This article offers a reading of Eriugena’s thought that is inspired by Heidegger’s claim according to which being is constituted in a dialectical interplay of revelation and concealment. Beginning with an analysis of how “causality as concealing revelation” works on the level of God’s inner-Trinitarian life, the piece moves on to a consideration of the way in which the human soul reveals itself in successive stages of exteriorization that culminate in the creation of the body, its “image.” The body, (...) however, conceals as much as it reveals true human nature. Moreover, it is shown that for Eriugena all of reality, as theophany, possesses this character of concealing its fundamental truth. These insights lead Eriugena to a recognition of radical human finitude, as genuine wisdom requires an acknowledgement of our fundamental ignorance. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza una recreación quijotesca en la novela de Graham Greene Monseñor Quijote. Para ello se utilizan dos términos procedentes del Derecho romano: los conceptos de autoridad y poder. En esta obra de Greene, la autoridad surge de los libros o de autores de libros, cuya lectura permite que la vida siga teniendo sentido. En Greene encontramos la estrategia de lectura conocida como las sortes virgilianae que permite a los personajes orientarse en las dificultades diarias. Sin embargo, (...) el poder está caracterizado por su condición iletrada, la ausencia de libros y su ignorancia. In this article a novel by Graham Greene entitled Monsignor Quixote is analysed, a book that involves a recreation of the novel by Cervantes. The author of this article employs two concepts from Roman law: authority and power in his analysis. In this work by Greene, authority arises from the books or the book writers, whose reading allows life to keep making sense. In Greene, a strategy of reading known as the sortes virgilianae is found and this allows the characters to get their bearings in the daily difficulties. However, power is described as illiterate, the absence of books and ignorance. (shrink)

In Heidegger's "Being and Time", the author locates the main themes of Heidegger's seminal work within their historical context and, in the process, familiarizes the reader with the terminology and background information relevant to understanding Heidegger's text. This study of what is arguably the greatest philosophical text of the century takes the ontological view of Heidegger's work. Here the author presents a precise formulation of the genuine problem of the meaning of Being, an explanation of the fact that (...) Being is for us problematic and should be so, and a precise determination and articulation of the mode of Being of man (using the hermeneutical and transcendental analytic of Dasein). Contents: I. The Preparatory Fundamental nalysis of Dasein II. Dasein and Temporality. Bibliography. Index. Co-published with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of fundamental entities in set theory. It takes up J. Hamkins’ claim that models of set theory are such fundamental entities and investigates it using the methodology of P. Maddy’s naturalism, Second Philosophy. In accordance with this methodology, I investigate the historical case study of the use of models in the introduction of forcing, compare this case to contemporary practice and give a systematic account of how set-theoretic practice can be said to introduce models as (...) new entities. In conclusion, I argue for a view that takes both sets and models to be fundamental entities in set theory. (shrink)

In Heidegger's "Being and Time", the author locates the main themes of Heidegger's seminal work within their historical context and, in the process, familiarizes the reader with the terminology and background information relevant to understanding Heidegger's text. This study of what is arguably the greatest philosophical text of the century takes the ontological view of Heidegger's work. Here the author presents a precise formulation of the genuine problem of the meaning of Being, an explanation of the fact that (...) Being is for us problematic and should be so, and a precise determination and articulation of the mode of Being of man . Contents: I. The Preparatory Fundamental nalysis of Dasein II. Dasein and Temporality. Bibliography. Index. Co-published with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. (shrink)

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions Approach is (...) better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of human rights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to explain human rationality. The fundamental principles of human thought are stated in terms of Balzer's Principles, and their operations in everyday life are illustrated. The natural numbers are defined and explained in a fresh fashion. Paradoxes, including those of class theory and material implication, which have signaled that all is not well in our logical systems, are laid to rest here. The explanation of human rationality has more than logical interest, for it touches (...) upon the human values embedded in our rationality. The book carries the message that all human beings are fundamentally equal. (shrink)

