In a series of recent publications, Jeffrey King (The nature and structure of content, 2007; Proc Aristot Soc 109(3):257–277, 2009; Philos Stud, 2012) argues for a view on which propositions are facts. He also argues against views on which propositions are set-theoretical objects, in part because such views face Benacerraf problems. In this paper, we argue that, when it comes to Benacerraf problems, King’s view doesn’t fare any better than its set-theoretical rivals do. Finally, we argue that his view faces (...) a further Benacerraf problem, one that threatens to undercut his explanation of why propositions have truth-conditions. If correct, our arguments undercut King’s main motivation for accepting his view over its rivals. (shrink)

Many political realists reject the idea that the first task for political philosophy is to justify the existence of coercive political institutions. Instead, they say, we should begin with the factual existence of CPIs, and ask how they ought to be structured. In holding this view, they adopt a form of political naturalism that is broadly Aristotelian in character. In this article, I distinguish between two forms that this political naturalism might take - what I call a ‘strong’ form, and (...) a ‘weak’ form - and argue that both ought to be rejected. (shrink)

Stel dat een inbreker bij jou thuis alleen de lijsten van de kunstwerken zou wegnemen, en niet de werken zelf. Wat zou er veranderen in je omgang met de kunst? Met dat gedachte-experiment opent de Franse filosoof Jacques Derrida het essay Parergon. Parergon betekent bijzaak in het Grieks. Zoals bijvoorbeeld de lijst van het schilderij, of het kader van een opgehangen foto. Ze behoren niet tot het kunstwerk. En toch zijn ze van groot belang voor hoe het werk bekeken wordt. (...) De belangwekkende tekst van Derrida uit 1974 geeft een centrale rol aan de bijzaak van het kader. Met filosofische acrobatie maneuvreert de denker tussen de grote klassiekers van de kunstfilosofie: Plato, Kant, Hegel en Heidegger. Hij gaat op een speelse manier met hun erfenis om. Woorden worden omgedraaid. Passages die op het eerste gezicht bijzaak lijken, maakt hij tot hoofdrolspelers van zijn betoog. Dit boek presenteert Derridas belangrijkste tekst over beeldende kunst voor de eerste keer in Nederlandse vertaling. Het boek is vormgegeven door de spraakmakende ontwerpster Ines Cox. Vertaler Ben Overlaet schreef een nawoord dat de tekst van de nodige filosofische en historische context voorziet. (shrink)

Millianism and Fregeanism agree that a sentence that contains a name expresses a structured proposition but disagree about whether that proposition contains the object that the name refers to (Millianism) or rather a mode of presentation of that object (Fregeanism). Various problems – about simple sentences, propositional‐attitude ascriptions, and sentences that contain empty names – beset each view. To solve these problems, Millianism can appeal to modes of presentation, and Fregeanism can appeal to objects. But this raises a further problem: (...) namely, to explain why the proposition expressed by a sentence that contains a name matters in some cases but not in others. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effect of female representation on the board of directors on corporate response to stakeholders’ demands for increased public reporting about climate change-related risks. We rely on the Carbon Disclosure Project as a sustainability initiative supported by institutional investors. Greenhouse gas emissions measurement and its disclosure to investors can be thought of as a first step toward addressing climate change issues and reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. Based on a sample of publicly listed Canadian firms over the (...) period 2008–2014, we find that the likelihood of voluntary climate change disclosure increases with women percentage on boards. We also find evidence that supports critical mass theory with regard to board gender diversity. These findings reinforce initiatives being undertaken around the world to promote gender diversity in corporate governance while demonstrating board effectiveness in stakeholder management. (shrink)

The paper provides a new characterization of the concepts of necessity and contingency as they should be used in the historical context. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions. The merits of this suggestion are that it avoids the conflation of causality and necessity (or contingency and chance), that it enables the bracketing of the problem of free will while maintaining the concept of human action making a difference, that it sanctions (...) tendencies without recourse to teleology, and that it recasts the controversy between historicists and anti‐historicists in less dogmatic language. (shrink)

This paper draws on Juvenal's intertextual relationship with comedy to solve a textual crux involving fish-names. The monograph by Ferriss-Hill will no doubt warn scholarship away from the treatment of Roman satire's intertextuality with Old Comedy for a time. Yet, Greek comedy's influence on Roman satire is far from exhausted, and this paper will show that this influence goes more widely, and more deeply, than is usually seen. In time, one might hope for a renewed monographic treatment of the subject.

