_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 170 - 193 Boethius identifies beings that _are in_ a subject with what the Scholastics called predicamental accident, and predication by accident with the predication of what _is in_ a subject. The first of these questionable assimilations went on to become terminology commonly accepted by Scholastics of all eras. On the other hand, the second, which seems quite consistent with the thinking of Aristotle, was only admitted with many reservations, probably because (...) of the bewildering claims of Aristotle in _Cat._ 5, 2a27-34 about the predication of what _is in_ the subject. In what follows I will try to show how these phrases, properly understood, are consistent with the idea that what _is in_ the subject is said by accident of the substance, although they implicate a difficulty poorly resolved by Boethius himself and those who followed him on this point, of whom I will only mention by way of example some Scholastics from the 16th century. (shrink)

Initiated by Robert Wesson, _Evolution and Human Values_ is a collection of newly written essays designed to bring interdisciplinary insight to that area of thought where human evolution intersects with human values. The disciplines brought to bear on the subject are diverse - philosophy, psychiatry, behavioral science, biology, anthropology, psychology, biochemistry, and sociology. Yet, as organized by co-editor Patricia A. Williams, the volume falls coherently into three related sections. Entitled Evolutionary Ethics, the first section brings contemporary research to an (...) area first explored by Herbert Spencer. Evolutionary ethics looks to the theory of evolution by natural selection to find values for human living. The second section, Evolved Ethics, discusses the evolution of language and religion and their impact on moral thought and feeling. Evolved ethics was partly Charles Darwin's subject in _The Descent of Man._ The last section bears the title Scientific Ethics. A nascent field, scientific ethics asks about the evolution of human nature and the implications of that nature for ethical theory and social policy. Together, the essays collected here provide important contemporary insights into what it is - and what it may be - to be human. (shrink)

Changing the worldview and cultural paradigm of the modern world with the inherent transformation of value orientations and the search for the life-meaning foundations of being leads to increased interest in the problems of spirituality. After all, spirituality is the most important pillar of human existence and the highest principle that determines the essence of man and his over-welcoming purpose. In the historical memory of the people, in its cultural traditions, spirituality has been sanctified for millennia by a religion (...) that sought to restrain primitive instincts and affirmation at all levels of being a moral person. Religion, as a spiritual phenomenon, is directly connected with man, with his attachment to the high meanings and the semantic fullness of being in general. The search for meaning promotes a person beyond the limits of the actual being given to him and ensures the integrity of the individual, affirmation of the person as an origin and bringing it to the culture and values. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most (...) people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

We inhabit a world in which the market is a dominant institutional form of social organization. This influence is not without its critics, and there is considerable debate amongst political philosophers and policy-makers about whether the range of the market should expand or contract and, further, about the extent to which the market should be subject to constraints and government regulation. The expansion of the market into realms hitherto unknown is the theme of a number of recent books, including (...) Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy and Debra Satz's Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, which build on earlier work by, amongst others, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Jane Radin, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

an has been the concern of various philosophical schools of thought and can be said as the center of philosophical inquiry. However, not all of the concerns of philosophy points to defend man in his external and internal dimensions. In Karol Wojtyla’s philosophy of the Human Person, he interprets man as not being solely as a “rational animal.” He offers instead an understanding of man viewing his innerness as a person manifested not only by his existence, but more importantly (...) through his actions. In this paper, the fundamental concepts of Wojtyla’s Human Person are precisely enumerated for a clear understanding of who a Human Person is. This paper aims to interpret man in his two-fold character, as a Person and as a Subject using Karol Wojtyla’s Personalism. In this task, one must be noted that Wojtyla employs Thomism and Phenomenology in his thought. In the discussion, I will lay down the primary distinction between these two concepts for a better understanding of the anthropological structure of man, his innerness and exteriority. The discussion has three divisions, the first part discusses the two different ways of understanding Human Being; the second part discusses the concept of Person; and the third part discusses the Human Subject. (shrink)

Spinoza’s Ethics must contain some of philosophy’s most baffling statements. All things are animate; the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things: what would I be committed to in agreeing with these doctrines? His austere mode of exposition, sparing of illustrations and discursive explanations, ensures that any answer must be highly speculative.His weakness for dark sayings seems to have communicated itself to some of his best-known commentators. Of course where a philosopher’s thought (...) is itself opaque one would be unreasonable to expect lucidity in a commentator’s exposition of it. However he has been described as holding puzzling, to my mind unintelligible opinions on subjects concerning which, as far as I can see, his own statements more naturally suggest a much clearer and more comprehensible interpretation. There are problems enough in understanding his thought without adding needlessly to the list. I think there has been such an addition in discussion of his doctrines about the causal relationship between God and finite creatures, and this paper is devoted to suggesting another account of his thought on that topic which combines, I think, the advantages of being more intelligible and a more natural construction to place on his own statements, than the set of opinions generally laid at his door. (shrink)