Division III of Being and Time (BT) was supposed to address the question of the sense of being. Being and its sense are in question because while we do understand being, it is also strangely withheld from us. That we understand being is evidenced by the fact that we have access to what and that things are (rather than not); that being is withheld from us is evidenced by the fact that we do not (...) seem to be able to articulate what it is that we grasp in this. Being is both given to us and withheld from us. To be given yet withheld is to be question-worthy—and it is also to be the proper object of phenomenology (BT 35). Being is the phenomenon: that which shows itself (phainomenon) (BT 31) but also needs to be “let be seen” (legein) (BT 32). To make sense of being is to make sense of both how it shows itself and how it hides itself. -/- Division I explains how being shows itself by, first, explaining how we discover entities in their being and, second, explicating the structure of our openness to being (i.e., disclosedness). The next step should be to explain how being hides itself—the phenomenon that Heidegger sometimes calls “falling.” But Heidegger does not do this. He is distracted by a different (albeit related) phenomenon: inauthenticity. By pursuing authenticity and inauthenticity throughout §40 and the so-called existentialist chapters in Division II, Heidegger does give us important insight into the riskiness and fragility of our relationship to being. But he does not capture the finitude that he should be aiming at: the withholding of being. Lacking this, Heidegger does not have our finite openness to being fully in view. As a result, the structure of the temporality that he draws out accounts for our openness to being but not for the finitude of this openness. This finitude is not a mere limitation on our part—it is not just that we don’t fully “get” being. It belongs to how being works that it withholds itself from us and so makes itself question-worthy. So, if Heidegger’s goal in Division III is to show how being makes sense, then he will need to make sense of this fundamental feature of being. It is, if nothing else, the feature that sparked his investigation. But because he lost sight of the withholding of being at the end of Division I, Heidegger is not in a position to make sense of being in Division III. -/- By the time he starts working seriously with the notion of phusis in the 1930s, Heidegger has reoriented himself to the phenomenon of being’s withholding. By approaching BT from the perspective of Heidegger’s work in this period, then, we can see more clearly what BT accomplished and where it veered off course. I will do this by interpreting Heidegger’s reading (in Introduction to Metaphysics [IM]) of the opening strophes of the choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. On Heidegger’s ontological reading, these strophes show us the various features of being by speaking of the natural world: being is understood as the sea, the earth, and the living thing. I will argue that BT illuminates being as the living thing and being as the earth, and in this explains how being is given to us. But BT falters when it tries to reach being as the sea. The sea is an image of being’s simultaneous granting and withholding. Because Heidegger has not thought being’s withholding in Divisions I and II, he cannot go on to make sense of this withholding as simultaneous with being’s granting in Division III. In short, Heidegger should have thought being as the sea in Division III, but he cannot. (shrink)

Darwin famously held that his use of the term "chance" in evolutionary theory merely "serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the causes of each particular variation". Is this a tenable view today? Or should we revise our thinking about chance in evolution in light of the more advanced, quantitative models of Neo-Darwinian theory, which make substantial use of statistical reasoning and the concept of probability? Is determinism still a viable metaphysical doctrine about biological reality after the quantum revolution in (...) physics, or dowe have to abandon it in favor of an objective indeterminism? In light of such reflections, what is the relevant interpretation of probability in evolutionary theory? Do biologists use the concept of probability because they are finite cognitive agents or because the evolutionary process is fundamentally probabilistic? In this paper, I will show that we do not yet fully understand the nature of chance in evolution. (shrink)

This essay outlines my view on the anthropic conditions of authentic dialogue. In my opinion dialogue as such can be pursued only by people endowed with specific qualities and enjoying maximal fulfilment as human beings: people who are creative, who have an active attitude towards themselves and the world, who do not feel estranged from it but are united with it, and for whom the world is neither alien nor hostile, people who are free and responsible. These anthropic conditions of (...) dialogue are connected with the herein-postulated image of human nature, whereby human nature is not only bound to the world by social relations but is co-created by the world, simultaneously retaining its subjective, individual dimension. In this context I will outline my concept of homo creator as a vision of modern humanism. In my belief this anthropological concept is one of the fundaments of philosophy of dialogue. (shrink)