This article has the aim of bringing some fresh observations to the interpretation of a Martial epigram. Beyond the individual poem, it seeks to read Martial's poetics more broadly, particularly with regard to the presence of Greek avatars, of various kinds, in his poetic production. The strategy will be an exact reading of the literary avatars in 10.4, with an attempt to specify the tone with which individual writers are associated. Once this strategy is developed in the case of well-recognized (...) intertextual models, it will be used to explore an underrated intertext in 10.4. (shrink)

The Defective Image develops the argument that Darwinism is predicated on a profound epistemological flaw and proposes to demonstrate that the limitations in Darwinism can be illustrated by its inability to furnish a credible explanation for communication. The author argues that Darwinism is more faith-based ideology than scientific theory and that its character as a faith-based ideology accounts for much of the rancor that characterizes the current debate over evolution.

This paper intends to illustrate the monuments of the Periklean building programme as embodying acts of temporal configuration; organizing synoptic episodes into an ethno-cultural continuum. A required element to this process is the issue of space, both in its experienced and imagined aspects, as the framework by which temporality is fixed and recounted. By viewing the monuments and accompanying iconography as spatio-temporal configurations, we can see the generation of those elements necessary for the formation of cultural identity via memory. This (...) includes the provision of axial points in time, set in space and wider temporal chronologies, and the election of totemic, and semioticized personages. Moreover, as the configurative action is both framed and informed by its enunciative context, the monuments indicate the promotion of biographical memory, as relating to the Persian Wars, into the register of Athenian cultural memory and temporality. (shrink)

In recent literature on plurals the claim has often been made that the move from singular to plural expressions can be iterated, generating what are occasionally called higher-level plurals or superplurals, often correlated with superplural predicates. I argue that the idea that the singular-to-plural move can be iterated is questionable. I then show that the examples and arguments intended to establish that some expressions of natural language are in some sense higher-level plurals fail. Next, I argue that these and some (...) other expressions should instead be classified as plurals whose reference is articulated, an idea explained and elaborated in the paper. I also show that the related categories of plural and superplural predicates collapse to that of ordinary predicates. In the process we also see that the law of substitutivity salva veritate should be elaborated for cases involving expressions more complex than singular ones. (shrink)

in Values and Morals, eds. Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim (Reidel, 1978), pp. 186-214.

This study examines the moderating effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the association between market orientation and firm performance in the context of an emerging economy. The results from a sample of firms that operate in Dubai indicate that CSR has a synergistic effect on the impact of market orientation on business performance. The results of our research on the moderating effects of CSR on market orientation subsets reveal that although CSR moderates the association between customer orientation and business (...) performance, it does not moderate the association between competitive orientation and interfunctional coordination and performance. The results of this study are discussed, and implications for practitioners and researchers are presented. (shrink)

When it comes to eggs, two aspects are central—taste and nutritional value. And it is when eggs are fresh that these are at their peak. Hate “tastes” worst, that is, its negative intensity is highest, when it is fresh. Yet, when hate is not merely a temporary eruption but a constant feature, it distorts the agent’s behavior and attitudes. As such, its moral value worsens with maturity.

Argues that acceptance of one’s place in the natural world involves an acceptance of free will. Free will is also necessary for the continuation of a social society in that we need to accept the doctrine in order to administer justice.