Hume? Yes, David Hume, that's who Jerry Fodor looks to for help in advancing our understanding of the mind. Fodor claims his Treatise of Human Nature as the foundational document of cognitive science: it launched the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of mind. Going back to this work after more than 250 years we find that Hume is remarkably perceptive about the components and structure that a theory of mind requires. Careful study (...) of the Treatise helps us to see what's amiss with much twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and to get on the right track. Hume says in the Treatise that his main project is to construct a theory of human nature and, in particular, a theory of the mind. Hume Variations examines his account of cognition and how it is grounded in his 'theory of ideas'. Fodor discusses such key topics as the distinction between 'simple' and 'complex' ideas, the thesis that an idea is some kind of picture, and the roles that 'association' and 'imagination' play in cognitive processes. He argues that the theory of ideas, as Hume develops it, is both historically and ideologically continuous with the representational theory of mind as it is now widely endorsed by cognitive scientists. This view of Hume is explicitly opposed to recent discussions by critics who hold that the theory of ideas is the Achilles heel of his philosophy and that he would surely have abandoned it if only he had read Wittgenstein carefully.You don't have to know much about Hume to enjoy this inventively argued, provocative, and stimulating defence of the representational theory of mind--which is looking increasingly hard to resist.LINES OF THOUGHTPhilosophy books don't need to be hundreds of pages long to make a substantial contribution to the subject. This new series presents original works by leading philosophers at an affordable price and a readable length. Series EditorsPeter Ludlow Scott Sturgeon. (shrink)

Universal Logic is not a new logic, but a general theory of logics, considered as mathematical structures. The name was introduced about ten years ago, but the subject is as old as the beginning of modern logic: Alfred Tarski and other Polish logicians such as Adolf Lindenbaum developed a general theory of logics at the end of the 1920s based on consequence operations and logical matrices. The subject was revived after the flowering of thousands of new logics during (...) the last thirty years: there was a need for a systematic theory of logics to put some order in this chaotic multiplicity. This book contains recent works on universal logic by first-class researchers from all around the world. The book is full of new and challenging ideas that will guide the future of this exciting subject. It will be of interest for people who want to better understand what logic is. Tools and concepts are provided here for those who want to study classes of already existing logics or want to design and build new ones. (shrink)

Aristotle thought we are by nature political animals, but the state-of-nature tradition sees political society not as natural but as an artifice. For this tradition, political society can usefully be conceived as emerging from a pre-political state of nature by the exercise of innate normative powers. Those powers, together with the rest of our native normative endowment, both make possible the construction of the state, and place sharp limits on the state's just powers and prerogatives. A state-of-nature theory has three (...) components. One is an account of the native normative endowment, or “NNE.” Two is an account of how the state is constructed using the tools included in the NNE. Three is an account of the state's resulting normative endowment, which includes a (purported) moral power to impose duties of obedience. State-of-nature theories disagree about the NNE. For Locke, it included a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Recent social scientific findings suggest a quite different NNE. Contrary to Locke, people do not behave in experimental settings as one would predict if they possessed a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Moral reproof is subject to standing norms. These norms limit the range of eligible reprovers. The social science can support two claims. One, is that the NNE is (as Aristotle held) already political. The other is that political authority can be re-conceived as a matter of standing—that is, as the state's unique moral permission coercively to enforce moral norms, rather than as a moral power to impose freestanding duties of obedience. (shrink)

Background: The magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists is reportedly high, yet no peer-review published studies addressing this issue could be found. Therefore, it was decided to conduct a pilot study to assess the degree of the problem, the types of bullying/harassment and to provide some insights into the situation.Methods and Principal Findings: Following multiple focus group meetings, a yes/no response type questionnaire was developed to assess the degree and type of bullying and harassment experienced by psychiatrists. Over a (...) 3-month period the questionnaire was administered to a random sample of 60 psychiatrists. 57 out of the 60 psychiatrists reported harassment and bullying. Frequencies of the following response variables are presented in descending order: rumours 40% ; defamation 20% ; passing remarks 20% ; false accusations 15% ; threats 13.3% ; verbal abuse 13.3% ; unjustified complaints 13.3% ; promotion blocked 13.3% ; humiliation 13% ; bad reference given 10% ; credentials questioned 8.3% ; physical attacks 5% ; termination 5% ; derogatory remarks 1.7% and 1.7% were subjected to personal work. As a result of being subjected to harassment, 66.7% of the psychiatrists did not take any action, whereas 33.3% confronted the person they believed responsible. Asked whether the bullying and harassment caused distress, 18.3% of the psychiatrists did not report any effect, 30% reported mild distress, 40% moderate distress and severe distress was reported by 11.7%.Conclusions: It was concluded that the magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists may be quite high, as evidenced by this pilot study. There is a need for extensive systematic studies on this subject and to establish strategies to prevent and address this issue at a national and regulatory level. (shrink)