En el artículo se realizó una revisión de los modelos de planificación estratégica en sentido general, pero que son aplicados en los momentos actuales en el ámbito de las instituciones de educación superior. El modelo globalizador, el cual es el básico en la mayor parte de los ejercicios de planificación; el modelo sectorial, que tiene un importante arraigo en el sector educativo latinoamericano, y el modelo situacional, cuya noción básica consiste en que planificar es una acción de todos los actores. (...) Igualmente se describen otros como el denominado complejo, el cual va cobrando interés en los estudiosos del tema; pues aunque esta línea de pensamiento posee sus ángulos de interés en el campo específico de la planificación estratégica, en el ámbito universitario aún le queda camino por recorrer para el logro de una mayor profundización en la temática, de manera que ella pueda ser aplicada al proceso formativo universitario. In the article, a general revision of the strategic planning models that are applied to the present times in the field of high education institutions was made. The models are: the globalizing model, which is the basic in the most part of the planning exercises; the sectorial model, which is very well established in the Latin-American educational sector; and the situational model, the basic notion of which consists on the fact that planning is an action that correspond to all the actors. The model known as complex was described as well. This model has become important among the specialists in the subject because, although this line of thinking has established its angles of interest in the specific field of strategic planning, it still has a long way to run, in the university field, for getting a greatest deepening in the theme, in a way that it could be applied to the university formative process. (shrink)

The present paper aims to contribute to the substantivalism versus relationalism debate and to defend general relativity (GR) against pseudoscientific attacks in a novel, especially inclusive way. This work was initially motivated by the desire to establish the incompatibility of any ether theories with accelerated cosmic expansion and inflation (motto: where would a hypothetical medium supposedly come from so fast?). The failure of this program is of interest for emergent GR concepts in high energy particle physics. However, it becomes increasingly (...) important to guard scientific results against their misrepresentation by fundamentally anti-scientific agendas. We therefore argue that although it is not known whether the perceived space-time is fundamental (rather than a condensed state or a particular membrane), in a fundamental theory, space-time must be abstract relational: fundamental space-time is the consistent spatial-temporal arrangement of events. To pursue its own goals, this work should be accessible to a wide audience: physicists, philosophers of science, those being tempted by anti-relativity theories, but also those who vigorously defend some orthodox relativity that is not actually supported by GR. It must thus be extensive in order to satisfy the different parties’ desire to have included and understood their respective positions. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to explain human rationality. The fundamental principles of human thought are stated in terms of Balzer's Principles, and their operations in everyday life are illustrated. The natural numbers are defined and explained in a fresh fashion. Paradoxes, including those of class theory and material implication, which have signaled that all is not well in our logical systems, are laid to rest here. The explanation of human rationality has more than logical interest, for it touches (...) upon the human values embedded in our rationality. The book carries the message that all human beings are fundamentally equal. (shrink)

I like the view that the fundamental facts are logically simple, not complex. However, some universal generalizations and negations may appear fundamental, because they cannot be explained by logically simple facts about particulars. I explore a natural reply: those universal generalizations and negations are true because certain logically simple facts—call them —are the fundamental facts. I argue that this solution is only available given some metaphysical frameworks, some conceptions of metaphysical explanation and fundamentality. It requires a ‘fitting’ framework, according to (...) which metaphysical theories explain the aptness of representations in terms of how things are fundamentally. Fitting frameworks conceive of the fundamental facts as those that are metaphysically ‘real’; call them the ‘facts-in-reality’. Moreover, we must take as primary a plural notion of the facts-in-reality, not the singular notion of a fact-in-reality. By contrast, a metaphysics that grounds facts is incompatible with my strategy for keeping the fundamental facts logically simple. (shrink)

In this article, I reply to a critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study, that Stephen Kershnar has published elsewhere in this issue of Science, Religion & Culture. Beyond expounding the central conclusions of the book, Kershnar advances two major criticisms of it, namely, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if (...) there were a value of meaning in life, my fundamentality theory of it would not capture it well. Here I respond to both of these criticisms, aiming to probe these underexplored issues still more deeply. I also contend that these two criticisms are in tension with each other; in order to contend that my theory of meaning is incorrect, Kershnar must draw on intuitions about the existence of meaning that undercut his suggestion that there is no such thing. (shrink)

