This chapter contains sections titled: Reincarnation/Rebirth Karma Causality Problem of Evil Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility Karma and Release Transfer of Merit Recent Developments Works cited.

Causation is important. It is, as Hume said, the cement of the universe, and lies at the heart of our conceptual structure. Causation is one of the most fundamental tools we have for organizing our apprehension of the external world and ourselves. But philosophers' disagreement about the correct interpretation of causation is as limitless as their agreement about its importance. The history of attempts to elucidate the nature of this concept and to situate it with respect to (...) other fundamental concepts is almost as long as the history of philosophy itself. In this first English translation of Causalite; et lois de la nature Max Kistler seeks to reconstruct a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. It will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics; and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role. (shrink)

Purpose. The article highlights the demand for critical thinking in everyday life at the present stage of development of globalized culture and emphasizes the role of philosophy as a source of rationality. Philosophizing, which is determined by the psychosociocultural matrix, sets the toposes, vocabulary and rhythms of meaning making, their preservation and transformation. The purpose of the article is to concretize the practices of socio-cultural communication, primarily through the social institute of education, where individuals interact with the psychosociocultural matrix of (...) philosophizing, which mediate the general and individual level in philosophical culture. Theoretical basis of the study are cultural anthropology and phenomenological methods. Originality of the study: based on the philosophy of intersubjectivity, we actualized the rational grounds for formation of adequate judgments in modern culture at the level of everyday life. This justifies the inevitability of the spread of various forms and types of philosophical education, philosophical thinking, ideas and values developed in philosophical communities beyond the narrow circle of professional philosophers. This implies the systemic involvement of philosophers as professionals of meaning-making in solving problems in various non-academic fields – politics, economics, law, etc. The formation of skills of philosophical critical thinking in the process of preparing young people for active civil life is no less important aspect of this. Conclusions lead to an understanding of the existential importance of philosophy and philosophizing and the need for organized forms of knowledge transfer such as the Faculty of Philosophy of the Classical University. There is a mutual interest and interaction of the general culture of society and philosophy as a special kind of culture. Because philosophy actively configures other forms of culture, contributes to the creation of sociocultural identities precisely because of its ability to conceptually reproduce the core of the psychosociocultural matrix that underlies the existence of all these different forms within one society. The sociocultural macro level of philosophical spiritual practices is formed by the psychosociocultural matrix of the philosophical tradition, which retains its longevity from the emergence of philosophy and goes through its history, demonstrating the features of the national reception of philosophy as a national-specific embodiment of sociocultural macro level of the psychosociocultural matrix. (shrink)

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found (...) an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient--and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. (shrink)

In this book, J. L. Mackie makes a careful study of several philosophical issues involved in his account of causation. Mackie follows Hume's distinction between causation as a concept and causation as it is ‘in the objects’ and attempts to provide an account of both aspects. Mackie examines the treatment of causation by philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Mill, Russell, Ducasse, Kneale, Hart and Honore, and von Wright. Mackie's own account involves an analysis of causal statements (...) in terms of counterfactual conditionals though these are judged to be incapable of giving a complete account of causation. Mackie argues that regularity theory too can only offer an incomplete picture of the nature of causation. In the course of his analysis, Mackie critically examines the account of causation offered by Kant, as well as the contemporary Kantian approaches offered by philosophers such as Bennett and Strawson. Also addressed are issues such as the direction of causation, the relation of statistical laws and functional laws, the role of causal statements in legal contexts, and the understanding of causes both as ‘facts’ and ‘events’. Throughout the discussion of these topics, Mackie develops his own complex account of the nature of causation, finally bringing his analysis to bear in regard to the topic of teleology and the question of whether final causes can be justifiably reduced to efficient causes. (shrink)

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision making might be modelled? Following Shepard (e.g.,1987), it is argued that some universal principles may be attainable in cognitive science. Here, 2 examples are proposed: the (...) simplicity principle (which states that the cognitive system prefers patterns that provide simpler explanations of available data); and the scale‐invariance principle, which states that many cognitive phenomena are independent of the scale of relevant underlying physical variables, such as time, space, luminance, or sound pressure. This article illustrates how principles may be combined to explain specific cognitive processes by using these principles to derive SIMPLE, a formal model of memory for serial order (Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007), and briefly mentions some extensions to models of identification and categorization. This article also considers the scope and limitations of universal laws in cognitive science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

This essential business ethics text touches on many themes important to future leaders of business. Broad in its scope, the book presents the business aspects of philosophy, law, politics, government policy, and education. The material is designed to heighten the reader's sensitivity to the moral domain existing in business. As the culture of American "big business" has clouded the view of society towards business professionals, Ethics, Law, and Business realizes a need to prepare business students for leadership roles in the (...) communities, as well as in business. This text discusses the basics of free speech, violence, affirmative action, and public education. Filling an important gap, this textbook presents imminently readable information on several business topics. In the past, there was not one or even any combination of books that provided the necessary coverage in a usable format. This book is appropriate for a semester course on business ethics in any graduate or undergraduate program. This textbook will be accompanied by an Instructor's Manual written by Wines and Nancy L. Bodie, Boise State University. It will feature PowerPoint slides, discussion problems, test items, and teaching suggestions. (shrink)

Ethics, communication skills, and the law ('practice skills') are important in all aspects of modern health care. Doctors and nurses must be sensitive to the ethical aspects of their work and understand the legal framework within which clinical decisions are made. Well developed skills of communication, with patients, their relatives and other members of the clinical team, are a key feature of good clinical practice Until recently, the important of practice skills has been relatively neglected in health care education. This (...) situation is changing. The UK General Medical Council, for example, has recently identified three aspects as part of the core of the medical course, and the move to degree courses in nursing has led to an increasing focus of practice skills in nurse education. The Oxford Practice Skills Project (OPSP) team have developed a course, within the University of Oxford Clinical School, which covers the teaching of practice skills in an integrated manner. This course is widely recognized as one of the most systematic developments of education in these areas. This manual describes the OPSP course in detail and provides teaching materials. Although developed initially for medical students, it should be helpful to all those involved in teaching ethics, communication skills, and law in health care. Each Seminar is described in detail Tutors' guides are provided Student handouts are included Contains guidelines for introducing 'practice skills' into a busy clinical curriculum Includes over forty case histories for teaching and examination Gives details of many useful sources and resources Details a variety of teaching methods together with their advantages and disadvantages Provides an ethics teaching toolkit for clinical teachers new to this area Readers are welcome to photocopy any part of this manual for their own teaching. (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a set (...) of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