Is love best when it is fresh? For many, the answer is a resounding “yes.” The intense experiences that characterize new love are impossible to replicate, leading to wistful reflection and even a repeated pursuit of such ecstatic beginnings. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev takes these experiences seriously, but he’s also here to remind us of the benefits of profound love—an emotion that can only develop with time. In The Arc of Love, he provides an in-depth, philosophical account of the experiences that arise (...) in early, intense love—sexual passion, novelty, change—as well as the benefits of cultivating long-term, profound love—stability, development, calmness. Ben-Ze’ev analyzes the core of emotions many experience in early love and the challenges they encounter, and he offers pointers for weathering these challenges. Deploying the rigorous analysis of a philosopher, but writing clearly and in an often humorous style with an eye to lived experience, he takes on topics like compromise, commitment, polyamory, choosing a partner, online dating, and when to say “I love you.” Ultimately, Ben-Ze’ev assures us, while love is indeed best when fresh, if we tend to it carefully, it can become more delicious and nourishing even as time marches on. (shrink)

We study the Magidor iteration of Prikry forcings, and the resulting normal measures on κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\kappa}$$\end{document}, the first measurable cardinal in a generic extension. We show that when applying the iteration to a core model below 0¶\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${0^{\P}}$$\end{document}, then there exists a natural correspondence between the normal measures on κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\kappa}$$\end{document} in the ground model, and those (...) of the generic extension. (shrink)

We prove that in a continuous ℵ₀-stable theory every type-definable group is definable. The two main ingredients in the proof are: 1. Results concerning Morley ranks (i.e., Cantor-Bendixson ranks) from [Ben08], allowing us to prove the theorem in case the metric is invariant under the group action; and 2. Results concerning the existence of translation-invariant definable metrics on type-definable groups and the extension of partial definable metrics to total ones.

The relationship between emotions and argumentation is not always clear. I attempt to clarify this issue by referring to three basic questions: (1) Do emotions constitute a certain kind of argumentation?; (2) Do emotions constitute rational argumentation?; (3) Do emotions constitute efficient argumentation? I will claim that there are many circumstances in which the answer to these questions is positive. After describing such circumstances, the educational implications of the connection between emotions and argumentation will be indicated.

I explain why I think that considerations regarding the opposing rights involved in the practice of circumcision—rights of the individual to bodily integrity and rights of the community to practice its religion—would not help us decide on the desirable policy towards this controversial practice. I then suggest a few measures that are not in conflict with either religious or community rights but that can both reduce the harm that circumcision as currently practiced involves and bring about a change in attitude (...) towards the practice, thus further reducing its frequency. These measures are the compulsory administration of anaesthetics; the banning of the metzitzah b’peh; and having an upper age limit of a few months on nontherapeutic circumcision of minors. I conclude with general considerations on why the steps taken towards the reform of circumcision should be moderate. (shrink)

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active, the passive and “fronting” constructions. But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we (...) conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions. The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

The richness of Putnam's philosophical oeuvre consists not only in the broad spectrum of problems addressed, but also in the transformations and restructuring his positions have undergone over the years. The essays collected in this volume are sensitive to both these dimensions. They discuss Putnam's major philosophical contributions to the theory of meaning, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and mathematics, and moral theory. But, in addition, tracing threads of change and continuity, they analyze the dynamics underlying the (...) unfolding of Putnam's thought. The volume also constitutes a critical introduction to a number of central issues in contemporary philosophy, including quantum logic, realism, functionalism, the 'minds as computer' metaphor, and the fact/value dichotomy. (shrink)

The Discourse of Domination tackles nothing less than the challenge of giving critical theory a new grip on current problems, and restoring the left's faith in the possibility of enlightened social change.

‘Feminist masculinity’ might seem like a contradiction in terms. One might have assumed that we can embrace feminism or embrace masculinity, but not both. If traditional masculinity is contrary to feminist values, a pressing query for feminist men is whether repudiation of traditional masculinity should move one to reject normative masculinity entirely, or to reframe and reclaim it instead. bell hooks and Michael Kimmel each counsel against discarding manhood and masculinity. hooks envisions feminist masculinity as an alternative to patriarchal dominance, (...) with masculinity to be reconstituted in terms of love, integrity, and mutuality; Kimmel advocates moving from immature and traditional masculinities toward justice and democratic manhood, with a new model of masculinity that identifies real men with adulthood and doing the right thing. Neither proposal provides a viable stance for feminist men without collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men’s and women’s identities and experiences. Building on Alcoff’s work on anti-racist whiteness, I suggest that feminist allyship practices ground a normative model of masculinity compatible with, and informed by, feminist values. We may understand allyship masculinities as open-ended feminist approaches to manhood: masculinities predicated on recognizing and responding to, rather than ignoring or accepting, the privileges and expectations distinctive of men under patriarchy. (shrink)