Since the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures and the outstanding work by Maturana and Varela, an exhaustive idea of what human mind is has lost its fascinating value and did not fund an epistemology anymore, falling down in the abrupt concept of a machinery or a mechanism. A failure, somehow, in interpreting what is life and the human being, arose from the dismiss of a sound epistemology or a basilar philosophic foundation of biology, which yet found an interesting (...) contribution with Maturana's and Varela's scientific efforts. In this book, we attempted to build a new epistemological model of life and the human mind taking into account the intriguing model of Prigogine's dissipative structure. Our model addresses, for the first time, three modalities of dissipation, besides dissipation in the thermodynamic field, introducing a Shannon's dissipation and a relational dissipation, able to give suggestive insights why life arose, mind developed and humans engage relationships. A new hypothesis on the origin of mind is presented. The book is exposed as an encouraging occasion to deepen our biological fundamental rules, giving amazing suggestion on our personal and social behaviours. Finally, it suggests a new psychotherapeutic approach to address important concerns about relation and affective life. (shrink)

This commentary proposes that “cognitive control” is neither componential nor emergent, but a fundamental feature of behavior. The term “control” requires an operational definition. This is best provided by the negative feedback loop that utilizes behavior to control perception; it does not control behavior per se. In order to model complex cognitive control, Perceptual Control Theory proposes that loops are organized into a dissociable hierarchical network (PCT; Powers, Clark, & McFarland, 1960; Powers, 1973a, 2008). In this way, behavior is dynamically (...) adaptive to environmental disturbances, rather than being formed by, or superimposed upon, learned associations between stimulus and response. (shrink)

Abstract Democracy is a fundamental right linked to the realization of a person’s worthy life project regarding its corresponding fulfillment of Human Rights. Along with the procedures to form political majorities, it is mandatory to incorporate the substantial part as a means and end for the normative content of Human Dignity to be carried out allowing it to: i) freely choose a project of valued life with purpose and autonomy ii) to have material and intangible means to function in society; (...) and iii) to live free from harm and fear in order to achieve human flourishing. The integral democracy is a means and an end to materialize individual happiness and the common good as long as everyone has concrete opportunities to unfold its inherent human dignity capacities within the trademark of the democratic constitutional State. Assuming this, integral democracy is the fundamental right of Fundamental Rights. (shrink)

In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

Heidegger’s discussion about the rise of the arbitrary power of “machination” in his late 1930s writings does not just echo his well-known later thinking on technology, but also affords a profound insight to the ontological mechanism of oblivion behind the history of Western thinking of being. The paper shows how this rise of the coercive power of ordering signifies an emergence of historically and spatially significant moment of completion: outgrowth of the early Greek notions of tekhne and phusis in (...) terms of globally expanding systems of calculative orderings. The paper thus aims to show how the condition of machination marks a fundamental implementation of the hidden consummation of the mechanism of oblivion now being re-adopted into the operational clarity of calculative rationality. It is argued that the rise of machination became possible through the historical process of replacing the early Greek disposition of existence, the wonder, with calculative rationality of ordering. (shrink)

The spiral form of the Periodic Law is proposed as its fundamental graphic representation. This idea is based on the fact that the spiral is the most appropriate form in description transitions from simple to complicated. The spiral is easily obtained from the linear succession of the elements when they are ranged by growing nuclear charge. The spiral can be simply transformed into many other graphic representations, including tables. This paper suggests the conception of the autonomy of blocks. This autonomy (...) is clearly seen in the variation of the outer electronic shells, in the width and the height of the blocks, as well as the number and properties of elements included therein. The regularities in the changes of element properties are pronounced in certain blocks but actually absent in others. The blocks can be permuted to obtain full-fledged versions of Periodic Table. The new stage of the verification of the blocks autonomy is the use of the total number of the differentiating electrons as an independent variable in describing the properties of the elements and their compounds. Consideration of individual blocks made it possible to deduce the periodic equations valid for all the elements within each block. Formulation of the Periodic Law is advanced: while describing characteristic determining the properties of the elements, the nuclear charge is replaced by the total number of differentiating electrons. Two modifications of the conventional Periodic Table are obtained by minimal changes. The first one shows the secondary and the additional periodicites. Another table shows the total number of differentiating electrons for each element. (shrink)