Professor Matthew Kramer is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time - even if the label 'legal philosopher' does not do justice to the breadth of his work. This collection of essays brings together esteemed philosophers, as well as junior scholars, to critically assess Kramer's philosophy. The contributions focus on Kramer's work on legal philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. The volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on different aspect of Kramer's work. The (...) first part, Rights and Right-holding, contains five essays addressing Kramer's work on rights and right-holding, including the Hohfeldian analysis and the interest theory of right-holding. The four essays in the second part, General Jurisprudence, focus on Kramer's work in general jurisprudence, from the compatibility of legal positivism with universal legal error, to his robust defense of inclusive legal positivism, concluding with reflections on his writings on the rule of law. The third part, General Matters of Ethics, contains two essays addressing Kramer's metaethical work on moral realism as a moral doctrine. The fourth and fifth parts, Freedom and Liberalism, have four essays falling within political philosophy, probing Kramer's work on negative freedom and political liberalism, respectively. The sixth part, Applied Ethics, contains two essays on Kramer's work on capital punishment and freedom of expression. The collection is rounded off by reflections on, and replies to, the contributions by Kramer himself. (shrink)

"Republicanism" in Kant's political philosophy describes the type of state and the kind of politics demanded by freedom. Thus understood, republicanism expresses the limits of practical reason in politics. ;Kant sets his political thought against Hobbes' empirical description of political individuals, for whom norms arise through imaginative "picturing" of various conditions. For Kant free practical subjects are motivationally independent of sensed objects and possess ability for self-legislation . Kant further maintains that ideas are "regulative", not constitutive, of human understanding, such (...) that correct use of them requires knowledge of their "principles." ;Because autonomy governs internal determinations, it cannot be the principle of republicanism, which as a matter of "right" concerns actions in their external aspect alone. Actions are subject only to moral possibility, or "permission". Kant's "permissive law" can be understood as law only if moral obligation is distinguished from the specification of duty, a distinction drawn by Achenwall, who influenced Kant. Right built on "permission" connects "first taking" and "intelligible possession". This explains two notions permeating Kant's political writings: obedience to state authority as such, and skepticism regarding any identification of existing arrangements with the idea of a perfectly rightful state. ;Thus conceived, right legitimizes various constitutions. The republican idea and its principle of "representation" are civil elaborations of permission's skeptical aspect. State authority represents the "universal united will", and cannot legitimately be resisted. ;This interpretation faces two challenges. One is unreserved cosmopolitanism, the claim that no right is conclusive without global authority. However, this position misinterprets "permission" as a preliminary violation of right, and therefore not as law. Secondly, the state may be seen as "rightfully" constituted for "fairness". This mistakenly attributes to Kant a Hobbesian view of individuals, and employs ideas not according to their principles , but in a direct, "pictorial" manner . ;Kant's "republicanism" is not an institutional arrangement but a principle of governance. The republican idea is the condition of the possibility of gradual, nonrevolutionary progress. Kant's "permission"---through its lack of specification and its deference to existing authority---is the expression of freedom in external contexts and the foundation of properly critical politics. (shrink)

Philosophers of science don't very often discuss the place of mathematics between other sciences or the meaning of mathematics for other sciences. They consider mathematics as a formal language with mainly analytical statements about the use of symbols (Carnap, Russell, Ayer ). Originally Wittgenstein defended this formalistic interpretation of mathematics in his TLP. Gradually, however, he develops himself towards an intuitionistic and ontological position, in which mathematics is conceived as the central and therefore normative part of our thought (of course (...) : on what there is and how it is). Mathematical science plays the role of logic in relation to other sciences. Its universal applicability and efficiency are consequences of its creating beings on a necessary level, in virtue of the number of its relations (always still by substitution). This highly important philosophy of mathematics (misinterpreted by Crispin Wright) starts with his lectures in Cambridge (in the thirties ) and reaches its culmination in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and in On Certainty. In a second part this philosophical determination of mathematical reasoning is traced backwards through history. David Hume's contribution is reinterpreted from a new point of view. Inside the total field of our beliefs he distinguishes between different sciences with the critérium of the intricacy of relations between items of our knowledge field. The more and stronger these relations, the more forceful and necessary their influence on the remaining parts of the system of our belief. So mathematics is in the centre, the loose reveries of our fancy on the periphery. Quine's representation of ‘the tribunal of sense experience’, by which the total field should be judged and corrected, must be disqualified. Hume's dictum ‘Whatever we conceive, we conceive it to be existent’ reveals sharply that this evaluative and corrective role is performed by the necessary thoughts (or, if one likes it so, ‘realities’) of mathematical science. That reason and especially mathematical reason is the highest judge on the population and structure of our world and a very precious heritage of Pythagorism and Platonism. From the sources of Sextus Empiricus and Aristotle the author tries to reconstruct exactly the original assertion of Pythagoristic mathematical philosophy, which has nothing to do with a naive hypostazation of numbers or a kabbalistic number mysticism. Philolaos' saying, that some propositions are stronger than we, is demonstrated to refer to mathematical laws. The pythagorical position is fully integrated in Plato's dialectical philosophy. Mathematics is the great mediator towards the intuition of true being, the ‘metaxu’ between sensible phenomena and ideas. This tradition of philosophical taxation of mathematics as the ‘logic of science’ is broken by Aristotle, who didn't use mathematics in his qualitative natural science and considered mathematics as an abstract science (about the quantitative aspect of being). Moreover, he disowned its logical role and created a special science for this task. Human reason is mathematical in so far it is sure of its language and thought, which is excellently expressed by the Greek μαθηματιxα (= what can be understood, learned and taught) and by the Dutch word ‘wiskunde’ (= science of what is certain). The remarks and reflections of Wittgenstein have produced a new perspective on the placevalue (‘Stellenwert’) of mathematics among all possible sciences and beliefs and have proven that its onto-logical purport is an unavoidable implication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and CharacterIvan A. BoldyrevMark D. White. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 270. Cloth, $55.00.This remarkable book provides a new ethical perspective for economics based on Kantian ethics of autonomy and dignity. There are two main messages in it that I find particularly important. First, Mark White derives from Kant the (...) idea of irreducible moral principles that govern the behavior of economic agents independently of welfarist and, more generally, consequentialist concerns. These principles of duty and the “incomparable worth” (21) of human dignity, as well as justice or rights, may not be economically traded off against some other motivations; hence, they simply evade economic reasoning altogether.Second, White endorses a version of libertarian Kantianism that treats people as individuals in essence (“autonomous”) and social in orientation (respecting the rights and the choices of the others). In discussing individualism, White attacks the conventional wisdom of economics and claims that preferences alone do not account for the identity of individuals [End Page 298] in space and time, although their unique characters do. Persons should be given free choice (absent in deterministic rational-choice models) and hence responsibility for their choices that incorporates the social factors in decision-making. However, White never mentions the almost insurmountable difficulties associated with fleshing out the truly individual features of a given person. Although he allows for a person’s identity and character changing over time, he does not recognize that character itself is in many respects a social construction.White criticizes paternalistic economic policies that suggest manipulating choice environments in order to follow the “true” preferences of the individuals. Instead, real consent, as satisfying both relevant preferences and principles (e.g. rights and human dignity), is, in his view, the sole criterion for justifying particular policy measures—not Pareto-efficiency or Kaldor-Hicks compensation. Economists’ obsession with efficiency leading to the misconceived notions such as “efficient level of crime” or “manageable level of terrorism” is also severely criticized.For White, the most popular formalistic version of the categorical imperative is less important than the other two—prohibiting treating other people simply as means and instituting the “Kingdom of Ends.” Formalism is reserved merely for the negative evaluation of actions and providing strict perfect duties that give clear guidance concerning what should not be done. White’s “Kantian-economic” model of decision-making incorporates perfect duties as constraints, and imperfect (positive) duties as preferences. He also stresses that for Kant, duties derived from the imperative depend on empirical knowledge, the context of decision-making, and judgment as a unique personal interpretation of the moral law. He further emphasizes the intersubjective role of Kantian morality: moral law should be universalizable to all rational persons (the “Kingdom of Ends” formula of the imperative), whereas rationality means not just following the patterns of behavior developed in the preference-oriented choice model, but rather acting on one’s beliefs and desires or choosing not to follow them, thus exhibiting genuine autonomy.The new and important contribution to the discussion is an explicit treatment of will as an inner faculty that, together with judgment, constitutes a person’s character or “self,” and helps to overcome the mere inclination to follow duty. Will is the missing link between decision and action and should be “well-trained” for bringing about true morality.The book is clearly written, and the author has upheld the interdisciplinary appeal of the topic, demonstrating an outstanding knowledge of the vast literature on ethics (both Kantian and not) and economics. White’s emphasis on the irreducibility of moral principles is absolutely relevant for current economic and political debates. However, some reservations are in order.There is an ambiguity concerning the status of his analysis. If in its positive aspect White’s recommendations for economists is to accept the Kantian vision of morality, then almost no arguments are given for this, and his modifications of the standard choice model are introduced in an ad hoc manner, just to reconcile it with the Kantian framework. Are an individual’s decisions to act on principles and to overcome mere inclinations really... (shrink)