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental. Given Foucault’s constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be (...) understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure). The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault’s work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the e;piste;mè, the historical a priori, the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the “anthropological sleep”—various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault’s work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concepts, we hypothesized that the spatio-temporal pattern of functional connectivity within the default-mode network (DMN) should persist unchanged across a variety of different cognitive tasks or acts, thus being task-unrelated. This supposition is in contrast with current understanding that DMN activated when the subjects are resting and deactivated during any attention-demanding cognitive tasks. To test our proposal, we used, in retrospect, the results from our two early studies ([Fingelkurts, 1998] and [Fingelkurts et (...) al., 2003]). In both studies for the majority of experimental trails we indeed found a constellation of operationally synchronized cortical areas (indexed as DMN) that was persistent across all studied experimental conditions in all subjects. Furthermore, we found three major elements comprising this DMN: two symmetrical occipito-parieto-temporal and one frontal spatio-temporal patterns. This new data directly supports the notion that DMN has a specific functional connotation – it provides neurophysiologic basis for self-processing operations, namely first-person perspective taking and an experience of agency. (shrink)

The larval arms of echinoid plutei are used for locomotion and feeding. They are composed of internal calcite skeletal rods covered by an ectoderm layer bearing a ciliary band. Skeletogenesis includes an autonomous molecular differentiation program in primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs), initiated when PMCs leave the vegetal plate for the blastocoel, and a patterning of the differentiated skeletal units that requires molecular cues from the overlaying ectoderm. The arms represent a larval feature that arose in the echinoid lineage during the (...) Paleozoic and offers a subject for the study of gene co-option in the evolution of novel larval features. We isolated new molecular markers in two closely related but differently developing species, Heliocidaris tuberculata and Heliocidaris erythrogramma. We report the expression of a larval arm-associated ectoderm gene tetraspanin, as well as two new PMC markers, advillin and carbonic anhydrase. Tetraspanin localizes to the animal half of blastula stage H. tuberculata and then undergoes a restriction into the putative oral ectoderm and future location of the postoral arms, where it continues to be expressed at the leading edge of both the postoral and anterolateral arms. In H. erythrogramma, its expression initiates in the animal half of blastulae and expands over the entire ectoderm from gastrulation onward. Advillin and carbonic anhydrase are upregulated in the PMCs postgastrulation and localized to the leading edge of the growing larval arms of H. tuberculata but do not exhibit coordinated expression in H. erythrogramma larvae. The tight spatiotemporal regulation of these genes in H. tuberculata along with other ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence suggest that pluteus arms are novel larval organs, distinguishable from the processes of skeletogenesis per se. The dissociation of expression control in H. erythrogramma suggest that coordinate gene expression in H. tuberculata evolved as part of the evolution of pluteus arms, and is not required for larval or adult development. (shrink)

Universal Logic is not a new logic, but a general theory of logics, considered as mathematical structures. The name was introduced about ten years ago, but the subject is as old as the beginning of modern logic: Alfred Tarski and other Polish logicians such as Adolf Lindenbaum developed a general theory of logics at the end of the 1920s based on consequence operations and logical matrices. The subject was revived after the flowering of thousands of new logics during (...) the last thirty years: there was a need for a systematic theory of logics to put some order in this chaotic multiplicity. This bo. (shrink)

This comprehensive new collection is designed as a complete introduction to philosophy for students and general readers. Consisting of eleven extended essays, specially commissioned for this volume from leading philosophers, the book surveys all of the major areas of philosophy and offers an accessible but sophisticated guide to the main debates. An extended introduction provides general context and explains how the different subjects are related. The first part of the book deals with the foundations of philosophical inquiry: epistemology, philosophical logic, (...) methodology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. The second part offers historical chapters, two on ancient philosophy and two on modern philosophy. Finally, two chapters deal with questions of value, ethics and aesthetics. Each chapter has a full bibliography. The contributors include Bernard Williams, Roger Scruton, Martin Davies, David Wiggins, Christopher Janaway, David Papineau, and Mark Sainsbury. Designed to be as useful to the third-year student as to the beginner, this exciting new text will give each reader a unique sense of involvement in philosophy as it is practiced today. (shrink)

Environmental change requires individuals and institutions to facilitate adaptive governance. However, facilitating adaptive governance may be difficult because resource users' perceptions of desirable ways of life vary. These perceptions influence preferences related to environmental governance and may stem from the ways individuals subjectively value their work and their connections to their environment. This paper uses a value-based approach to examine individual and institutional preferences for adaptive governance in Carelmapu, Chile. We show that two groups had different value frames rooted in (...) divergent ontologies which influenced their actions related to adaptive governance, creating conflict. (shrink)