One of our great contemporary scientists presents ten insights that illuminate what every thinking person needs to know about what the world is and how it works. Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals is built around a simple but profound idea: the models of the world we construct as children are practical and adequate for everyday life, but they do not bring in the surprising and mind-expanding revelations of modern science. To do that, we must look at the world anew, (...) combining clear thinking with an openness to wonder. This "born again" world is in many ways larger, fuller, and much stranger than it appears. Through an exploration of space, time, matter, and ideas--and equipped with facts, questions, and brilliant speculations--Wilczek guides us through the past, present, and future of fundamental science. Readers will emerge with an expanded vision of our universe. Author Bio: Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His "Wilczek's Universe" column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to briefl y examine one of the fundamental assumptions made in contemporary liberal political philosophy, namely that persons are free and equal. Within the contemporary liberal political thought it would be considered very uncontroversial and even trivial to claim something of the following form: “persons are free and equal” or “people think of themselves as free and equal”. The widespread nature of this assumption raises the question what justifies this assumption, are there good reasons (...) for holding it? After establishing some methodological remarks, including a distinction between having freedom-equality and being free-equal and restricting the domain of discussion to include only a subset of all moral questions, namely the questions of political morality, the paper deals with some conceptual issues concerning this assumption of persons as free and equal, such as how do free-and-equal-making properties relate to person-making properties. It then moves on to examine three broad ways the free-and-equal-mak-ing properties could be established. First, necessary property approaches, which take some necessary feature of persons to be what makes them free and equal (e.g. possessing an immortal soul). Second, contingent property approaches, which take some contingent feature of persons to be what makes them free and equal (e.g heir practise of reasoning). Third, agreement based approaches, which take some agreement or contract among persons to be the basis for their being free and equal (e.g. evolutionary emergence of our treatment of others). Strengths and weaknesses of all approaches will be examined. (shrink)

Starting from the practice of hermeneutic phenomenological writing as it has been advanced by van Manen, this paper addresses the understanding of an ‘experiential givenness’ of the world as basis for our ‘lived writing’; an understanding that is essential to the new phenomenological writer if s/he is to be part of the phenomenological writing process. As the ultimate givenness of the world is the basis of knowledge, we constantly strive to “reach out on life beyond itself” (Gadamer, 1960/1985, p. 62), (...) and thus need the right language to let the phenomenological text speak. The phenomenological writer’s understandings of the chiasm of world and self, the depth of phenomenological awareness, and the interlacement of ethic-aesthetical poetic writing, are qualities discussed as essential for the phenomenological writer to understand in a felt–sensed way in order to write a phenomenological text. A deconstructive approach to (pre)reflective phenomenological writing is put forth by provocatively asking what it means to be involved in, and profoundly enclosed with the “wordliness of the world” (Saevi, 2011a, p. 3). The radical hermeneutic phenomenological openness to what it means to be human and how to encounter the human givenness of phenomenological seeing and writing renders it possible for the writer’s personal voice to evolve. (shrink)

In his private notes written in 1936 (now published as GA82), Heidegger enumerates three “fundamental deceptions” at play in Being and Time (1927). The thrust of these deceptions is twofold: that Dasein is something given and that the task of phenomenology is to describe Dasein in its givenness. These are deceptions, Heidegger claims in 1936, because Dasein is not something given, but can only be reached in a leap, and because the task of phenomenology is not to describe Dasein (...) in its givenness, but to bring about Dasein and the “there,” the site of Being’s happening, through a creative leap-in. Scholars might be inclined to read these deceptions as further evidence for the view that Heidegger in the 1930s abandons phenomenology understood as a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness. This paper argues, to the contrary, that phenomenology for the young Heidegger was never a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness, but always, however obliquely presented throughout the 1920s, a way of participating in the creative unfolding of the site of Being’s happening. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public (...) domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In their recent book Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman and Ross claim: (i) Physics is analytically complete since it is the only science that cannot be left incomplete. (ii) There might not be an ontologically fundamental level. (iii) We should not admit anything into our ontology unless it has explanatory and predictive utility. In this discussion note I aim to show that the ontological commitment in implies that the completeness of no science can be achieved where no fundamental level exists. (...) Therefore, if claim requires a science to actually be complete in order to be considered as physics,, and if Ladyman and Ross's “tentative metaphysical hypothesis ... that there is no fundamental level” is true,, then there simply is no physics. Ladyman and Ross can, however, avoid this unwanted result if they merely require physics to ever strive for completeness rather than to already be complete. (shrink)

