This paper defends a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics in the Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics as a radical conventionalist one, whereby our agreement about the particular case is constitutive of our mathematical practice and ‘the logical necessity of any statement is a direct expression of a convention’ (Dummett 1959, p. 329). -/- On this view, mathematical truths are conceptual truths and our practices determine directly for each mathematical proposition individually whether it is true or false. Mathematical truths (...) are thus not consequences of a prior adoption of a convention or rules as orthodox conventionalism has it. -/- The goal of the paper is not merely exegetical, however, and argues that radical conventionalism can withstand some of the most difficult objections that have been brought forward against it, including those of Dummett himself, and thus that radical conventionalism has been prematurely excluded from consideration by philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering our daily lives in the form of driverless cars, automated online assistants and virtual reality experiences. In so doing, AI has already substituted human employment in areas that were previously thought to be uncomputerizable. Based on current trends, the technological displacement of labor is predicted to be significant in the future – if left unchecked this will lead to catastrophic societal unemployment levels. This paper presents a means to mitigate future technological unemployment through the introduction (...) of a Basic Income scheme, accompanied by reforms in school curricula and retraining programs. Our proposal argues that such a scheme can be funded by a special tax on those industries that make use of robotic labour; it includes a practical roadmap that would see a government take this proposal from the conceptual phase and implement it nationwide in the span of one decade. (shrink)

Stimulating discussion of the fundamental concepts we employ in every day consideration of moral questions for the general reader.

Even a morally good practical agent does not act solely from the recog- nition of the abstract demands of moral duty. Often, she acts to satisfy desires for particular ends that are not intrinsically moral. But if freedom, as Kant claims, consists in acting from universal principles one adopts from respect for the moral law, how can agents freely act to satisfy desires for particular ends? The standard answer to this question, the so-called Incorporation Thesis, is, I argue, unsatisfactory both (...) as an interpretation of Kant and on philosophical grounds. I propose instead that, for Kant, the capacity to act freely for the sake of a particular, non-intrinsically moral end is not exhausted by the ability to step back, reflect and decide whether a desire is or can provide a reason to act. Rather, Kant shows, the place for the pursuit of particular ends is determined by practically rational agents’ spontaneous constitution of their moral character, whereby they subordi- nate the pursuit of material, particular ends to the pursuit of formal, moral ones or vice versa. (shrink)

Opponents of abortion sometimes hold that it is impermissible because fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. But miscarriage, which ends up to 89 % of pregnancies, is much deadlier than abortion. That means that if opponents of abortion are right, then miscarriage is the biggest public-health crisis of our time. Yet they pay hardly any attention to miscarriage, especially very early miscarriage. Attempts to resolve this inconsistency by adverting to the distinction between killing and letting die or to (...) the difficulty of preventing miscarriage fail, leaving a dilemma. Opponents of abortion should either advocate a substantial shift in our political and medical priorities or else give up the view that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. (shrink)

Short-circuit evaluation denotes the semantics of propositional connectives in which the second argument is evaluated only if the first argument does not suffice to determine the value of the expression. Free short-circuit logic is the equational logic in which compound statements are evaluated from left to right, while atomic evaluations are not memorised throughout the evaluation, i.e. evaluations of distinct occurrences of an atom in a compound statement may yield different truth values. We provide a simple semantics for free short-circuit (...) logic and an independent axiomatisation. Finally, we discuss evaluation strategies, some other SCLs, and side effects. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical re-assessment of the thought of Ernst Bloch, best-known for his groundbreaking study The Principle of Hope and one of the most significant European thinkers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It explores Bloch's life, work and reception; his debt to Marx and Hegel; his central concepts of hope and utopia; his affinities with philosophers such as Gramsci and Zizek; and his radical reframing of our understanding of history, society and culture. Above all, this volume (...) examines the relevance of Bloch's ideas today, in a world still shot through with economic inequality and social injustice. Contributors are: Agata Bielik-Robson, Ivan Boldyrev, Henk de Berg, Sam Dolbear, Vincent Geoghegan, Holger Glinka, Loren Goldman, Douglas Kellner, Cat Moir, Jan Rehmann, Nina Rismal, Johan Siebers, and Peter Thompson. (shrink)

At the outset of _Marx for Cats_, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have (...) long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Einleitung, mittelhochdeutscher Text -- Bd. 2. Lateinische Quellen.