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies' open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Introduction: Informed consent has been recognized as an important component of research protocols and procedures of disclosure and consent in collaborative research have been criticized, as they may not be in keeping with cultural norms of developing countries. This study, which is part of a larger project funded by the United States National Bioethics Advisory Commission, explores the opinions of developing country researchers regarding informed consent in collaborative research. Methods: A survey of developing country researchers, involved in human (...) class='Hi'>subject research, was conducted by distributing a questionnaire with 169 questions, which included questions relating to informed consent. In addition, six focus group discussions, eight in‐depth interviews and 78 responses to open‐ended questions in the questionnaire provided qualitative data. Results: 203 surveys were considered complete and were included in the analysis. Written consent was not used by nearly 40% of the researchers in their most recent studies. A large proportion of respondents recommended that human subject regulations should allow more flexibility in ways of documenting informed consent. 84% of researchers agreed that a mechanism to measure understanding should be incorporated in research studies as part of the process of informed consent. Discussion: This paper is an empirical step in highlighting the ethical issues concerning disclosure. Health researchers in developing countries are well aware of the importance of consent in health research, and equally value the significance of educating human subjects regarding study protocols and associated risks and benefits. However, respondents emphasize the need for modifying ethical regulations in collaborative research. (shrink)

Background The ethical use both of human and non-human animals in research is predicated on the assumption that it is of a high quality and its projected benefits are more significant than the risks and harms imposed on subjects. Yet questions remain about whether and how IRBs and IACUCs should consider the scientific value of proposed research studies.Methods We draw upon 45 interviews with IRB and IACUC members and researchers with oversight experience about their perceptions of their own roles in (...) reviewing the quality and value of scientific protocols. Interview transcripts were memoed to highlight specific findings, which were then used to identify key themes through an iterative process.Results IRB and IACUC members expressed broad trust in the need for and value of research, and they often assumed that protocols had social value or that prior review, especially when associated with funding, affirmed both the rigor and merit of those protocols. Some oversight members also took an explicit stance against scientific review by stating that such review is not within the regulatory mandates governing their parts in the oversight system. Yet other interviewees expressed uneasiness about the current paradigm for evaluating the quality and overall value of science, suggesting that IRB and IACUC members perceive gaps in the oversight systems.Conclusions These findings reveal many similarities in how IRB and IACUC members understand the roles and limitations of their respective oversight committees. We conclude with a discussion of how the lack of a clear mandate regarding scientific review within US federal regulations may undermine ethical engagement of whether human and animal research is scientifically justified, resulting in a “mission lapse” wherein no organizational body is clearly responsible for ensuring that the research being conducted has the potential to advance science and benefit society. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (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)

Purpose. The aim of this piece is to study the manifestations of humanistic pursuits in a literary fiction work. The main interest is related to the interpretation of those existential and sociocultural concepts that underlie the dystopian novel by Lois Lowry. The theoretical basis of the study is based on works on phenomenology and the theory of reader reception. The method of phenomenology is a descriptive method: the phenomena of consciousness cannot be reduced to limited cognitive forms, and therefore language (...) and means of description are important along with their ability to reveal consciousness through phenomena. Originality of the study lies in the investigation of the humanistic aspect of a dystopian society, depicted in the modern literary fiction. The main attention is focused on the phenomenological identification of existential ideas and their manifestation in the literary characters of the given work. The conclusions speak about the tendencies of humanization and dehumanization of a man and society in the context of philosophical, ethical and aesthetic issues, which are the most important and urgent problems of our time. The current study finds out that in the modern dystopian literature and philosophy, the main subject of attention is a human. This human is perceived and depicted as a phenomenon that cannot be grasped by the notions of intimation and essence. The human is a creature whose freedom presupposes a constant departure from nature and habitual reality to the realm of transcendent through the desire to comprehend his or her certain way of existence. (shrink)

The subject of the aesthetic has returned to cultural and literary debates with a vengeance. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies is a timely and authoritative collection of essays that analyze the role of aesthetics in American and British cultural studies, and reflect on its recuperation in the field. Contains first-rate, original essays that analyze the role of aesthetics in American and British cultural studies, and reflect on its recuperation in the field. Contributors are leading scholars, internationally based. Includes substantial (...) introductory material by the editor. (shrink)

The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a someone doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a someone. This paper brings Karl Poppers model of objective knowledge what he calls knowledge in the absence (...) of a knowing subject to bear on the proposition that film thinks, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought. (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)

It is a great pleasure to introduce this collection of papers on the use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. Our task as guest editors has been tremendously stimulating. We have received an outstanding number of contributions, in terms of quantity and quality, from academics across a wide disciplinary span, both from younger researchers and from the most experienced scholars in the field. We therefore had to redraw the plans for this project a number of times. It quickly became clear (...) to us that the collection would expand beyond the scheduled double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. A triple issue was then drafted, but the number of excellent contributions continued to grow. We therefore had to reconsider the publication plans again, and the decision was made to publish an extended collection of papers in discrete instalments. At present substantial progress has been made towards determining the content of a second double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, due summer 2004. A third instalment now appears to be a real possibility. We welcome enquiries from authors interested in submitting to later instalments, especially those offering a novel perspective that is not otherwise represented. However, we do not intend continue this collection indefinitely. In putting together the first major interdisciplinary collection on this topic, we view our task as that of providing a starting point. Sufficient outlets exist to support ongoing debate. (shrink)