Feminist metaphysics is guided by the insight that gender is socially constructed, yet the metaphysics behind social construction remains obscure. Barnes and Mikkola charge that current metaphysical frameworks—including my grounding framework—are hostile to feminist metaphysics. I argue that not only is a grounding framework hospitable to feminist metaphysics, but also that a grounding framework can help shed light on the metaphysics behind social construction. By treating social construction claims as grounding claims, the feminist metaphysician and the social ontologist both gain (...) a way to integrate social construction claims into a general metaphysics, while accounting for the inferential connections between social construction and attendant notions such as dependence and explanation. So I conclude that a grounding framework can be helpful for feminist metaphysics and social ontology. (shrink)

Abstract:While the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce and the twelfth-century Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 lived and worked in radically different contexts, there are nevertheless striking parallels in their view of inquiry. Both appeal to the fundamental nature of reality in order to draw conclusions about the way in which inquiry can be a component of the path toward moral perfection. Yet they prominently diverge in their account not only of the fundamental nature of reality, but also of the way (...) in which we have epistemic access to it. These connections between metaphysical fundamentality or structure and epistemology, it is proposed, have the potential to illuminate current debates in metaphysics. Contemporary approaches that appeal either to grounding relations or to joint-carving ideology in characterizing metaphysical structure, it is proposed, implicitly rest on distinct sets of epistemological presuppositions that resemble the respective views of Zhu Xi or Peirce. (shrink)

Context: The term “second-order cybernetics” was introduced by von Foerster in 1974 as the “cybernetics of observing systems,” both the act of observing systems and systems that observe. Since then, the term has been used by many authors in articles and books and has been the subject of many conference panels and symposia. Problem: The term is still not widely known outside the fields of cybernetics and systems science and the importance and implications of the work associated with second-order cybernetics (...) is not yet widely discussed. I claim that the transition from cybernetics to second-order cybernetics is a fundamental scientific revolution that is not restricted to cybernetics or systems science. Second-order cybernetics can be regarded as a scientific revolution for the general methodology of science and for many disciplines as well. Method: I first review the history of cybernetics and second-order cybernetics. Then I analyze the major contents of von Foerster’s fundamental revolution in science and present it as a general model for an alternative methodology of science. Subsequently, I present an example of practicing second-order socio-cybernetics from within. I describe some consequences of doing science from within, and I suggest some new horizons for second-order cybernetics. Results: Second-order cybernetics leads to a new foundation for conducting science and offers important contributions for a new way of organizing science. It expands the conception of science so that it can more adequately deal with living systems. Implications: Second-order cybernetics extends the traditional scientific approach by bringing scientists within the domain of what is described and analyzed. It provides models of research processes for when the scientist is within the system being studied. In this way it offers a new foundation for research in the social sciences, in management science, and in other fields such as the environmental sciences or the life sciences. Keywords: Epistemology, general scientific methodology, cybernetics, social sciences, action research, Heinz von Foerster. (shrink)

The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these authors maintain that this claim holds across Heidegger’s oeuvre, I purposefully adopt a conservative hermeneutical strategy that focuses on two writings from the 1927–1928 period—Being and Time (...) and the following year’s lecture course translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic—and emphasize the lesson of the ontological difference that Being is always the Being of an entity, to argue that with regards to these texts, at least, an alternative equivocal interpretation is possible in which Being is always said differently. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for the relationship between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Deleuze’s differential ontology. (shrink)

This article examines identity narratives of adult adoptees who have undergone dislocations which make impossible the construction of a seamless narrative of origin. Focusing on the dynamic between their experience of uprootedness and the modernist compulsion for a `fundamental ground' that is `beyond the reach of play', we argue that the pressure to fix identity operates to expose both the tenuousness of the concept of a center or ground and the problems with the postmodernist impulse to celebrate a vision of (...) identity as only play. Identity narratives of adoptees engage both cultural discourses of authenticity and the emotional resonance of these discourses as subjects reformulate the stories of their lives. These reformulations allow us to examine what it means to move beyond conventional understandings of identity as either mobile or fixed to a more complex view that encompasses interrupted movement and the dissonance of multiple forms of rootedness. (shrink)

