This article discusses how everyday speech was mediated in early modern England: how speech was registered and remediated through various cultural techniques making it recognizable as a distinct linguistic medium and how these processes intersected with literary writing. A contribution to the study of the early modern English mediascape and its literary ramifications, this essay is also an effort to think historically about media change and literary transformation both as they happen and as they become visible over time. In what (...) follows, I trace the relationship between speech and the cultural techniques that engage with speech as the medium of everyday face-to-face interaction. Although my question is ultimately about speech, not poetry, and although the larger question I am interested in is not about artistic production but about media and cultural techniques more broadly, literary—poetic and especially dramatic—writing is nevertheless central to my essay. My argument grows out of the insights of twentieth-century literary criticism, whose observations about the relationship between speech and writing in 1600 were recognizably informed by the discourse network of their own moment and by their own concerns with modernity and its origins. So even as I am making an argument about the media constellation of a particular moment (an argument that could perhaps be described as crudely historicist), I am also curious about how the features of that moment became visible under different historical conditions or were imprinted by different media constellations and also how the defamiliarizing effect of the new may have made the past look familiar. (shrink)

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias. This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children and adults. The goals of this study were to examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and examine the development of (...) an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers’ compared to peers’ faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver. (shrink)

This article deals with some phenomena of the Hungarian legal language from a historical point of view, with special regard to the terminology of private law going back to Roman law tradition. The author aims, on the one hand, to present the historical background of the current terminology of Hungarian private law by means of some representative examples. On the other hand, it is attempted at demonstrating that “false friends” and some further misunderstandings in the current terminology of Hungarian private (...) law can be led back to the historical determination of the concepts/terms in question. A certain Hungarian legal language existed already in the 16th c., however it reached the common European level by the middle of the 19th c. This development took place mainly under the influence of the Austrian and German law and legal science. Due to the translation of foreign legal terms to Hungarian since the 19th c. there emerged some “global” difficulties of legal terminology also in the Hungarian legal language. As the most important example, the reception of bona fides can be mentioned. It was an amendment of the Hungarian Civil Code in 2006 which tried to eliminate the misunderstandings as regards the principle of good faith conceived formerly by many Hungarian jurists exclusively in subjective sense. The history of reception of the German notions of Gültigkeit and Wirksamkeit in Hungary is extremely intriguing, too. Hungarian jurists did not follow the pattern of the German BGB but developed this pair created by Windscheid by drawing a clear distinction between the validity and effectiveness of legal transactions, similar to the Italian terminology. Sometimes the reception of German notions happened in a less successful way. Despite the important foreign, especially German impacts, the Hungarian legal language is an autonomous one having several remarkable features which deserve attention also in comparison with terminology of the Western legal cultures. (shrink)

There are two approaches to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956: to view it as a national or as a social affair; a fight for national independence or for a revolutionary transformation of society. The two approaches can be collapsed into a comprehensive one in the name of autonomy, and this is what Feher and Heller did, remaining mindful, however, of the two major and irreducible aspects of the actual events and their motivating forces. Their main argument is threefold. The people (...) in revolt wanted to establish a “dual system” of a socialist economy and a political pluralism; they wanted a renegotiation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements; and in the course of the revolution they achieved a national consensus that could actively negotiate a compromise implied by both major aims. (shrink)

Mutually beneficial exchanges in markets can be exploitative because one party takes advantage of an underlying injustice. For instance, employers of sweatshop workers are often accused of exploiting the desperate conditions of their employees, although the latter accept the terms of their employment voluntarily. A weakness of this account of exploitation is its tendency for over-inclusiveness. Certainly, given the prevalence of global and domestic socioeconomic inequalities, not all exchanges that take place against background injustices should be considered exploitative. This paper (...) offers a framework to identify exploitation in mutually beneficial exchange, focusing on the case of sweatshop labor. It argues that an employer can be viewed as taking unfair advantage of an underlying injustice if and only if the employer’s surplus from the exchange in the unjust state of affairs exceeds the surplus it could maximally obtain in a just state of affairs. The paper illustrates the applicability of this framework using three different conceptions of justice and argues that it is superior to microlevel accounts of exploitation that regard background justice as irrelevant. The paper concludes by describing some normative implications that follow from judging an exchange exploitative. (shrink)

The prevailing justification for constitutional institutions is that such institutions reflect and enable rational solutions to social problems. However, constitutions are constructed through emotionally driven processes that reflect both the public sentiments of the day and, at least to some extent, basic moral emotions. Historical examples from France and the United States demonstrate the role of such emotional processes in shaping the design of liberal constitutionalism. Further, constitutional law both sets and regulates emotional display rules; favors or disfavors certain emotional (...) commitments; and, particularly through the formulation of fundamental human rights, reflects and shapes emotional moral judgments. The emotional contributors to constitutional design and interpretation may be called “constitutional sentiments.”. (shrink)