This article focuses on the analysis of gossip that is done in a playful key, including laughter as a salient feature, drawing on extracts taken from two naturally occurring conversations among Galician female undergraduate students. The analysis indicates that gossip emerges as a form of indirect mockery in the data, which are commonly based on dramatized reported speech of the ‘victim’, including parodic stylization devices that are orientated to elicit laughter by making fun or through ridicule. The evaluation component also (...) reveals important differences in relation to serious gossip, as it is not necessarily negative and is not always explicitly established or developed. For this reason, this component can be ambiguous in some cases. From a functional perspective, the article emphasizes that sociability and entertainment are not the only functions that playful and humorous gossip can play; at a fundamental level, this discourse practice has other benefits for the participants: as a way of constructing group identity and getting group comfort for a feeling of envy; of increasing self-esteem from the problems of another party; and of degrading other people’s success. The common element behind these underlying functions is a comparative competition of the gossipers with the person who is the subject of their talk. Thus, gossip as mockery is not free of maliciousness and competitiveness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 121-122 [Access article in PDF] Harold Tarrant. Plato's First Interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 263. Cloth, $55.00. This is Tarrant's third book on the ancient Platonist tradition, following his Scepticism or Platonism? (1985) and Thrasyllan Platonism (1993). In those earlier volumes his focus was on the first centuries bc and ad. Here his scope is much (...) wider. Stating that "Platonic interpretation is today at a crossroads," he has written a book that explores "ancient attempts to wrestle with this corpus," with the ultimate objective "to encourage a fresh, almost primitive reading of Plato himself" (vii).He begins engagingly by confronting the ancients with questions any modern reader of Plato must ask: What kind of text is this? Are there doctrines here? Where do I look for Plato's doctrines? The second part of his book is a historical survey, taking us from Plato, the early Academy and Aristotle, through the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial period, and concluding with the principal Neoplatonist interpreters. In the third and longest part, he focuses on the interpretation of specific dialogues, giving most space to the Gorgias and Theaetetus, but also dealing in particular detail with the Meno, Parmenides, and Philebus. Something is said about every dialogue, but Tarrant writes only briefly about such major works as the Republic and Timaeus. He explains his selectivity (not very convincingly) as due to his wish to "discuss issues of meta-interpretation, with emphasis on the period before Plotinus" (198).Taking his book as a whole, one realizes that few strands of modern interpretation were not prefigured to quite a large extent in antiquity. The two most obvious exceptions are the chronological and developmental approach (Early, Middle, and Late), at present under strong attack from some quarters, and the theological, numerological, and allegorical readings practiced by Neoplatonists. Plato's ancient interpreters were doctrinal unitarians, but they implicitly anticipated our tendency to distinguish "Socratic dialogues," which some of them called "gymnastic" and "inquisitive," from such "canonical" works as the Phaedo,Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus, to which they applied the labels "dogmatic" and "expository." And they recognized that both types of characteristics could be found in the same dialogue, as in the Meno and Theaetetus. Plato himself, they proposed, spoke primarily through the voices of Socrates, Timaeus, and the Eleatic and Athenian strangers; but other characters, such as Pausanias in the Symposium, or Protagoras in the dialogue of that name, utter thoughts with some philosophical value. In explaining difficult passages of one dialogue, they would typically refer to passages from other parts of the corpus. An especially intriguing instance is the strategy of the Anonymous Commentator on the Theaetetus, who reads the Meno into the dialogue on which he is officially commenting.Ancient scholars, just like ourselves, asked questions about the unifying themes of complex dialogues. Hence the sub-titles given to certain works: "On the soul" for the Phaedo, and "On justice" for the Republic, etc. For Olympiodorus (whose commentary on the Gorgias Tarrant has recently co-edited [Leiden, 1998]), earlier interpreters have seriously erred by giving too limited an account of that dialogue's scope. It is not, he says, simply about rhetoric, nor about justice and injustice; nor is its theme the divine demiurge (as some Neoplatonists had strangely proposed, on the basis of the concluding myth). Rather, the subject of the Gorgias is "the ethical principles that lead to constitutional well-being" (125). [End Page 121] However, Olympiodorus's eminently "sensible" reading (as Tarrant calls it) is deeply embedded in the Neoplatonic contrast between the "purificatory virtues" of the Phaedo and the "constitutional virtues" of Republic4.Strong or weak scepticism, esotericism, unwritten doctrines, spurious versus genuine, a canon of central dialogues, dramatic considerations, and the philosophical importance or non-importance of the dialogues' prologues—all of these are interpretive approaches that Tarrant surveys in this immensely learned book, and all of them continue to resonate for us. Modern scholars, who emphasize the literary and philosophical unity of each dialogue, are walking... (shrink)