Marc Lange’s new book on laws offers a restatement and development of the account he proposed in Natural Laws and Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000), henceforth NLSP, and the new material is helpfully summarized in the preface. Laws and Lawmakers presents the key idea from NLSP in a rather more reader-friendly manner – this idea being roughly that the difference between laws and accidents is that laws, unlike accidents, form a ‘stable’ set, i.e. a logically closed set of truths (...) such that they would all still hold under any counterfactual supposition consistent with the set. So, for example, the natural laws all still hold under counterfactual suppositions such as ‘had this match been struck …’, ‘had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across’ and so on; thus this set is stable. But the set of laws plus the accidental claim ‘there is no gold cube one mile across’ fails to hold under such counterfactual suppositions because had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across, such a cube might well have come into existence; thus this set is not stable. While the basic outline and defence of this idea is provided in Chapter 1, those wishing to delve into the intricate …. (shrink)

Muslim legal culture is becoming more relevant to modern Ukraine, which can be explained, on the one hand, by the nature of Islam and, on the other, by the peculiarities of its current state in our country. After all, the internal logic of Islam, as a universal system that encompasses both religious and secular life, as one of the components of the awakening of Islam, involves recourse to Sharia, a strict adherence to which is an unmistakable criterion for Muslims (...) of deep religious faith. On the other hand, in addition to religious revival, in the lives of Muslims, social and economic, political, national and cultural problems need to be addressed and secular. It is secular relations that led to the formation of Muslim jurisprudence and its subsequent evolution. (shrink)

Metaphysicians play an important role in our understanding of the universe. In recent years, physicists have focussed on finding accurate mathematical formalisms of the evolution of our physical system - if a metaphysician can uncover the metaphysical underpinnings of these formalisms; that is, why these formalisms seem to consistently map the universe, then our understanding of the world and the things in it is greatly enhanced. Science, then, plays a very important role in our project, as the best scientific formalisms (...) provide us with what we, as metaphysicians, should be trying to interpret. In this thesis I examine existing metaphysical views of what a law is (both from a conceptual and from a metaphysical perspective), to show how closely causation is linked to laws, and to provide a priori arguments for and against each of these positions. Ultimately, I aim to provide an analysis of a number of metaphysics of natural laws and causation, apply these accounts to our best scientific theories, and see how these metaphysics fit in with our concepts of cause and law. Although I do not attempt a definitive metaphysical account myself, I conclude that any successful metaphysic will be a broadly Humean one, and furthermore that given the concepts of cause and law that shall be agreed upon, Humean theories allow for there to be causal sequences and laws (in line with our concepts) in the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature ed. by Rafael K. StepienVesna A. Wallace (bio)Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature. Edited by Rafael K. Stepien. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 381. Paperback $26.95, isbn 978-1-4383-8070-1.The editor of the Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature should be commended for bringing together an excellent collection (...) of essays and producing the first comprehensive volume that offers a coherent study of the relationship between Buddhist literature and philosophy. This book is an ambitious and praiseworthy project, which covers a wide range of Buddhist literary genres produced in India, Tibet, and East Asia over two millennia. As a whole, the volume invites the reader to reexamine a centuries-long binary division between the categories of literature and philosophy, which have been often approached in academic studies as mutually exclusive. It does so by demonstrating that in the context of Buddhism, philosophy and literature continuously converge, diminishing the overarching binary and broadening their scopes. Most contributions to this volume demonstrate that Buddhist philosophy as presented and enacted in Buddhist literature is not limited to what some would consider a "pure philosophy." The volume is divided into the two, mutually mirroring sections, with each section containing six chapters. Chapters forming the section one, "Buddhist Literature as Philosophy," aim at broadening our perspective about literary forms, such as tales, novels, hymns, and court poetry, which have not been usually explored as the means of articulating Buddhist philosophical views. Chapters grouped in the section "Buddhist Philosophy as Literature" focus on Buddhist literary theories as philosophy of language and introduce the Buddhist biographical and autobiographical genres characterized by practical philosophy to further challenge our preconceptions of what it is that constitutes literature and philosophy. While some contributors endeavor to demonstrate the presence of rational, analytical reasoning in unexpected literary forms, other contributors problematize a strict distinction between literature and philosophy as inapplicable to Buddhism, which is undeniably cross-disciplinary.The first two chapters in section one, authored by Amber Carpenter and Sarah Shaw respectively, draw examples from jātaka stories to show us how Buddhist ethical lessons work in the narrative tales of the Buddha's former births. These two chapters also draw our attention to an accessible and engaging, [End Page 1] narrative manner that presents the Bodhisattva's philosophical exercises to the audience, a manner that stands in contrast to the a priori reasoning characteristic of philosophical treatises. In the first chapter, titled "Transformative Vision: Coming to See the Buddha's Reality," Carpenter analyzes two jātaka stories--"Bodhi the Wandering Ascetic" and "The Man Without an Heir"--taken from Āryaśūra's Jātakamālā. In the first story, a renunciant Bodhi, while repudiating the king's ministers who are intent on disqualifying him as a king's advisor on morality, makes metaphysical claims regarding the nature of reality, causation, and the universe, and provides the reasons and arguments. According to Shaw, by offering an insight into the Buddhist worldview and morality, jātaka tales have a transformative power not only with regard to ethics but also in transforming the reader's vision of reality. In the chapter "Jātakas and the Abhidhamma: Practical Compassion and Kusala Citta," Shaw suggests that a reason why jātaka stories are rarely discussed seriously in the way that they were intended is their literary format based in narrative and mundane situations. Analyzing the concepts of momentariness and kusala citta ("virtuous consciousness") in these stories, Shaw shows that by communicating the technical and insight-based Buddhist doctrinal elements, jātaka tales significantly contribute to Buddhist practical ethics. The Pāli Javanahaṃsa-jātaka, a tale about the friendship between a goose and a king, introduces the reader to some of the most complex Buddhist ideas such as impermanence, momentariness, and mental states, expounded in the Abhidhamma in extraction. Through her analysis of the Kurudhamma-jātaka and Mahosaddha-jātaka, Shaw further shows the integration of narrative literature and Buddhist philosophical tenets, of Buddhist tales and the Abhidhamma, of the relationship between the intention and consciousness... (shrink)

