The epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and theology of Sankhya, one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy.

La nature du projet de Danielle Lories est exposée clairement dans les premières pages de l’ouvrage. L’auteure situe les origines de son entreprise dans la volonté d’affronter la difficulté que présente la notion de «sens commun», aux paragraphes 18, 22 et 40 de la Critique de la faculté de juger de Kant, mais aussi le propos de Hannah Arendt tiré de «La crise de la culture» qu’elle cite en page 2, sur la jonction des sens communs kantien et aristotélicien. Ce (...) qui préoccupe essentiellement l’auteure, dans la pers-pective d’une pensée de la «spécificité du jugement praxique», est ici la façon dont s’articulent le sens commun en tant qu’unification de l’expérience sensorielle par-delà la diversité des cinq sens, et le sens communautaire en vertu duquel nous communions dans une même appréhension du réel, la constitution d’un rapport au réel étant d’abord affaire de sens: «Chez Arendt, tout se passe comme si le partage des choses perçues avec autrui et donc leur réalité “objective” était le prolongement naturel du partage d’une même chose perçue par nos divers sens». En arrière-plan de l’entreprise figure un intérêt pour les rapports entre jugements pratique et esthétique. L’auteure se trouve amenée à traiter d’Aristote, et entend montrer que si chez lui le sens commun du De anima et des Parva naturalia est bien un sens global du réel, il n’a guère encore cette dimension communautaire que présente en revanche la φρόνησισ, «excellence du jugement pratique et excellence politique», laquelle φρόνησισ se trouve en continuité avec la discrimination perceptive unitaire, dans la mesure où pour l’une comme pour l’autre, l’objet est le particulier du monde réel perçu. Danielle Lories est également conduite à examiner si, entre le livre VI de l’Éthique à Nicomaque, d’une part, et la Critique de la faculté de juger d’autre part, il n’y a «rien qui vaille mention». Ayant travaillé sur Shaftesbury, un des pères britanniques de la philosophie du sens commun, sous l’espèce notamment du sens moral, par ailleurs précurseur du désintéressement esthétique kantien, et enfin lecteur d’Épictète, l’auteure se trouve orientée dans la direction de sa source stoïcienne. De là cette fois, malgré l’obstacle apparent que constitue le fait pour le stoïcisme de s’apparenter davantage au platonisme qu’à l’aristotélisme en concevant la φρόνησισ comme une science et en l’identifiant à la σοφία, tout en faisant en outre à peu près silence sur l’αἴσθησισ κοινή, l’idée d’«étudier l’éventuel apport du stoïcisme — ancien — à l’analyse du jugement pratique — celui du phronimos au sens où l’entendait Aristote», la thèse étant que la marque du stoïcisme dans l’histoire de la pensée occidentale du jugement pratique «consiste à faire converger dans ce jugement plusieurs formes de “sens commun” dont certaines sont dérivées de l’aisthèsis koinè ou encore de la phronèsis aristotéliciennes». (shrink)

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

In De anima, III, Aristotele studia tre operazioni sensibili : percezione dei sensibili comuni, appercezione, discriminazione, cui la critica si riferisce come alla teoria del ‘senso comune’, identificando la αἴσθησις κοινή del De anima con la κοινὴ δύναμις dei Parva naturalia. Ma le due espressioni denotano aspetti ben diversi : la prima indica una capacità posteriore alla divisione della percezione nei cinque sensi, mentre la seconda è una capacità anteriore e radicale della percezione.

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the explanatory benefits (...) of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

Esta obra contribuye al homenaje que la Universitat de València rindió al profesor Amartya Kumar Sen con motivo de su investidura como Doctor Honoris Causa. La cuidada selección de artículos preparada por el profesor Casas Pardo, precedida de un estudio introductorio sobre su obra, recoge las aportaciones más importantes, originales y creativas del Dr. Sen a la economía, la ética y al pensamiento social en general.

Gary Becker and others have done important work to broaden the content of self interest, but have not departed from seeing rationality in terms of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. One reason why committed behavior is important is that a person can have good reason to pursue objectives other than self interest maximization (no matter how broadly it is construed). Indeed, one can also follow rules of behavior that go beyond the pursuit of one's own goals, even if the goals (...) include non-self-interested concerns. By living in a society, one develops possible reasons for considering other people's goals as well, which takes one beyond an exclusive concentration on one's own goals, not to mention the single-minded pursuit of one's own self interest. The recognition of other people's goals may be a part of rational thought. If rational behavior may depart from the relentless pursuit of one's own goals, commitment has to be important in a theory of rationality. Furthermore, seeing the role of commitment in human behavior can have explanatory importance in allowing us to understand behavior patterns that are hard to fit into the narrow format of contemporary rational choice theory. Commitment is, thus, important both for practical reason and for causal explanation. (shrink)

I am embarrassed at being placed in the dizzying company of one of the truly great thinkers in the world. The similarities between Mill's ideas and mine partly reflect, of course, his influence on my thinking. But I also discuss some difficulties in taking Mill's whole theory without modification, since there are internal tensions within it. In a paper I published in 1967, I tried to discuss how Mill's willingness to hold on to some contrary positions depended on the nature (...) of his empirical reading of the world. I draw on that diagnosis in commenting on some of the articles here. There are some serious issues of misinterpretation in one of the articles, which I try to clarify. I also comment on Arrow's interpretation of what is involved in the idea of autonomy and on his own way of assessing freedom, and acknowledge the seriousness of the questions he raises about the value of freedom in normative political philosophy. (shrink)

Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...) for a mnemonic simulation thereof. We call our analysis the Sequence Analysis of Episodic Memory since episodes will be analyzed in terms of sequences of events. Our philosophical analysis of episodic memory is driven and supported by experimental results from psychology and neuroscience. We discuss selected experimental results that provide exemplary evidence for uniform causal mechanisms underlying the properties of episodic memory and argue that episodic memory is a natural kind. The argumentation proceeds along three cornerstones: First, psychological evidence suggests that a violation of any of the proposed conditions for episodic memory amounts to a deficiency of episodic memory and no form of memory or cognitive process but episodic memory fulfills them. Second, empirical results support a claim that the principal anatomical substrate of episodic memory is the hippocampus. Finally, we can pin down causal mechanisms onto neural activities in the hippocampus to explain the psychological states and processes constituting episodic memory. (shrink)

In an interesting letter to Anna George, the daughter of Henry George, Bernard Shaw wrote: “Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me”. I am not able to determine what making a man of Bernard Shaw would exactly consist of, but it is clear that the kind of moral and social problems with which Shaw was deeply concerned could (...) not be sensibly pursued without examining their economic aspects. For example, the claims of property rights, which some would defend and some would dispute, are not just matters of basic moral belief that could not possibly be influenced one way or the other by any empirical arguments. They call for sensitive moral analysis responsive to empirical realities, including economic ones. (shrink)

We live in a world in which the idea of human rights is persistently invoked. However, despite the tremendous appeal of the idea of human rights, it is also seen by many as lacking in foundation. I have argued, particularly in my book The Idea of Justice, that human rights are best seen as articulations of commitments in social ethics, comparable to — but very different from — accepting utilitarian reasoning. Like other ethical tenets, human rights can, of course, be (...) disputed, but the claim is that they will survive open and informed scrutiny.This view contrasts with seeing human rights in primarily legal terms, either as consequences of humane legislation, or as precursors of legal rights, or as pointing towards what should ideally be legal rights. Human rights may well be reflected in legislation, may inspire legislation, and may even serve, in many circumstances, as ideals that demand legislative attention. However, these are ‘further facts’— not the defining characteristics of human rights. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

Enthält: "Historisches Denken als Trauerarbeit - Jacob Burckhardts Antwort auf eine Frage unserer Zeit" (S. 73-95).

Aphoristic work on the fundamentals of Nyaya philosophy with classical Sanskrit commentaries; critical edition with exhaustive introduction.

Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beiträge stellen einen interdisziplinären Zusammenhang her, der eine komplexe Perspektive auf das Thema "Geschichtsbewusstsein" eröffnet. Es geht hier um das Ensemble mentaler Operationen, die das Geschichtsbewusstsein als zentrales Phänomen menschlicher Subjektivität ausmachen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen seine kulturellen Funktionen zur Orientierung der menschlichen Lebenspraxis. Psychologische, linguistische und geschichtliche Analysen verbinden sich mit theoretischen Entwürfen, die die Leistung der Zeitdeutung und Identitätsbildung umfassend explizieren. Die theoretischen Analysen des Bewusstseins von Geschichte stehen jedoch nicht allein, sondern werden auf (...) konkrete Phänomene und auf systematisch angelegte empirische Untersuchungen bezogen. (shrink)

This paper addresses the doubts voiced by Wigner about the physical relevance of the concept of geometrical points by exploiting some facts known to all but honored by none: Almost all real numbers are transcendental; the explicit representation of any one will require an infinite amount of physical resources. An instrument devised to measure a continuous real variable will need a continuum of internal states to achieve perfect resolution. Consequently, a laboratory instrument for measuring a continuous variable in a finite (...) time can report only a finite number of values, each of which is constrained to be a rational number. It does not matter whether the variable is classical or quantum-mechanical. Now, in von Neumann’s measurement theory (von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, [1955]), an operator A with a continuous spectrum—which has no eigenvectors—cannot be measured, but it can be approximated by operators with discrete spectra which are measurable. The measurable approximant F(A) is not canonically determined; it has to be chosen by the experimentalist. It is argued that this operator can always be chosen in such a way that Sewell’s results (Sewell in Rep. Math. Phys. 56: 271, [2005]; Sewell, Lecture given at the J.T. Lewis Memorial Conference, Dublin, [2005]) on the measurement of a hermitian operator on a finite-dimensional vector space (described in Sect. 3.2) constitute an adequate resolution of the measurement problem in this theory. From this follows our major conclusion, which is that the notion of a geometrical point is as meaningful in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics as it is in classical physics. It is necessary to be sensitive to the fact that there is a gap between theoretical and experimental physics, which reveals itself tellingly as an error inherent in the measurement of a continuous variable. (shrink)

We propose that rapid eye movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep contribute differently to the formation of episodic memories. REM sleep is important for building up invariant object representations that eventually recur to gamma-band oscillations in the neocortex. In contrast, slow-wave sleep is more directly involved in the consolidation of episodic memories through replay of sequential neural activity in hippocampal place cells.

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Based on the 1972 Radcliffe Lectures, this book presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.