Bioeconomy solutions potentially reduce the utilization demand of natural resources, and therefore, represent steps towards circular economy, but are not per se equivalent to sustainability. Thus, production may remain to be achieved against losses in natural resources or at other environmental costs, and materials produced by bioeconomy are not necessarily biodegradable. As a consequence, the assumption that emerging bioeconomy by itself provides an environmentally sustainable economy is not justified, as technologies do not necessarily become sustainable merely through their conversion to (...) using renewable resources for their production. A source of the above assumption is that the utility of bioeconomy is mostly assessed in interaction between technology developers and economists, resulting in biased assessment with private commercial technology benefits being included, but environmental costs, especially longer term ones, not being sufficiently considered in the economic models. A possible solution to this conceptual contradiction may come from bioethics, as a strong concept in environmental ethics is that no technological intervention can be imposed on nature beyond its receptive capacity. To achieve a better balanced analysis of bioeconomy, environmental and ecological, as well as non-economic social aspects, need to be included in the overall assessment. (shrink)

This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...) combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual. Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason. (shrink)

Neanderthal extinction is a matter of intense debate. It has been suggested that demography (as opposed to environment or competition) could alone provide a sufficient explanation for the phenomenon. We argue that demography cannot be a ‘stand-alone’ or ‘alternative’ explanation of token extinctions as demographic features are entangled with competitive and environmental factors, and further because demography should not be conflated with neutrality.

Women as individuals experience subtle discrimination regarding career development opportunities as evidenced by research on the Glass Ceiling. This paper looks at the ramifications of technology, specifically the Internet, and how it affects women’s career opportunities.

IntroductionIt is clear that forgiveness is closely related to emotions. Bishop Butler’s “forswearing of resentment” is still the definition most philosophical works on the subject take as their point of departure. Some others disagree but usually only insofar as they focus on another reactive emotion – e.g., moral hatred, disappointment, anger – which we overcome when we forgive.More specifically, according to Roberts the emotion we overcome in forgiveness is anger, see Robert C. Roberts, “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995): 289–306. (...) According to Richards, forgiveness involves overcoming a whole range of negative emotions including sadness, disappointment, frustration as well as resentment; see Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics 99 (1988): 77–97. According to Sher, forgiveness involves overcoming blame; see George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).There is something striking about the negativity of this approach. Forgiveness i. (shrink)

The thirty year long friendship between Imre Lakatos and the classic scholar and historian of mathematics Árpád Szabó had a considerable influence on the ideas, scholarly career and personal life of both scholars. After recalling some relevant facts from their lives, this paper will investigate Szabó's works about the history of pre-Euclidean mathematics and its philosophy. We can find many similarities with Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics and science, both in the self-interpretation of early axiomatic Greek mathematics as Szabó reconstructs it, (...) and in the general overview Szabó provides us about the turn from the intuitive methods of Greek mathematicians to the strict axiomatic method of Euclid's Elements. As a conclusion, I will argue that the correct explanation of these similarities is that in their main works they developed ideas they had in common from the period of intimate intellectual contact in Hungarian academic life in the mid-twentieth century. In closing, I will recall some relevant features of this background that deserve further research. (shrink)

The Stufenbaulehre is a central and founding element of the Pure Theory of Law . Most of the criticism on SL targets the idea of the basic norm , however unjustified. This criticism stems from a misunderstanding of the presumptive character of the basic norm and of the whole legal order. Others have criticised the relativisation of the difference between individual and general norms, Kelsen's monism, and the determination of the validity of a norm by a single other norm. This (...) can be refuted as well - either because their critique does not concern an essential part of SL , or because SL can be saved by making a small modification to it. However, there is one lethal criticism. It concerns the founding thought of the whole SL, i.e. the derivation of validity. In a law-making process, there is never a derivation of validity: the logical result of a law-making process is only a norm saying ,,The new norm ought to be valid.“ Whether the new norm is in fact valid, is a question of efficacy in the realm of the Ought . This has serious consequences: Without this derivation SL can not survive, and without SL, PTL can not survive either. Some valuable parts of PTL might be used in other legal theories, but these are nothing but transplanted organs from the dead body of PTL whose heart - SL - can no longer keep the body alive. (shrink)

This essay discusses a less known period of Karl Mannheim's life, namely the period he spent in Hungary. I attempt to point out that the career of the young Mannheim, starting from a philosophical interest and continuing with a sociological one, is continuous. His first published works and letters prove that in the period preceding his emigration to Germany in 1919 he was concerned with questions that received their mature form in his sociology of knowledge. They include primarily the question (...) of culture, that of perspective-boundedness (relativity) of cognition, interpretation and the problem of intellectuals. Despite changing disciplines from philosophy to sociology, the continuity of his oeuvre can be shown. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of how economic and political institutions can limit the applicability of principles of justice even in non-relational cosmopolitan conceptions. It shows that fundamental principles of justice underdetermine fair distributive shares as well as justice -based requirements. It argues that institutions partially constitute the content of justice by determining distributive shares and by resolving indeterminacies about justice -based requirements resulting from strategic interaction and disagreement. In the absence of existing institutions principles of justice might not be (...) applicable for assessing distributions or guiding individual action and institutional design. Hence, accepting a specific cosmopolitan conception of justice is insufficient to settle global distributive questions. (shrink)