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to (...) moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’. (shrink)

In the article, the main lines of the research and educational cooperation of the linguists of the Bashkir State University and the St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo are considered. The prospects of these contacts are determined by capabilities of joint development of the long-term research programs in comparative linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, which can be implement as collective monographs, Ph.D. theses, textbooks of the Russian and the Bulgarian languages, dictionaries (including the multilingual dictionaries). A program of (...) the double diplomas in the specialized training of undergraduates ‘Applied Slavic philology (translation study)‘ as a new form of the cooperation is also considered. (shrink)

What kind of subject is Politics? Is it a science, an art, a religion or a philosophy? Is the study of politics an independent subject—a subject in its own right—or is it simply a branch of some other and, presumably, superior subject? These questions require to be answered because there is obvious uncertainty at the moment about the nature and status of the study of politics. The uncertainty is shown by the fact that Politics goes under different names and is (...) associated with different subjects in different universities. Politics is sometimes called Political Philosophy and sometimes Political Science. Some universities confine the study of politics to History. Others make it a branch of Ethics. The latest tendency is to associate Politics and Economics and regard the economic as the most important of the relations of politics. Among the objections to the independence of Politics, one deserves to be noted. Politics, it is said, is an aspect of a total social situation which it shares with Ethics and Economics. Thus it is a mistake to try to disentangle the political factor and view it in itself. (shrink)

The Universe is One places the ancient synthesis of Stoicism, Platonism, Judaism, and Christianity in active dialogue with modern process science in order to conjoin science, philosophy, and theology into the human quest for meaning. Paul A. Olivier proposes a comprehensive theory of knowledge, which he expands into a theory of life, correlating modern process science and the western-Judeo-Christian heritage into a grand theory of the Universe. He brings together the ideas of influential thinkers from the world of science with (...) those from the world of New Testament studies. Olivier clearly explains concepts from diverse fields to construct a satisfying theory of knowledge and life. He accomplishes this through an examination of the dominance of polarity in all aspects of the universe, such as chaos and order, predictability and unpredictability. Through this complex blend of opposites Olivier develops his theory as an interaction of Word and Spirit that provides the Universe with everything necessary to account for its creation and ongoing evolution. The Universe continually creates and sustains itself out of its own internal necessity coupled paradoxically with the fluidity of its own inherent unpredictability. (shrink)

To provide basic health care services in rural areas is one of the major challenges for developing countries like Bangladesh because of lack of infrastructures and unavailability of qualified medical doctors in the villages. Telemedicine viewed as a new way of offering health care services that has the potential to overcome this problem. Author is a member of extended group at Dhaka University (DU) which has been developing telemedicine equipment and data acquisition software to promote telemedicine practice in Bangladesh. PC (...) based ECG equipment, Digital stethoscope, Digital microscope, Digital X-ray view box and some other essential medical equipment was developed for telemedicine services. The data acquisition software establishes an easy and appropriate patients to doctor interaction through a trained operator in a remote center that involve management and arrangement of consultation of a chosen and agreeing doctor by a patient. Upon establishing audio-visual connection between patient and doctor relevant physiological data from different diagnostic instruments will be uploaded securely in a dedicated web server which can be viewed real time using unique patient/doctor ID and password. Recently the Telemedicine group of DU and a local NGO named SAMAMA with support from Service innovation fund (SIF) of Prime Minister Office (PMO) of Bangladesh took the initiative to establish eight rural telemedicine centers and one expert center for the field trial of telemedicine in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical challenges of such health care system and our effort to overcome those problem before starting the field trial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise by Patrick RileySusanna GoodinPatrick Riley. Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 338. Cloth, $39.95.Leibniz’s political views are often downplayed, if not simply ignored, by philosophers focusing on his metaphysical accounts of substance and force. That Leibniz himself does not view these two areas as (...) distinct is forcefully argued in Patrick Riley’s detailed account of Leibniz’s theory of justice. Under Riley’s presentation, Leibniz’s definition of justice as the “charity of the wise” depends crucially on both his monadology and his theodicy. And his political maneuverings, particularly with France, are dominated by this unique definition of justice.Riley begins his argument by detailing Leibniz’s objections to Descartes’s voluntarism and Hobbes’s mechanistic view of human nature and the emphasis on power as the foundation of moral truths. The central Leibnizian theme to which Riley returns repeatedly is perfection. A perfect God does not act on whim or power but on reason. Monads are created with the freedom to strive toward perfection. Love, or charity, becomes perfect by becoming universal. Justice is not, as Hobbes claimed, that which is determined to be good for the whole by an absolute power, but a love or benevolence for the whole, striving through reason for the best. Wisdom is the heart of justice, not power. And for Leibniz, wisdom is inseparable from charity. God wills to actualize the best of all possible worlds out of love and wisdom, thus, wise charity.But Leibniz’s view of justice as wise charity is not without problems, most significantly the problem of freedom. In his first chapter, “Foundations,” Riley skillfully raises this problem in the context not only of Leibniz’s political stance on justice but also in the context of his metaphysics and theodicy. It is in the second chapter, “Monadology and Justice,” that Riley does the bulk of the work relating the metaphysics with the moral-political: “... on the knowledge of substance, and in consequence of the soul, depends the knowledge of virtue and of justice” (Leibniz, as quoted in Riley, 51). Political philosophy cannot be done correctly without first acquiring an adequate and proper account of substance, something the materialist Hobbes had failed to do. But because Leibniz has so closely linked his politics with his metaphysics, the perhaps insurmountable problem of freedom in his metaphysics hounds his politics. “If there are no autonomous persons with nonillusory ‘wills’, there cannot be ‘general benevolence’—for benevolence is just [End Page 470] ‘good willing’, and Leibniz invariably equates benevolentia with caritas sapientis. Without a certain kind of will, then, wise charity cannot serve as the heart of a justice which is more than sovereign-ordained law” (61). To prevent Hobbes from ruling the day, Leibniz must, as Riley correctly notes, devise a metaphysics which allows for freedom for both God and man.And here arises the one troubling aspect of Riley’s work. He addresses the problem of freedom in Leibniz’s metaphysics, but there is no discussion of the recent work done by such scholars as Robert Adams, whose book Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist makes significant contributions on exactly this topic. Regarding Leibniz’s serpentine defense of freedom, Riley does little more than bring up the problem and comment that Leibniz had a problem which, ultimately, he seemed unable to resolve. In fact, Riley shows little appreciation for the work done by mainstream scholars in the area of Leibniz’s metaphysics. If Riley’s work centered primarily on Leibniz’s political writings this might not matter, but given that the thrust of the first part of the book is to argue that Leibniz’s political theory is not merely compatible with his metaphysics but arises out of it, so that an understanding of Leibniz’s metaphysics is essential to grasping the logic of his political views, the absence of current scholarship on the metaphysics is troubling. References in footnotes confirm that Riley had read Adams’s book, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, which contains David Blumenfeld’s excellent... (shrink)

