...) The fact of translation seems to defy the notion that ‘meaning’ is reducible to its component words; yet, to say that the ‘truth’ is more than the sum of its parts, we are challenging the very foundations of what it is to communicate, to understand, and to know. In Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, the author sets out his own theory of language in light of these issues. (shrink)

At the heart of the cinema of Werner Herzog lies the vision of discordant and chaoticnature – the vision of anti-nature. Throughout his work we can trace a constant fascinationwith the violence of nature and its indifference, or even hostility, to human desires andambitions. For example, in his early film Even Dwarfs Started Small we have therecurrent image of a crippled chicken continually pecked by its companions.2Here theviolence of nature provides a sly prelude to the anarchic carnival violence of (...) the dwarfs’revolt against their oppressive institution. This fascination is particularly evident in hisdocumentary filmmaking, although Herzog himself deconstructs this generic category. Inthe ‘Minnesota Declaration’ 3on ‘truth and fact in documentary cinema’ he radicallydistinguishes between ‘fact’, linked to norms and the limits of Cinéma Vérité, and ‘truth’ asecstatic illumination, which ‘can be reached only through fabrication and imagination andstylization’ 2002, 301). In particular he identifies nature as the site of thisecstatic illumination – in which we find ‘Lessons of Darkness’ – but only through the lack ofany ‘voice’ of nature. While Herzog constantly films nature he films it as hell or as utterlyalien. This is not a nature simply corrupted by humanity but a nature inherently ‘corrupt’ in itself; Herzog’s vision of nature is a kind of anti-vitalism, a horror at the promiscuous vitality of nature. (shrink)

Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s ‘Olympian’ and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch or skim. Against claims to hidden or encrypted meaning to be revealed, they stress we stay as close to the surface of things as possible. These forms of ‘surface reading’ characterise a common orientation of literary and critical studies at the present moment – from invocations of materialities, networks and objects, (...) to statistical and cognitive methodologies. Taking issue with these orientations, I explore how such claims falsely characterise critique – notably psychoanalysis and Marxism – as based on distance and exteriority. In fact, these modes of critique constantly insist on our immersion and embeddedness in forms of relation: whether socio-economic or psychic. The forms of anti-critique dispute this form of immersion in the name of an affirmative form of taking a distance, escaping what they see as the problematic space of negativity that binds critique to its objects. So, while claiming to get us close, anti-critique inscribes an affirmative distance. I return to negativity as the inscription of a messy proximity that carves out an internal dissension and distance within the experience of immersion. (shrink)

What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as (...) readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past. (shrink)

Félix Guattari's theoretical and practical interests in cinema culminated in the film project A Love of UIQ. While critics have concentrated on the sci-fi screenplay's elements of minor cinema, its themes of mass media, emerging computer technologies and informatic-communication networks particularly express Guattari's concept of post-media. The screenplay is an aesthetic meditation on the potentialities of post-media, a concept that anticipates the practical and theoretical issues surrounding the age of the Internet. A Love of UIQ voices Guattari's ambivalence towards the (...) liberatory possibilities of network technologies that are at constant risk of capitalist recapture. (shrink)

This volume deals with philosophically grounded theories of animal generation as found in two different traditions: one, deriving primarily from Aristotelian natural philosophy and specifically from his Generation of Animals; and another, deriving from two related medical traditions, the Hippocratic and the Galenic. The book contains a classification and critique of works that touch on the history of embryology and animal generation written before 1980. It also contains translations of key sections of the works on which it is focused. It (...) looks at two different scholarly communities: the physicians and philosophers, that share a set of textual resources and philosophical lineages, as well as a shared problem, but that nevertheless have different concerns and commitments. The book demonstrates how those working in these two traditions not only shared a common philosophical background in the arts curricula of the universities, but were in constant intercourse with each other. This book presents a test case of how scholarly communities differentiate themselves from each other through methods of argument, empirical investigation, and textual interpretations. It is all the more interesting because the two communities under investigation have so much in common and yet, in the end, are distinct in a number of important ways. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight of subjecthood. (...) Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period (1485–1602). Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

Michael A. Peters Beijing Normal UniversityDeclinism is back in fashion again. It is now a common and persistent source of historical reflection that has been a constant theme since the first Chris...