The idea that language is metaphoric in nature has often been suggested or stated since Vico and Rousseau. Derrida, too, often writes about metaphor and the impression he gives is that he is arguing for the metaphoric nature of both thought, whether philosophic or not, and language. Interpreters like de Man or Culler have helped to spread this impression. If it is correct, Derrida shares a pan-metaphoric view of language and whatever can be made with it. It is useful to (...) refer to Derrida's view because in my opinion he has been very good at saying what language is, even if he has been very much in the wrong in seeing no distinction between language and language use. Let us consider first what he has been good at. (shrink)

The article analyzes ethnic data collection pertaining to criminal justice in Hungary. With such a sensitive and delicate issue at hand, Hungary has decided on an evasive approach, resisting ethnic data collection by law enforcement authorities. The author argues that this approach has become one of the obstacles in fighting discrimination and ethnic profiling. Moreover, Hungary’s restrictive approach to ethno-national data classification also causes severe constitutional problems in other, noncriminal legal circumstances, where ethnic data is used in the context of (...) additional rights and affirmative protection provided for ethno-national minorities. The first part of the article describes general problems relating to ethnic data collection and analyses of the Hungarian minority protection framework, in particular, the minority self-government structure (a unique constitutional institution). The second part focuses on the criminal justice system; the author’s aim is to show that prohibiting the official recognition and collection of data on ethnicity by criminal justice authorities has potentially ethnically discriminatory consequences. (shrink)

Individualists hold that moral responsibility can be ascribed to single human beings only. An important collectivist objection is that individualism is morally deficient because it leaves a normative residue. Without attributing responsibility to collectives there remains a “deficit in the accounting books” (Pettit). This collectivist strategy often uses judgment aggregation paradoxes to show that the collective can be responsible when no individual is. I argue that we do not need collectivism to handle such cases because the individualist analysis leaves no (...) responsibility-deficit. Harm suffered in such situations can have only two sources. Harm is either due to culpable wrongdoing by individuals. Harm is then redressed by holding these individuals responsible. Or harm does not result from culpable wrongdoing. Such harm may have to be redressed too, but not because anyone is responsible for it. Therefore, the charge of moral insensitivity against individualist accounts can be rejected. Furthermore, in the last section of the chapter I will show that collectivist talk about moral responsibility can be used for ethically questionable purposes as well. Collectivists cannot claim the moral high ground. (shrink)

Many believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. This paper focuses on epistemic aspects of the putative link between emotions and value by asking two related questions. First, how exactly are emotions supposed to latch onto or track values? And second, how well suited are emotions to detecting or learning about values? To answer the first question, the paper develops the heuristics-model of emotions. This approach models emotions as sui generis heuristics of value. The empirical plausibility of the heuristics-model (...) is demonstrated using evidence from experimental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience. The model is used then to answer the second question. If emotions are indeed heuristics of value, then it follows that emotions can be an important and useful source of information about value. However, emotions will not be epistemically superior in the sense of being the highest court of appeal for the justification of axiological beliefs (the latter view is referred to as the Epistemic Dependence Thesis, or EDT for short). The paper applies the heuristics-model to celebrated cases from the philosophy of emotions literature arguing that while the heuristics-model offers a good explanation of typical patterns of emotional reactions in such cases, advocates of EDT will have a hard time accounting for these patterns. The paper also shows that the conclusions drawn from special cases generalize. The paper ends by arguing that skepticism about the metaethical significance of emotions is compatible with a commitment to the importance of emotions in first-order normative ethics. (shrink)

A simple inductive argument shows natural languages to have infinitly many sentences, but workers in the field have uncovered clear evidence of a diverse group of ‘exceptional’ languages from Proto-Uralic to Dyirbal and most recently, Pirahã, that appear to lack recursive devices entirely. We argue that in an information-theoretic setting non-recursive natural languages appear neither exceptional nor functionally inferior to the recursive majority.

The theory and practice of constitutionalism is tightly interwoven with references and appeals to values. However, these references and appeals frequently remain undertheorized and are seldom connected directly to philosophical theories of value. This chapter outlines some ways in which such connections might be established.

Sentimentalists believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. Epistemic sentimentalists subscribe to what I call the final-court-of-appeal view: emotional experience is ultimately necessary and can be sufficient for the justification of evaluative beliefs. This paper rejects this view defending a moderate version of rationalism that steers clear of the excesses of both “Stoic” rationalism and epistemic sentimentalism. We should grant that emotions play a significant epistemic role in justifying evaluations. At the same time, evaluative justification is not uniquely or (...) especially dependent on emotions. The anti-sentimentalist argument developed in this paper is based on the indeterminacy thesis. The thesis states that the evaluative properties picked out by our emotional responses are too indeterminate to play a central role in our evaluative practices. I argue that while the indeterminacy thesis undermines the final-court-of-appeal view it supports the claim that emotional responses can provide prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs. (shrink)