The authors ably demonstrate the value and relevance of sophisticated conceptual analysis in law. Such concepts as cause, reason, consequence, condition, opportunity, and explanation are carefully investigated. The use of the causal notions in the Anglo-American tradition of tort, contract, and criminal law, as well as in continental theories, is examined in detail. A book of importance which carries out English analysis in a subtle and exciting way. It is sure to be one of the lasting contributions of the recent (...) analytic movement.--A. P. D. M. (shrink)

One of the main arguments against interventionist views of special divine action is that God would not violate his own laws. But if intervention entails the breaking of natural law, what precisely is being broken? While the nature of the laws of nature has been widely explored by philosophers of science, important distinctions are often ignored in the science and religion literature. In this paper, I consider the three main approaches to laws: Humean anti-realism, supervenience on more fundamental aspects of (...) metaphysics, and nomological realism. The first denies that there is any metaphysical reality behind laws or causation. The second holds that laws supervene on capacities, dispositions, or counterfactuals. The third takes laws to be irreducible aspects of reality. The mechanics of special divine action and worries about intervention vary depending on which view of law one holds. In the end, I argue that early modern natural philosophers, who first introduced law-language for nature, largely had it right. Laws are not created entities or powers that act as intermediaries between God and nature; they are best understood as expressions of God’s will for nature. The outstanding question is whether such a view inevitably lands in occasionalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal ExpressionSarah K. Burgess and Stuart J. MurrayFor More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Adriana Cavarero. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 262. $65.00, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.Adriana Cavarero's most recent book, For More than One Voice, offers the reader a critique of Western metaphysics that challenges the hegemony of speech's relation (...) to thought within politics. Revisiting Aristotle's Politics, Cavarero examines the famous definition of man as "zoon logon echon"—usually translated as "rational animal." She is critical of the tradition that renders logos here as "reason" or "rationality," modeled on the abstract and disembodied Platonic idea. Reading the Politics alongside the Poetics, she brings politics into a distinctly rhetorical sphere, and therefore figures logos as "phone semantike." In this light, man is a "speaking animal," an animal who speaks with a voice (phone) that is meaningful (semantike—an adjectival form that qualifies the voice itself). Cavarero's argument is that voice and meaning—phonic and semantic—must be sharply distinguished. The history of Western philosophy, she contends, has effaced this vital difference and focused instead on speech as a unitary phenomenon in which the vocalic and the semantic are always already joined as meaningful signification. In this way, the singularity of the vocalic itself has been elided in favor of speech that strongly privileges meaning. She therefore wishes to deliver us from language, as it were, through a recuperation of the force of the vocalic, the acoustic, the resonant and sonorous auditory quality of phone.Absent in the history of Western philosophy, this sonorous aspect of the vocalic stands as a corrective to our logocentric metaphysical tradition that singularly values the visual over the acoustic, semantic content over vocal utterances, and an abstract, anonymous "what" over a particular, embodied "who." Cavarero claims that the vocalic is an "anti-metaphysical" force that exceeds and challenges signification. In other words, the vocalic immediately communicates the uniqueness of the speaker without recourse to the signifying content of his or her speech. The voice is essentially relational—a relation that is described as "the condition of every communication.... the communicability of the communicable, or the significance of signification" (29). Indeed, for Cavarero the voice is that which "precedes, generates, and exceeds verbal communication" [End Page 166] (29–30). In this way, remarkably, Cavarero refigures the voice as a presymbolic origin that is both temporally and ontologically prior to signification, as that which is a condition of possibility for signification, and as that which is never exhausted by any signifying speech act as such.The voice is the expression of one unique, embodied individual to another. This expression, a "reciprocal invocation" founded in the sonorous, rhythmic, and resonant materiality of the voice, constitutes a "duet," a musical exchange of voices in and through which individuals mutually invoke one another. Cavarero resists inscribing such a relation within the symbolic realm; yet for her this relation is a "wordless language" that takes place in the paradigmatic scene between mother and infant. Here, in this originary scene, there is not yet the movement of language or speech as such, but the rhythm and cadence of demand and response—the voices of mother and infant that invoke one another. Drawing on Hélène Cixous's and Julia Kristeva's well-known work on the maternal chora, Cavarero demonstrates that the cadence of the "la-la melody" exchanged between mother and infant "configure[s] a reciprocal dependence" (170) that takes a structural form in the movement between demand and response.For Cavarero, the "scene of infancy" enjoys a primacy: it is both ontologically and chronologically prior to the institution of language and law. The maternal chora is figured as that which invisibly underwrites what will be understood as the law of the father—a law that is said to mark the inauguration of language. But if the law of the father is rational and semantic, the maternal should not be conceived as simply irrational and pure sound. For Cavarero, the maternal vocalic demonstrates its own reason through its rhythmic and musical resonance... (shrink)