What is a logical constant? In which terms should we characterize the meaning of logical words like “and”, “or”, “implies”? An attractive answer is: in terms of their inferential roles, i.e. in terms of the role they play in building inferences. More precisely, we favor an approach, going back to Dosen and Sambin, in which the inferential role of a logical constant is captured by a double line rule which introduces it as reflecting structural links (for example, multiplicative (...) conjunction reflects comma on the right of the turnstyle). Rule-based characterizations of logical constants are subject to the well known objection of Prior’s fake connective, tonk. We show that some double line rules also give rise to such pseudo logical constants. But then, we are able to find a property of a double line rules which guarantee that it defines a genuine logical constant. Thus we provide an alternative answer to Belnap’s requirement of conservatity in terms of a local requirement on double line rules. (shrink)

The characteristic temporal relationship between actions and their sensory outcomes allows us to distinguish self- from externally generated sensory events. However, the complex sensory environment can cause transient delays between action and outcome calling for flexible recalibration of predicted sensorimotor timing. Since the neural underpinnings of this process are largely unknown this study investigated the involvement of the cerebellum by means of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation. While receiving anodal, cathodal, dual-hemisphere or sham ctDCS, in an adaptation phase, participants were (...) exposed to constant delays of 150 ms between actively or passively generated button presses and visual sensory outcomes. Recalibration in the same and in another sensory modality was assessed in a subsequent test phase during which variable delays between button press and visual or auditory outcome had to be detected. Results indicated that temporal recalibration occurred in audition after anodal ctDCS while it was absent in vision. As the adaptation modality was visual, effects in audition suggest that recalibration occurred on a supra-modal level. In active conditions, anodal ctDCS improved sensorimotor recalibration at the delay level closest to the adaptation delay, suggesting a precise cerebellar-dependent temporal recalibration mechanism. In passive conditions, the facilitation of inter-sensory recalibration by anodal ctDCS was overall stronger and tuned to larger delays. These findings point to a role of the cerebellum in supra-modal temporal recalibration across sensorimotor and perceptual domains, but the differential manifestation of the effect across delay levels in active and passive conditions points to differences in the underlying mechanisms depending on the availability of action-based predictions. Furthermore, these results suggest that anodal ctDCS can be a promising tool for facilitating effects of temporal recalibration in sensorimotor and inter-sensory contexts. (shrink)

We consider Choiceless Polynomial Time , a language introduced by Blass, Gurevich and Shelah, and show that it can express a query originally constructed by Cai, Fürer and Immerman to separate fixed-point logic with counting from image. This settles a question posed by Blass et al. The program we present uses sets of unbounded finite rank: we demonstrate that this is necessary by showing that the query cannot be computed by any program that has a constant bound on the (...) rank of sets used, even in image, an extension of image with counting. (shrink)

Chile has established hybrid policies for the administrative distribution of its educational establishments, leading to significant gaps in educational results and school conditions between public, mixed, and private schools. As a result, there are high levels of segregation, and social and economic vulnerability that put public schools at a disadvantage, affecting their image and causing a constant decrease in enrollment. An abbreviated version of Luhtanen and Crocker’s collective self-esteem scale was adapted and validated for the Chilean educational context because (...) of its usefulness in studying processes of social segregation and cultural coherence, seeking to identify student perception about the appreciation of school actions in the context of belonging and identification with schools, in order to compare between groups according to types of establishment and assess the effects of school conditions on the perception of students. A representative sample of Chilean secondary students between 9th and 12th grades participated. Descriptive analyses, comparison of means between groups, confirmatory factorial analyses, and multi-group analyses were conducted to test the adjustment and invariance of the unifactorial structure of a reduced version of four items. The results indicated that the scale satisfactorily complies with the proposed adjustment indexes, presents total invariance by gender and partial invariance by administrative dependence, and allows establishing statistically significant differences in the collective self-esteem, indicating a higher score for students in the private system, and a lower score for those in the public system. These results show the negative effects of high school segregation on students’ collective self-esteem, affecting the appreciation of personal, collective, and institutional activities and the sense of belonging. Although previous research has explored some of the effects of school segregation, the present study focuses on collective self-esteem, which is closely related to identity and belonging, and allows for further innovative research on school segregation. The scale is useful as an instrument for researching social conditions of student well-being, in regards to educational management. (shrink)

Benjamin Constant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were both Swiss-French political thinkers who had a significant influence on the subsequent development of political thought. Constant is known not only as a political philosopher but also as an active politician, who today is considered one of the founding fathers of liberalism. Rousseau, in turn, is considered one of the most controversial thinkers of the Enlightenment, who has been accused of laying the foundation for many revolutionary political movements and repressive regimes. (...) The main objective of this work is to illustrate Benjamin Constant’s liberal objections to the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. First, it is important to focus on Rousseau’s main ideas for the full disclosure of the topic. Likewise, it is also crucial to take into account the historical context, which will be useful for understanding the motives for the formation of Constant’s liberal views. Thus, in the first part of the work, we will briefly consider the main concepts developed by Rousseau in his book, The Social Contract, such as popular sovereignty, the state of nature, and direct democracy. In the second part, we will analyze the main political concepts of Constant and his critique of Rousseau, based on his books The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns and Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments. (shrink)