This study addresses the conceptual affinities between F. W. J. Schelling and Félix RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix by focusing on the genesis of the link between nature and thought in their respective philosophies. To achieve this, it considers the role of diagrammatic representation in depicting this link—particularly in the figure of the spiral. I argue that, for Schelling, the spiral is a real pattern that suggests the polarity of the mental and the physical whereas, for RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix, it is a memory of (...) the condition of action and a condition of grace. I cash out this argument by considering not only Schelling’s philosophy of nature, where the spiral is manifest in the vortex of the First Outline of the System of the Philosophy of Nature, and RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s OfHabitHabit, but also RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s essays on fine art, Leonardo da Vinci and the serpentine line. (shrink)

Borrowing from the philosophy of Kierkegaard, one way of understanding the apparent conflict between science and religion is to frame each as a discourse in terms of ‘about’ and ‘of’ languages that appeal to objective-explicit and subjective-tacit aspects of experience. About languages are discourses that are about something else, where science is nominally about nature, empirical events and objective descriptions, whereas religions are about doctrines, rituals, liturgies, institutional structures and so on. About languages are those things that can be stated (...) propositionally, explicitly and objectively. In contrast, of languages refers to lived practices that are socio-historical. It is not just the doing of those practices but also the background conditions that contextualise them. This language is experienced tacitly and subjectively. Whilst we might be able to work from definitions by explicitly-objectively stating what science and religion are about, the tacit-subjective element eludes such reduction. Christianity, for example, may be about Jesus, Love and the Gospels, but we might be unsatisfied in saying that is all that Christianity is. Equally, we might be unsatisfied in claiming science is only about experimental verification, consensus building or falsification when history offers scientific counterexamples that fail to meet our definition. I argue that this unsatisfactory result is due to a metaphysical conflation of two discourses, which then create their own pseudo-problems, such as proving the existence of God as a route to the ‘Truth’ of religion or supplying a scientific basis for being ethical as a way of ‘disproving’ the religious experience. (shrink)

It will be argued that the “problem of demarcation” and the defining of “expertise” share common structural features that can lead to either a type of strong relativism or ultra-scepticism. Appropriating notions from Thomas Kuhn’s. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions it will be argued that an “expert” in a field that has a dominant paradigm is different to an “expert” in a field that has multiple competing paradigms. To illustrate my argument I will look at the field of economics and (...) the competing claims of experts over the likelihood of a global recession circa 2005. To this I will apply Goldman’s criteria for expertise assessment and by-way of a hypothetical non-expert show that this criteria becomes deficient in expertise assessment if we only hold to what I have called a “methodological” definition of expertise. I will also introduce the notion of the “anti-expert” who is an equivalent expert, but their whole field is dependent upon the dominant paradigm for its meaning. That is, its existence is parasitic upon the success of the paradigm, rather than as a “revolutionary science” which looks to overthrown or change the paradigm. (shrink)

Without suggesting that Kant is responsible for the rise of hermeneutical philosophy, there are some developments in his philosophy which are important in relation to hermeneutics. Kant made the distinction between things‐in‐themselves and phenomena or appearances (see Article 2, kant). The world we know depends on a conceptual projection of categories of our mind; we do not have access to the things‐in‐themselves, but only to interpretations of things such as they appear to us, after they have been edited by the (...) understanding. This domestication of rationality led to the fideism of Jacobi: if reason can not bring us to reality, the only instance that can give us any sense of an objective and real world is faith with a kind of “knowledge” which is higher than our rational knowledge. In his early On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) followed Jacobi in denying the pretensions of rational knowledge and determined religious sentiment to be a source of “knowledge” which transcends rational understanding (Vedder 1994). This background of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is important to acknowledge. Therefore in this essay I will emphasize the fragility of hermeneutical knowledge for Schleiermacher. First I shall explain the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher; then I shall examine the relation between hermeneutics and dialectics. (shrink)