The study tests the hypothesis that conditional probability judgments can be influenced by causal links between the target event and the evidence even when the statistical relations among variables are held constant. Three experiments varied the causal structure relating three variables and found that (a) the target event was perceived as more probable when it was linked to evidence by a causal chain than when both variables shared a common cause; (b) predictive chains in which evidence is a cause of (...) the hypothesis gave rise to higher judgments than diagnostic chains in which evidence is an effect of the hypothesis; and (c) direct chains gave rise to higher judgments than indirect chains. A Bayesian learning model was applied to our data but failed to explain them. An explanation-based hypothesis stating that statistical information will affect judgments only to the extent that it changes beliefs about causal structure is consistent with the results. (shrink)

Altruism and cynicism are two fundamental algorithms of moral decision-making. This derives from the evolution of cooperative behavior and reciprocal altruism and the need to avoid being taken advantage of. Rushton (1986) developed a self-report scale to measure altruism, however no scale to measure cynicism has been developed for use in ethics research. Following a discussion of reciprocal altruism and cynicism, this article presents an 11-item self-report scale to measure cynicism, developed and validated using a sample of 271 customer-service (...) and sales personnel. (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)

One of the factors characteristic of bourgeois thinking today is the effort to create a "third trend" in philosophy, to "overcome" the conflict between materialism and idealism, and to replace this with some "higher" principle. Such attempts usually conceal outright subjectivism. The effort to find a higher, more "primordial" reality, antecedent to the division into matter and mind, into object and subject, amounts in essence to elevation to an absolute of forms of subjective experience in which awareness of the difference (...) between existence and thought is still lacking. It is consciousness that is declared to be primary, as was the case in earlier, more or less open varieties of idealism, but was not the case in its developed and conceptualized forms . This consciousness is found in non-differentiated, randomly appearing, "directly given" states. (shrink)

The article emphasises that the importance of Herzen’s philosophical input is related to his human-centered approach. There are three areas of investigation that are of particular importance in this context: responsibility, freedom and chance. I argue that according to Herzen, chance, by tearing apart the net of supposedly necessary causes and effects in the physico-social world, proves that the existence of man is best understood as a manifestation of man's free agency. Whereas the lack of freedom would mean that an (...) individual is as determined as the objects that surround him, and consequently, that he cannot be held accountable for his deeds. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

For a long period, no attention was paid in our literature to the circumstance that space and time, as fundamental forms of the existence of matter, cannot be reduced to the characteristics of space and time as viewed in physics. Nor was the fact taken into consideration that sociohistorical being is no less real than the existence of physical things, that the activity of human society is no less objective than the physical interactions of the material world.

On the basis of careful textual exegesis and philosophical analysis, and contrary to the received view, Mark R. Wheeler demonstrates that Aristotle presents and systematically explicates his definition of the essence of the truth in the Metaphysics. Aristotle states the nominal definitions of the terms "truth" and "falsehood" as part of his arguments in defense of the logical axioms. These nominal definitions express conceptions of truth and falsehood his philosophical opponents would have recognized and accepted in the context of dialectical (...) argument. On the basis of these nominal definitions, Aristotle develops his definitions of the essences of truth and falsehood--his "real" definitions of truth and falsehood. Aristotle's methodical exposition of his essential definitions of truth and falsehood in the Metaphysics serves as a well-developed example of how his philosophical inquiry starts with nominal definitions and ends with real definitions. Wheeler also argues for the novel claim that Aristotle defines the most fundamental kind of truth in terms of accurate measurement. Aristotle's metrical conception of truth serves as the theoretical basis for specifying the truth conditions of various assertions, for identifying the sorts of beings implicated in these truth conditions, and for explaining the nature of approximate truth and falsehood. Far from offering us a minimal account of truth, Wheeler shows how Aristotle offers us a sophisticated and metrical theory of truth. (shrink)