The author, head of a teaching hospital surgical unit, argues that the medical curriculum must ensure that all students are exposed to a minimum of ethical discussion and decision-making. In describing his own approach he emphasises the need to show students that it is 'an intensely practical subject'. Moreover, he reminds them that moral dilemmas in medicine--perhaps a better term than medical ethics--are unavoidable in clinical practice. Professor Johnson emphasises the need for small group teaching and discussion of real (...) cases, preferably chosen and 'worked up' by individual students. He suggests that ethical issues could profitably be introduced into written, oral and clinical examinations. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 40, Issue 1, pp 104 - 115 It is intended in this study to present initial reliability and validity data for the Russian adaptation of the Multidimensional Inventory of Religious/Spiritual Well-being, as being related to personality factors and psychopathology. Therefore, the first version of the MI-RSWB-R was applied to a sample of 192 non-clinical subjects, together with the NEO Five Factor Inventory and the Symptom-Check-List. The original six-factor structure of the scale could be replicated for (...) the MI-RSWB-R, which also provides satisfying psychometric properties. In accordance with previous research the RSWB total score was linked to more favorable personality traits such as Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness, which was paralleled by substantial negative correlations with increased psychopathology. Our findings support the reliability and structural validity of the MI-RSWB-R as a standardized instrument for addressing the spiritual dimension in Russian populations. Further research in clinical surroundings is now recommended. (shrink)

This paper offers a new approach to the philosophical foundations of information systems through feminist philosophy and, in particular, feminist epistemology. This can be used to expose the universalizing tendency of many information systems and to show the importance of using real-life complex examples rather than the simplified examples often favored by philosophers. Within traditional epistemology and its relation to IS, subjectivity, the propositional/skills distinction and epistemic hierarchies are subject to arguments from feminist epistemology. With respect to the emerging (...) critical school of IS, feminist epistemology, and within that, feminist standpoint theory, are used to examine the complexities of the positivist/anti-positivist position and the related concept of emancipation. In addition, it is argued that the liberal version of emancipation encapsulated in such systems may have an effect opposite to that of emancipation These issues are illustrated in an existing expert systems project. (shrink)

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while (...) others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

This paper presents a qualitative study investigating the application of physiotherapists’ professional ethics in practice with respect to touch, intimacy, and corporeality during therapy, based on the experiences of elderly patients. As the relationship in a physiotherapy session is multidimensional, the study considered three levels: physical contact, verbal contact, and the conditions in which the therapy took place. The aim of this study was to find out what values are of importance to older people during a physiotherapy session, with emphasis (...) on the categories of touch, corporeality, and intimacy. The studied group consisted of sixteen male and female physiotherapy patients aged between sixty-six and ninety-two years. The study was conducted according to the grounded theory methodology. The research material consisted of transcriptions of free targeted interviews, which were subjected to a process of coding and analysis. As a result of data analyses, three superior categories have been identified—safety, anxiety, interpersonal relationship—and three a priori categories stemming from the characteristic features of the study area—touch, corporeality, and intimacy. The a priori categories did not appear independently in statements made by the respondents, but instead seemed to be components of superior categories. The most important values indicated by the respondents concerned the interpersonal relationship with their physiotherapist and the feeling of safety and care. In terms of touch, corporeality, and intimacy, the respondents indicated, among others, the importance of predictability, a sense of security, privacy, and acceptance of the body. (shrink)

Theories of beauty are often divided into the objective and the subjective. I am doubtful whether a rigid distinction between the two can be maintained. It is difficult for an objective theory to assert that the impression of beauty is received quite passively, without any reaction or co-operation on the part of the subject, which is likely to be similar in the various cases.

Proposition and sentence are two separate entities indicating their specific purposes, definitions and problems. A proposition is a logical entity. A proposition asserts that something is or not the case, any proposition may be affirmed or denied, all proportions are either true (1’s) or false (0’s). All proportions are sentences but all sentences are not propositions. Propositions are factual contains three terms: subject, predicate and copula and are always in indicative or declarative mood. While sentence is a grammatical entity, (...) a unit of language that expresses a complete thought; a sentence may express a proposition, but is distinct from the proposition it may be used to express: categories, declarative sentences, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative sentences. Not all sentences are propositions, propositions express sentence. Sentence is a proposition only in condition when it bears truth values i.e. true or false. We use English sentences governed by imprecise rule to state the precise rules of proposition. In logic we use sentence as logical entity having propositional function but grammatical sentences are different from logical sentences while the former are having only two divisions namely subject and predicate and may express wishes, orders, surprise or facts and also have multiple subjects and predicates and the latter must be in a propositional form which states quantity of the subject and the quality of the proposition and multiple subjects and multiple predicate make the proposition multiple. (shrink)