The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the 18th Century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to be between an object/construct's elements. As such, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as you can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for (...) beauty at the semantic level). By the 13th Century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterized as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the pythagorean theory of beauty recognize that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are lawful. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognize two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do. (shrink)

permits a sound and rigorously definable notion of ‘originating cause’ or causa causans—a type of transition event—of an outcome event. Mackie has famously suggested that causes form a family of ‘inus’ conditions, where an inus condition is ‘an insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition’. In this essay the needed concepts of BST theory are developed in detail, and it is then proved that the causae causantes of a given outcome event have exactly the structure of a (...) set of Mackie inus conditions. The proof requires the assumption that there is no EPR-like ‘funny business’. This seems enough to constitute a theory of ‘causation’ in at least one of its many senses. Introduction The cement of the universe Preliminaries 3.1 First definitions and postulates 3.2 Ontology: propositions 3.3 Ontology: initial events 3.4 Ontology: outcome events 3.5 Ontology: transition events 3.6 Propositional language applied to events Causae causantes 4.1 Causae causantes are basic primary transition events 4.2 Causae causantes of an outcome chain 4.3 No funny business Causae causantes and inns and inus conditions 5.1 Inns conditions of outcome chains: not quite 5.2 Inns conditions of outcome chains 5.3 Inns conditions of scattered outcome events 5.4 Inus conditions for disjunctive outcome events 5.5 Inns and inus conditions of transition events Counterfactual conditionals Appendix: Tense and modal connectives in BST. (shrink)

The democratic principle in its extreme form is the assertation that the mere fact of free birth is alone sufficient to constitute a claim to all offices. It is never the claim of a majority to rule, but it is the demand that every one, whether rich or poor, high- or low-born, shall be equally represented in the constitution. This is what Aristotle calls the principle of numerical equality.-from "Chapter VI: Democracy"One of the most renowned classical scholars of the turn (...) of the 20th century here offers a lucid and highly readable overview of a difficult and little understood aspect of Greek history: its public law, not just how it was structured but how it behaved in action. This 1896 book-perfect for university students, amateur historians, and readers of the history of the law-covers the full range of Greek legal development, from the origin of the city-state and the beginnings of the Greek monarchy to the social and political institutions of the far-flung Greek civilization to the rise of federalism and its long-term historical impact on the cultures that came after.British classical scholar A.H.J. GREENIDGE was a lecturer in ancient history at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is also the author of Roman Public and Private Law (1894), Legal Procedure in Cicero's Time (1901), and Roman Public Life (1901), among many other works of ancient history. (shrink)

This article defends the classical liberal view of human interactions that gives strong protection to associational freedom except in cases that involve the use of force or fraud or the exercise of monopoly power. That conception is at war with the modern antidiscrimination or human rights laws that operate in competitive markets in such vital areas as employment and housing, with respect to matters of race, sex, age, and increasingly, disability. The article further argues that using the “human rights” label (...) to boost the moral case for antidiscrimination laws gets matters exactly backwards, given that any program of forced association on one side of a status relationship (employer, not employee; landlord, not tenant) is inconsistent with any universal norm governing all individuals regardless of role in all associative arrangements. The articled also discusses the tensions that arise under current Supreme Court law, which protects associational freedom arising out of expressive activities (as in cases involving the NAACP or the Boy Scouts), but refuses to extend that protection to other forms of association, such as those involving persons with disabilities. The great vice of all these arrangements is that they cannot guarantee the stability of mandated win/lose relationships. The article further argues that a strong social consensus against discrimination is insufficient reason to coerce dissenters, given that holders of the dominant position can run their operations as they see fit even if others do otherwise. It closes with a short model human rights statute drafted in the classical liberal tradition that avoids the awkward line drawing and balancing that give rise to modern bureaucracies to enforce modern antidiscrimination laws. (shrink)

In his professional life, Richard Posner is addressed as inasmuch as he is Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Finally, he is a prolific author of books and articles in scholarly journals in which he expounds at length and with copious footnotes his particular views of jurisprudence and public policy. One of his frequent intellectual adversaries, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, wryly described (...) Judge Posner as. (shrink)

The action of social laws cannot be conceived of apart from the active role of the human subject, without the participation of the subjective factor in the historical process. This viewpoint seems to me to be the only correct one. It derives from the premise, postulated by Marxism, that people's social activity must be regarded as a mode of existence of social reality, the embodiment of the social form of movement of matter, and a mode of functioning of social laws (...) themselves. All social reality, considered as a whole, all so-called "humanized nature," preserves and reproduces itself only if it is embodied in living human activity and by means of it. For example, Marx observed that a machine taken out of the productive process ceases to be a productive force of society. He emphatically rejected the notion that the objective embodiments of the historical process could function and develop automatically, independently of people, and pointed out the dependence of their social functions on living human activity. All objective embodiments of the historical process are only intermediate links and aspects of a process in which individuals renew themselves as they renew the world created by them. (shrink)

During the last decade corporate reputation as one of the central efforts of corporate citizenship behavior has gained increasing attention in scholarly research, as has the way that reputation can serve as an instrument for business purposes. This poses the question of how such reputation will be achieved. To answer these questions this article examines Cicero’s considerations concerning the interrelation of honorableness and beneficialness made in his work ‘On Duties’. Based on Cicero’s understanding of universal natural law and his (...) idea that reputation derives solely from honorable behavior and the orientation in the common good, we show that also corporate reputation is achieved only if it is based primarily on ‘honorableness’, and that reputation is lost if financial interests override the intentions of honesty of a company. (shrink)

Kant’s formula of universal law (FUL) is standardly understood as a test of the moral permissibility of an agent’s maxim: maxims which pass the test are morally neutral, and so permissible, while those which do not are morally impermissible. In contrast, I argue that the FUL tests whether a maxim is the cause or determining ground of an action at all. According to Kant’s general account of causality, nothing can be a cause of some effect unless there is a (...) law-like relation between the putative cause and effect. Applied to the case of action, no maxim can be the cause of an agent’s action unless there is a law-like relation between maxims of that kind and actions of that kind. The special capacity to act according to maxims as law-like causes is what Kant calls a will; the basic constitutive principle of the will is a non-normative principle I call the categorical declarative. While the actions of a perfectly good will would be described by the categorical declarative alone, human action is determined not only by the causality of the will, but also by competing causes, namely those stemming from inclination. There is thus need for a causal test for putative maxims. The test contained in the FUL is meant to determine whether an action could be grounded solely on the agent’s maxim, or whether it requires a cause external to the will. This account permits one to build eventual distinctions concerning the morality of actions on prior and independent distinctions concerning their causality. (shrink)

Philosophical traditions often bear the seeds of their own destruction.Their seminal insights are achieved in part by ignoring or distorting certain aspects of human experience. Insights and mistakes grow from the same roots. In transitional periods, this dialectic leads to strange reversals in allegiance and to unexpected and even unnoticed shifts in philosophical doctrine. Classical empiricism presents an example of this when one shifts attention from its treatment of epistemological questions to problems of humanaction, or to the relation of knowledge (...) and action. The empiricist analysisof knowledge in terms of the succession and conjoining of ideas and impressions in the mind leaves the mind itself a passive spectator that undergoes its contents. On this view, the human subject lacks any distinctive spontaneity or power of initiative. The mind's internal processes are conceived ofon analogy with Newtonian mechanics and are distinguished by their law-likeregularity. The subject is not, and cannot conceive itself as being, a kindof agency. Historically, the consequences of this are evident in Berkeley's difficulties regarding ‘active spirit’, of which we have ‘notions’ but not perceptions, and in the often remarked upon disparities between Parts I and III of Hume's Treatise. (shrink)