Originally known for his groundbreaking work in literary studies, the Bulgarian-born French scholar Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) was one of the world's foremost cultural theorists. His interventions cover an astounding range of topics, from narratology to ethics, from painting to politics, and from the Enlightenment to current affairs. Written by an international team of experts, this volume - the first-ever comprehensive examination of Todorov as a cultural critic - discusses the crucial elements of his work as well as his place in (...) European thought. (shrink)

Human emotions guide verbal and non-verbal behaviour during social encounters. During public performances, performers’ emotions can be affected directly by an audience’s attitude. The valence of the emotional state (positive or negative) of a broad range of animal species is known to be associated with a body and visual orientation laterality bias. Here, we evaluated the influence of an audience’s attitude on professional actors’ head orientation and gaze direction during two theatrical performances with controlled observers’ reactions (Hostile vs Friendly audience). (...) First, our speech fluency analysis confirmed that an audience’s attitude influenced actors’ emotions. Second, we found that, whereas actors oriented more their head to the left (i.e. Right Hemisphere Bias) when the audience was hostile, they gazed more straight ahead at Friendly spectators. These results are in accordance with the Valence-Specific Hypothesis that proposes that processing stimuli with negative valences involves the right hemisphere (i.e. left eye) more than the left hemisphere. (shrink)

Human emotions guide verbal and non-verbal behaviour during social encounters. During public performances, performers’ emotions can be affected directly by an audience’s attitude. The valence of the emotional state (positive or negative) of a broad range of animal species is known to be associated with a body and visual orientation laterality bias. Here, we evaluated the influence of an audience’s attitude on professional actors’ head orientation and gaze direction during two theatrical performances with controlled observers’ reactions (Hostile vs Friendly audience). (...) First, our speech fluency analysis confirmed that an audience’s attitude influenced actors’ emotions. Second, we found that, whereas actors oriented more their head to the left (i.e. Right Hemisphere Bias) when the audience was hostile, they gazed more straight ahead at Friendly spectators. These results are in accordance with the Valence-Specific Hypothesis that proposes that processing stimuli with negative valences involves the right hemisphere (i.e. left eye) more than the left hemisphere. (shrink)

IntroductionAlthough the motor signs of Parkinson’s disease are well defined, nonmotor symptoms, including higher-level language deficits, have also been shown to be frequent in patients with PD. In the present study, we used a lexical decision task to find out whether access to the mental lexicon is impaired in patients with PD, and whether task performance is affected by bradykinesia.Materials and MethodsParticipants were 34 nondemented patients with PD, either without medication or under optimum medication. A total of 19 age-matched control (...) volunteers were also recruited. We recorded reaction times to the LDT and a simple RT task. In each task, stimuli were either visual or auditory. Statistical analyses consisted of repeated-measures analyses of variance and Tukey’s HSD post hoc tests.ResultsIn the LDT, participants with PD both off and on medication exhibited intact access to the mental lexicon in both modalities. In the visual modality, patients off medication were just as fast as controls when identifying real words, but slower when identifying pseudowords. In the visual modality of the control task, RTs for pseudowords were significantly longer for PD patients off medication than for controls, revealing an unexpected but significant lexicality effect in patients that was not observed in the auditory modality. Performances of patients on medication did not differ from those of age-matched controls.DiscussionMotor execution was not slowed in patients with PD either off or on medication, in comparison with controls. Regarding lexical access, patients off medication seemed to have difficulty inhibiting a cognitive-linguistic process when it was not required, and exhibit a specific pseudoword processing deficit in the LDT, which may have been related to impaired lateral word inhibition within the mental lexicon. These deficits seemed to be compensated by medication. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that women must be independent citizens, but that they cannot be that unless they fulfill certain duties as mothers. This is problematic in a number of ways, as argued by Laura Brace in a 2000 article. However, I argue that if we understand Wollstonecraft's concept of independence in a republican, rather than a liberal context, and at the same time pay close attention to her discussion of motherhood, a feminist reading of Wollstonecraft is not only possible but (...) enriching. I will attempt to show, in particular, that the seeds of a feminist argument for co-parenting are to be found in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

The first book that presents key original texts from the modern German philosophical tradition to English-language students and scholars of German, with introductions, commentaries, and annotations that make them accessible.