Examining dialogue, one may underline its being amicable or not, intellectual or not, useful or useless, plainly transferring message or hinting metamessage, serving social or private goals etc. However, speaking about dialogue in general we speak in terms of semiotics.Considering globalization in general one should adopt the semiotic framework within which globalization is not just a collection of cases, and globalistics is not only a catalogue registering it. It will turn globalization into the subject of philosophical interest. The (...) paper presents a specific basis for semiotic investigations. This basis postulates inter alia the fourth part , not widely known, called sigmatics, dealing with the construction of adequate ontologies. It can help to explain in a complete way what we observe in the present and to foresee the prospects of the future, including the integrated problems of dialogue, globalization and tolerance which are the main concern of the presented considerations. Some special characteristics of the semiotic research and of globalistics in Russia are displayed in two Appendixes. (shrink)

On average, “young” people underestimate whereas “old” people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. Such subjective survival beliefs violate the rational expectations paradigm and are also not in line with models of rational Bayesian learning. In order to explain these empirical patterns in a parsimonious manner, we assume that self-reported beliefs express likelihood insensitivity and can, therefore, be modeled as non-additive beliefs. In a next step we introduce a closed form model of Bayesian learning for non-additive beliefs which (...) combines rational learning with psychological attitudes in the interpretation of information. Our model gives a remarkable fit to average subjective survival beliefs reported in the Health and Retirement Study. (shrink)

Feminist researchers have urged more study of how feminist practice is actually accomplished in mixed-gender organizations. Social movement scholars have called for more attention to dynamics of gender and race in social movement organizations, especially to the challenges of maintaining internal solidarity. Based on field observations in a pro-feminist, progressive, mixed-gender, mixed-race social movement organization, this article examines organizational decision-making processes and interpersonal and group dynamics. Gendered and racialized patterns of subordination are both very much in evidence and—at the same (...) time—actively challenged in this organization. The author argues that profeminist and progressive organizational practices and efforts to create solidarity across gender and race can exist through competing and contradictory dynamics and ongoing struggles. Complex and inconsistent dynamics around these social barriers are likely to occur in organizations more generally and need to be a subject for more research. (shrink)

Schizophrenia involves profound but enigmatic disturbances of affective or emotional life. The affective responses as well as expression of many patients in the schizophrenia spectrum can seem odd, incongruent, inadequate, or otherwise off-the-mark. Such patients are, in fact, often described in rather contradictory terms: as being prone both to exaggerated and to diminished levels of emotional or affective response. According to Ernst Kretschmer, they actually tend to have both kinds of experience at the same time. This paper attempts to (...) explain what might be termed this 'Kretschmerian paradox'. Some relevant concepts and vocabulary for affect and emotion are discussed . The need for a phenomenological approach focusing on subjective experience is suggested. Three modes of abnormal experience in schizophrenia are investigated in light of their implications for affect or emotion: alienation of the lived body ; fragmented perception and loss of affordances ; and preoccupation with a quasi-delusional world created by the self. (shrink)

The self can be understood in objective metaphysical terms as a bundle of properties, as a substance, or as some other kind of entity on our metaphysical list of what there is. Such an approach explores the metaphysical nature of the self when regarded from a suitably impersonal, ontological perspective. It explores the nature and structure of the self in objective reality, that is, the nature and structure of the self from without. This is the objective self. I am taking (...) a different approach. In addition to objective reality, which is usually understood and explored from an impersonal, quasi-observational and metaphysically realist perspective, we can also explore the nature and structure of subjective reality. The nature and structure of subjective reality is defined by the nature and structure of first-personal, conscious experience. Subjective reality is as real as objective reality, and a metaphysical realist such as myself can endorse the existence of both kinds of ontology. The mental states that, as experienced from the first-personal or subjective perspective, capture the nature and structure of subjective reality, are included in objective reality. The questions to explore in a subjective ontology of the self concern the nature and structure of the self from the first-personal or subjective perspective, that is, the nature and structure of the self from within. This is the subjective self. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to analyse the impacts of Edward Snowden’s revelations in Spain focusing on issues of privacy and state surveillance. This research takes into consideration the Spanish context from a multidimensional perspective: social, cultural, legal and political. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews the Spanish privacy and state surveillance situation. Responses to a questionnaire were collected from 207 university students studying at Universitat Rovira i Virgili or Burgos University. The quantitative responses to the survey were statistically analysed as well as (...) qualitative considerations of free-text answers. Findings The survey outcomes demonstrate that a majority of respondents are aware of Snowden’s revelations, but only a few have even considered taking serious actions to improve their online privacy. One of the most relevant findings is that Spanish citizens find it acceptable to lose privacy and be subject to state surveillance if that provides a benefit in security. Practical implications The research points out the importance of privacy in a multicultural environment. A sensitised society is a keystone for the healthy and balanced development of state surveillance policy and practice. Social implications Training programmes are a critical dimension to ensure awareness across society regarding privacy and digital technologies. Suitable educational policies and curricula at all levels should be fostered. Originality/value Privacy and state surveillance based on information and communication technologies is an emerging research topic with important consequences for social values and ethics. This study provides an overview of Spanish higher education students’ attitudes in these areas. (shrink)