Of silence, paradoxically, one can only speak. By virtue of the alliance that unites reason and language, the capacity to name and to address indeed obeys a certain desire to restrain excessive communication. Laughter, tears and silence are part of the expressive world: however, they attest to the impossible pitfall of words in the socializing function that we accord them. Of extreme sociality, of meaning that exceeds the bearable, the suitability and the commerce of ideas, the only thing that rises (...) to the surface of the perceptible is that emotional logic whose significations shatter every criterion of certitude and of truth on the real. Confronted with three forms of experience of the unspeakable, we ordinarily allow ourselves to lend credit to the spontaneity of the first two (laughter and tears), while the symbolic dimension of silence seems to derive from an invisible orchestration, from a rather simple calculation or from a more elaborate strategy. This difference in nature is essential, and no one would dream of equating what “can” not be said with what “should” not be said. Silence exists as a sort of constraint, interiorized at various levels of the personality, and thereby more social than psychological. Even the involuntary silence of the unknowing person can be codified: as a disciplined avowal or the politeness of the humble who neither tolerates nor imagines any escape from his embarrassment. If speech is born in the abandon of a burst of expressivity, in hilarity or in sobs, it expires in a law, no less severe than the one which endows phrases with semantic coherence. Such a rule thus manifests a universal character socially more affirmed than the multiple syntaxes that organize each linguistic patrimony. That muteness can also be subject to a particular form of apprenticeship shows how each process of socialization determines the price of the communicable and assigns a value to the unformulated. Without pretending to offer a strict typology of this phenomenon, I will distinguish five classes that are capable of comprising its collective aspects. (shrink)

Is freedom of research protected at the constitutional level? No obvious answer can be given to this question, as European and Northern American constitutional systems are not unequivocal and the topic has not been discussed deeply enough.Looking at the constitutions of some European and Northern American countries, it is possible to immediately note that there are essentially two ways to deal with freedom of scientific research. On the one hand, in Canada and in the US, constitutions have no specific provisions (...) to protect freedom of scientific research, with the result that such freedom ends up having to be protected as a specific aspect of the wider freedom of thought and expression . On the other hand, other countries’ constitutional systems, mainly European ones, expressly recognise freedom of research and teaching arts and science. For instance, article 5 of the German Constitution states that “Art and science, research and teaching are free”, article 33 of the Italian Constitution1i establishes that “The arts and sciences as well as their teaching are free” and article 59 of the Slovenian Constitution states that “Freedom of scientific research and artistic endeavor shall be guaranteed”.Within this second group, some constitutions limit their protection to the provision of freedom of scientific research, whereas other fundamental laws engage governments in promoting and supporting it. For example, the Italian Constitution, which states that “The Republic promotes cultural development and scientific and technical research” , the Spanish Constitution, according to which “public authorities shall promote science and scientific and technical research for the benefit of general interest” and, also, the Greek Constitution, whose article 16 establishes that art, science, research and their teaching are free, and their promotion is mandatory for the State.2 It …. (shrink)

The mathematical and physical aspects of the conformal symmetry of space-time and of physical laws are analyzed. In particular, the group classification of conformally flat space-times, the conformal compactifications of space-time, and the problem of imbedding of the flat space-time in global four-dimensional curved spaces with non-trivial topological and geometrical structure are discussed in detail. The wave equations on the compactified space-times are analyzed also, and the set of their elementary solutions constructed. Finally, the implications of global compactified space-times for (...) cosmology are discussed. It is argued that the recent discovery of periodic structure of matter distribution on large distances strongly suggests that the global cosmological space-time should be close. Next we analyze the inflation scalar field in the inflationary model of universe evolution considered on the spatially compact Robertson-Walker space-time. It is shown that the energy distribution in this model is periodic and the periods and density decrease with increasing distance, in striking agreement with experimental data. Our model of the universe also provides a definite predictions for the energy distribution, polar and azimuthal, considered as a function of angles θ and φ. These predictions should be tested with the new astronomical data. (shrink)

The Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria went through a process of restructuring, resulting in the amalgamation of Dogmatics, Christian Ethics, Church History and Church Polity into one department under the name ‘Systematic and Historical Theology’. This contribution reflects only on the one aspect, namely Historical Theology. The point is made that a name change could not mean ‘business as usual’, but should be regarded as an opportunity to re-imagine the content and structure of Historical Theology. This (...) is not an easy task. This contribution reflects on Historical Theology as theological discipline, the teaching content and how it could be relevant in Africa in the 21st century. It also has implications for restructuring the curriculum. (shrink)

Since the emergence of computing as a mode of investigation in the sciences, computational approaches have revolutionised many fields of inquiry. Recently in philosophy, the question has begun rendering bit by bit—could computation be considered a deeper fundamental building block to all of reality? This paper proposes a continuum computing construct, predicated on a set of core computational principles: computability, discretisation, stability and optimisation. The construct is applied to the set of most fundamental physical laws, in the form of non-relativistic (...) conservation equations which underpin our governing physics. The discretisation approach divides all of space into a mesh of discrete computational cells, and evolution of data in those cells must obey pre-defined stability conditions from established continuum computing theory, namely, the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition. Evolving cell-state data in a manner which logically optimises computational efficiency, combined with the defined stability condition, the construct derives a central coupling of space, time, and the fastest speed of information propagation. This coupling formed at the lowest level by the computing construct, naturally and inherently produces aspects of special relativity and general relativity at the macroscale. This paper therefore proposes a new explanation of why the nature of space and time may be fused, and explores simple emergent congruities with relativity. The theory invites us to reverse the philosophical premise of the original Simulation Argument. This argument currently leads us to consider: how might all of the observed physics of our reality be reproduced computationally in a simulation of our existence? This work asks instead: could foundations of the physics of our universe—namely spacetime coupling—emerge inherently, and necessarily, from fundamental principles of computation? (shrink)