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) is the most important French liberal that most casual liberals have never heard of. Everyone knows something about Montesquieu because checks and balances and the separation of powers are household terms. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution are both established classics. But Constant is largely terra incognita even for those with a university degree—to their loss.

ABSTRACTThis paper makes a claim about Constant’s intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant’s views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors’ desire (...) to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant’s liberalism either in terms of ‘scepticism’ or ‘pluralism.’ It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For several decades now, a steady flow of scholarly contributions from both intellectual history and political theory has been reasserting Benjamin Constant as a theorist of liberal democracy. Constant’s visionary understanding of liberal democracy is usually conflated with his understanding of limited popular sovereignty. In this article, I reconstruct Constant’s positive conception of popular sovereignty, i.e. his conception of what popular sovereignty means within its limits and take it as the starting point of an analysis (...) of Constant’s understanding of democracy. I argue that Constant’s understanding of popular sovereignty as ‘the assent of all’ leads to a distinction between ‘governmental authority’ and ‘sovereign power’. The latter is exercised by the individual members of the political community and has features that align with contemporary aggregative and contestatory approaches to democracy. Even though according to this analysis, Constant’s conception of democracy allows for both pluralism and dynamism, those are operative against the background of a more fundamental conservatism: Constant’s understanding of sovereign power is predicated on an institutional status quo. (shrink)

This essay concerns Constant’s classic text The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Although this is a frequently quoted text, what makes reading it still something of an effort is that it contains a baffling shift from the complete exaltation of modern liberty in its first part to the recognition of the significance of political participation in safeguarding modern liberty in its final part. The text is also replete with additional treasures, including Constant’s famous (...) distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns and his turn to the basic human capacity of self-development to support his stubborn insistence on the irreducibility of political participation. With regard to the aforementioned shift in the 1819 text, some have argued that in order to reveal the richness of the text we must be aware that its two parts were written under different historical circumstances. Accepting this claim, I argue that the basic tone of the text is Constant’s attempt to combine modern liberty and political participation and that deciphering the argumentative thrust inherent in the text helps reveal its richness. I focus on the centrality of the representative system, which, I argue, plays an important role in Constant’s endeavour to unify the liberty of the moderns and political liberty throughout the text. To see how he defends both the enjoyment of individual interests and the practice of political liberty, it is necessary to recognize the nature of representative assemblies in Constant’s constitutionalism and to characterize his appeal to self-development as a justification of the practice of political liberty. (shrink)

SummaryOn the basis of B. Constant’s ideas, this article discusses the possibility of studying religious feeling only as emotion and substantiates the superiority of this approach to the cognitive. The difficulties of the non-cognitive approach are mainly related to its fusion with the cognitive and can be overcome by a strict distinction between them. Religious feeling is thereby shown to be an ordinary emotion without any cognitive properties – only as a sensual stream that is specified by the particularities (...) of its flow and its interactions with thought (and probably will). Its specificity as religious would be considered as the effect of such particularities and interactions. Further specification of this feeling – the differences among faith, religious hope, love, etc. – is proposed in the same manner, revealing and distinguishing nuances of its flow. In this way, religious feeling could be considered without mystification, and its nature would be understandable through the mechanism of consciousness. The whole of religion as reduced to religious feeling and consciousness would be accessible in its nature to the researcher while fully preserving its details as they occur in the believer’s consciousness. (shrink)

Le portrait politique de Constant est divisé en quatre parties.

This article examines Constant's analysis of character during the French Revolution. During the late-1790s, Constant declared himself a “democrat”, but he worried that the Revolution was reinforcing character traits in France that would undermine stable liberal politics. He was especially concerned that the “revolutionary torrent” [his phrase] had unleashed violent passions that led to fanaticism, rebelliousness, and the search for vengeance. And, he was disturbed to see that, at the other extreme, the chaos of revolutionary violence had led (...) others to resignation, isolation, and a focus on narrow self-interest. In his search for a path between vengeance and fatigue, he encouraged sentiments like self-respect, compassion, and enthusiasm. (shrink)