The original publication was an important spur to the subsequent renewal of interest in the study of stoicism, and is here reprinted not only because literature on the subject is still scarce, but because it has continued to be heavily referred to long after it had gone out of print. The ten essays were presented at a seminar at the University of London. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This paper notes how Jim influenced my own use of Foucault and also focuses on two of James Marshall's New Zealand oriented texts. In the first, Discipline and Punishment in New Zealand Education he provides a Foucauldian genealogy of New Zealand approaches to both punishment and discipline, in particular corporal punishment. The second, his 1996 book co‐written with Michael Peters, Individualism and Community: Education and Social Policy in the Postmodern Condition, analyses political philosophy and social and educational policy as New (...) Zealand changed from being a welfare state since the 1930s to a neoliberal one since the mid 1980s. Foucauldian understandings about power, bio‐power, governmentality, autonomy and subjectivity are brought to bear in their analysis. (shrink)

This provocative but persuasive book is essentially a radical attack upon the Humean conception of causality and the presentation and defense of a counter-theory, closer to everyday experience and pre-Humean traditional views. As formulated by empiricist philosophers, the Humean approach depends on two basic postulates. The philosophical analysis of any non-empirical concept must be a formal explication; any residue elements have to be accounted for in terms of their psychological origins. The world as experienced can be conceived adequately as a (...) logically independent system of things or flux of events, without the unwarranted assumption that individuals persist diachronically. As the grounds for undermining these assumptions, the authors develop a conception of causes as "powerful particulars," i.e., things which have both a nature and powers. So long as the nature remains unchanged the agent in question will continue to behave in this fashion with a natural necessity, stemming from the individual’s nature and specific powers. The opening chapter discusses the problem of conceptual and natural necessity—as distinct from logical necessity which alone is allowed by the Humean empiricists. Natural necessity is the mark of the relationship between real causes and their respective effects, whereas conceptual necessity characterizes the way our statements about such are themselves related. Later the irreducibility of natural necessity is emphasized and its differences from logical entailment spelled out. Chapter two takes up the subject of the "regularity theory and its allies." Characteristic of such are two claims: the empirical content of a causal-relationship statement is exhausted by the actual or hypothetical regularity between independent entities, and the necessity ordinarily attributed to causal production is an illusion, to be accounted for in various ways. Subsequent chapters are devoted to assaulting the pillars of the Humean notion either directly or indirectly through an illuminating and attractive account of their own theory of nature, causal powers, and natural necessity. The final chapter, entitled "Fields of Potential," indulges in speculation about the nature of ultimate entities on the basis of an extended generalization of the notion of the powerful individual, and concludes with a brief account of the historical antecedents of Faraday’s modern field theory and the metaphysical implications of a generalized field theory.—A.B.W. (shrink)

Father Lonergan, Professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, writes from the conviction that by thoroughly understanding what it is to understand, one will understand the structure of all that is and can be understood. Focussing on insight, the very essence of understanding, Father Lonergan examines illustrations of insight in mathematics, science, common sense, etc., in order to bring the reader to an insight into insight. The sometimes annoyingly prolix discussion is intended to enable the reader to grasp within his (...) own self-consciousness the structure or invariant pattern of all understanding. The advance from lower to higher standpoints of understanding is traced, and a plurality of patterns appropriate to diverse domains, each standpoint of insight exhibiting a structure of understanding correlative to an intelligibility immanent in its subject matter, is acknowledged. Yet Father Lonergan pursues insight until at last he claims to discover the unifying, universal, invariant pattern and hence the ultimate metaphysical intelligibility. This structure or pattern proves to be essentially scholastic in conception, in particular Thomistic; yet the scholasticism Father Lonergan advances contains important revisions in matters of method and content. A carefully argued book, Insight is a remarkable combination of orthodoxy and originality.--A. J. R. (shrink)

Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an “intensified” or “developed” form of subjectivity—his name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaard’s account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being (...) subjective in a degraded sense—merely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affects—to being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on one’s own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to one’s effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is. (shrink)

Never before, in any anthology, have contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of language come together to address the single most neglected important issue at the confluence of these two branches of philosophy, namely: Can we know facts from reliable reports? Besides Hume's subversive discussion of miracles and the literature thereon, testimony has been bypassed by most Western philosophers; whereas in classical Indian theories of evidence and knowledge philosophical debates have raged for centuries about the status of word-generated knowledge. `Is the response (...) "I was told by an expert on the subject" as respectable as "I saw" or "I inferred" in answer to "How do you know?"' is a question answered in diverse and subtle ways by Buddhists, Vaisesikas and Naiyayikas. For the first time this book makes available the riches of those debates, translating from Sanskrit some contemporary Indian Pandits' reactions to Western analytic accounts of meaning and knowledge. For advanced undergraduates in philosophy, for researchers - in Australia, Asia, Europe or America - on epistemology, theory of meaning, Indian or comparative philosophy, as well as for specialists interested in this relatively fresh topic of knowledge transmission and epistemic dependence this book will be a feast. After its publication analytic philosophy and Indian philosophy will have no excuse for shunning each other. (shrink)