Causation is defined as a relation between facts: C causes E if and only if C and E are nomologically independent facts and C is a necessary part of a nomologically sufficient condition for E. The analysis is applied to problems of overdetermination, preemption, trumping, intransitivity, switching, and double prevention. Preventing and allowing are defined and distinguished from causing. The analysis explains the direction of causation in terms of the logical form of dynamic laws. Even in a universe (...) that is deterministic in both temporal directions, not every fact must have a cause and present facts may have no future causes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decision-Making as a Broader ConceptJacinta O. A. Tan (bio), Anne Stewart (bio), and Tony Hope (bio)KeywordsCompetence, decision-making, capacity, anorexia nervosa, autonomy, values, identityWe thank Demian Whiting for the thoughtful critique of aspects of our paper (Tan et al. 2006a). A primary aim of our research was to provide empirical grounds on which to stimulate discussion about the nature of decision-making capacity (DMC). Whiting criticizes in particular the concept of (...) 'pathological values' that we suggested might be relevant in the assessment of DMC and in the related issue of deciding when a patient's refusal of beneficial treatment should be overridden.Whiting's central concern is with DMC. Whiting argues that the absence of pathological values should not be a criterion for DMC. We are unclear whether he is also arguing that pathological values do not provide a reason of any kind for overriding treatment refusal. At the end of the paper he writes: "we cannot justify compulsory treatment of patients who have pathological values... on the grounds that these patients lack DMC" (2009, XX). This seems to leave open the possibility that we may be able to justify compulsory treatment of patients who have pathological values on grounds other than that they lack DMC. As we wrote in our response to the discussants of our original paper, "The primary issue for us is whether the reasons for refusal to which we draw attention provide grounds for overriding refusal, and if they do how they can be characterized in such a way as to avoid the ever-present danger of simply overriding autonomy in a patient's best interests" (Tan et al. 2006b, 300).In deciding on whether to use compulsory treatment, there are other relevant factors that may need to be considered, such as the seriousness of the decision, which determines the threshold for competence. However, in this response we consider three issues. First, we argue that the current concept of DMC is by no means so clear cut or generally agreed upon as Whiting implies, and that some of the lack of clarity relates to pathological values. Second, that the concept of DMC is itself dependent on accounts of autonomy, and that it is plausible that pathological values can affect autonomy. Third, we directly consider the question of whether a coherent account of pathological values might be given based on a concept of authenticity.The Current Criteria for DMCWhiting argues that the current criteria for DMC are correct and that an additional criterion along the lines of absence of pathological values should not be added. This argument assumes that there is a clear and agreed understanding of the current criteria. We believe this is not the case for three reasons.(i) Whiting begins his account of DMC by saying that it is normally taken to include: "(1) [End Page 345] understanding (and appreciation)" (2009, 341). Already there is an area of dispute, and the use of parentheses reflects this. The concept of 'appreciation' was developed by Grisso and Applebaum (Grisso, Appelbaum, and Hill-Fotouhi 1997). It is not included in either English common law development, for example (ReC), nor in the criteria specified in the Mental Capacity Act 2005. More important, Grisso and Appelbaum in their comment on our original paper (2006) argue that our work advances thinking about 'appreciation' rather than requiring that we add new elements. The implication is that they believe that what we have called pathological values are relevant to the assessment of capacity and are already included in an account of capacity that incorporates the criterion of 'appreciation.' In our response, we argued that pathological values are not entirely captured within the account of appreciation that Grisso and Appelbaum had previously given. We do not want to revisit that issue here, but the point of relevance is that on one view (that of Grisso and Appelbaum) pathological values are already included in the current criteria for DMC as part of the concept of appreciation, whereas on Whiting's view they are not.(ii) Even if there were agreement over the wording and concepts relevant to DMC there is a further important issue: how are those concepts... (shrink)

In my dissertation, I develop the idea that Nietzsche's perspectivism constitutes a thesis on subjectivity, i.e., a thesis that asserts the indeterminate nature of both reality and the issue of human significance. Simply put, I contend that Nietzsche's perspectivism connotes a broad ranging anti-foundationalism that denies not only the reality of a fixed world of being, but also the idea that human significance is objectively defined in terms of a universal human ideal. ;In addition, I also argue that although (...) Nietzsche heralds the idea of subjectivity, in so far as he develops his perspectivism, he is himself unable to come to terms with it. More precisely, I contend that rather than overcoming a psychological need for objectivity, Nietzsche satiates this need by developing a naturalized account of existence, one that he ultimately appeals to as a means of justifying his own peculiar conception of human significance. ;Structurally, the insights of this project emerge as a consequence of three different discussions. The first is a preliminary discussion that sets the stage for an historical treatment of Nietzsche's perspectivism. Highlighting the fact that much of the contemporary focus on Nietzsche's perspectivism is motivated by a desire to establish the overall consistency of his thought, this first discussion explores the character and shortcomings of the conservative attempt to interpret Nietzsche's philosophy as wholly committed to truth and the radical attempt to interpret it as a complete abandonment of truth. ;Concentrating exclusively on the historical development of Nietzsche's perspectivism, the second discussion focuses on the shift from what first emerges as a very conservative thesis concerning the structure of cognition and the possibility of knowledge to what later emerges as a very radical and broad ranging anti-foundationalism. Highlighting the tension between the pluralistic implications of this perspectivism and the dogmatic nature of many other aspects of Nietzsche's thought, the third discussion explores the psychological underpinnings of Nietzsche's philosophical inconsistency. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

The article offers a review and analysis of the discussion on the principle of universalizability at its initial stage. The author determines the theoretical roots and key points of the discussion and reveals the directions of controversy and the position of researchers. In particular, the problem field depends on the divergence of the ethical and logical aspects of the principle of universalizability. As a result, two areas of discussion are formed: 1) the search for an ethical interpretation of the principle (...) of universalizability, 2) an analysis of the principle of universalizability in its relation to the ethical idea of the action. The author proposes the semantic models of the principle of universalizability designed to turn it into a substantive moral principle. These models are based on ideas: a) impartiality, b) justice, c) equality. The models of harmonization of universal normativity and moral experience, law and action are designed to protect the idea of universalizability from accusations of formalism and dogmatism. The grounds and vulnerabilities of the proposed semantic models of the principle of universalizability are examined and the possibility of harmonizing law and action is analyzed. The understanding of universalizability in analytic philosophy is metaphysical. Within the limits of the metaphysical understanding of universality, the problem of harmonizing the universal law and the idea of individuality cannot be solved. A possible way of solving the problem is an appeal to such a concept of universality in which the idea of universality can be reconciled with the idea of the individual freedom. (shrink)

The article outlines some aspects of the civil law in Lithuania, an Eastern European country, which underwent an essential transformation in the last decades. The author outlines the development of the Lithuanian civil law from the oldest written sources up to the adoption of the new Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania in 2000. The author is critical about the denomination of Lithuania as a “new” state and draws attention to the history of Lithuanian law, which spans hundreds of (...) years. The article emphasizes the continuity of the legal tradition and the heterogeneity of law – the coexisting of several legal systems in the territory of one state. The article discusses the role of Roman Law in the legal system of Lithuania. Even though Roman Law has never been applied in Lithuania, the author argues that it nevertheless had an indirect influence on Lithuanian private law. Roman Law and Canonical Law were among the main sources while drafting the three codified acts, the Statutes of Lithuania, in 1529, 1566 and 1588. The knowledge of Roman Law acquired by lawyers at universities in other European countries was transmitted through drafting of the laws and the jurisdictional and administrative practices. (shrink)