Jerry Fodor and Ernie LePore argue against inferential role semantics on the grounds that either it relies on an analytic/synthetic distinction vulnerable to Quinean objections, or else it leads to a variety of meaning holism frought with absurd consequences. However, the slide from semantic atomism to meaning holism might be prevented by distinctions not affected by Quine's arguments against analyticity; and the absurd consequences Fodor and LePore attribute to meaning holism obtain only on an implausible construal of inferential roles.

I. Pragmatismus und Neukantianismus Marc Rölli: Die Durchquerung des Absoluten. Zur Hegel-Rezeption John Deweys Wolfgang Bonsiepen: Hegel und der Neukantianismus Matthias Wunsch: Phänomenologie des Symbolischen? Die Hegelrezeption Ernst Cassirers II. Phänomenologie - Ontologie - Lebensphilosophie Annette Sell: Das Geheimnis des Anfangs. Die Aufnahme des Hegelschen Anfangsbegriffs in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers Hans-Ulrich Lessing: Hegel und Helmuth Plessner: Die verpaßte Rezeption Walter Jaeschke: Der Geist und sein Sein. Nicolai Hartmann auf Hegelschen Wegen Holger Glinka: Aus Phänomenologie mach Dialektik. Jean-Paul Sartres Anverwandlung (...) Hegels III. Marxistische Tradition und kritische Theorie Andreas Arndt: Lenin liest Hegel Daniel Althof: Das "Geklapper der Triplizität" - Adornos Hegelrezeption Christoph J. Bauer: Mit Hegel gegen den 'Positivismus' - mit Hegel zum 'Wesen des Menschen'. Herbert Marcuses Interpretation der Hegelschen Urteilslehre IV. Postmoderne und Gegenwart Karin de Boer: Differenz: zwischen Hegel und Derrida Robert B. Pippin: Brandoms Hegel. (shrink)

L ’ histoire du droit de la guerre est marquée par trois temps principaux.Ainsi, de la période antique jusqu ’ au XIX e siècle se déploie la doctrine du justum bellum,visant à moraliser la guerre. Ensuite, au XIX e siècle, l ’ affirmation des souverainetésouvre la porte à la liberté d ’ user de la guerre comme instrument de politique internationale. Enfin, au terme de la Première Guerre mondiale, la volonté d ’ apporter une réponsenormative au recours à la force (...) s ’ est fait jour, donnant naissance au jus ad bellum. Cetteévolution juridique fut accompagnée d ’ une évolution sémantique qui, au XXI e siècle,conduira à une curieuse inversion conceptuelle. (shrink)

Dr André Berge : médecin et psychanalyste, est directeur médical du Centre psycho-pédagogique Claude Bernard. Les données traditionnelles, toutes les valeurs, tous les principes sont discutés et sans cesse remis en cause. Et pourtant, personne ne saurait échapper à la nécessité d’adopter dans l’existence une ligne de conduite — c’est-à-dire une morale — sous peine de sombrer dans l’incohérence. Mais l’homme, s’il a besoin d’une morale, n’en est pas moins enclin à l’utiliser pour s’écraser lui-même et tend parfois à transformer (...) cet instrument en une arme qu’il lui arrive de retourner contre sa propre personne. C’est cela qu’il s’agit d’empêcher. Ce que veut établir cet ouvrage, ce sont les bases d’une morale psychologique tendant à remédier au désarroi des esprits et à contribuer à l’avènement d’un nouvel humanisme. (shrink)

Gilbert (2000) examined the issue of collective intentionality in science. Her paper consisted of a conceptual analysis of the negative role of collective belief, consensus, and joint commitment in science, with a brief discussion of a case study investigated by Thagard (1998a, 1998b). I argue that Gilbert's concepts have to be refined to be empirically more relevant. Specifically, I distinguish between different kinds of joint commitments. I base my analysis on a close examination of Thagard's example, the discovery of Helicobacter (...) pylori, and two other historical cases involving the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics and the Austrian school of economics. I also argue that it is difficult to fulfill the condition of common knowledge, even in Gilbert's weak sense. I conclude by raising serious doubts about the very possibility of a certain type of joint commitment, which I refer to as an implicit joint commitment. (shrink)