We investigate some basic descriptive set theory for countably based completely quasi-metrizable topological spaces, which we refer to as quasi-Polish spaces. These spaces naturally generalize much of the classical descriptive set theory of Polish spaces to the non-Hausdorff setting. We show that a subspace of a quasi-Polish space is quasi-Polish if and only if it is Π20 source in the Borel hierarchy. Quasi-Polish spaces can be characterized within the framework of Type-2 Theory of Effectivity as precisely the countably based spaces (...) that have an admissible representation with a Polish domain. They can also be characterized domain theoretically as precisely the spaces that are homeomorphic to the subspace of all non-compact elements of an ω-continuous domain. Every countably based locally compact sober space is quasi-Polish, hence every ω-continuous domain is quasi-Polish. A metrizable space is quasi-Polish if and only if it is Polish. We show that the Borel hierarchy on an uncountable quasi-Polish space does not collapse, and that the Hausdorff–Kuratowski theorem generalizes to all quasi-Polish spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and BrechtHarvey L. HixCitation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, by Claudette Sartiliot; xiii & 173 pp. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, $15.95 paper.Claudette Sartiliot argues that “the traditional definition of citation” is “inadequate and outmoded” (p. 15). It no longer applies to modernist and postmodernist writers, for whom “quotation represents a definite break with the tradition as well as a (...) means of questioning the nature of the literary text” (p. 3). The traditional definition, derived from classical rhetoric, limits quotation to the purpose of illustration and ornament. In contrast, modernist and postmodernist citational practices, having abandoned the typographical separation of the quotation from the “main” text, question “the concept of text as an autonomous entity” and replace the idea of a book “by the more unbounded word discourse” (p. 20).To illustrate her point, Sartiliot appeals first to Derrida’s Glas, which “relies on citation to such an extent that it can serve as a paradigm for a theory of quotation” (p. 35). By juxtaposing two columns of text and by extensive quotation, Derrida (a) links quotation with violence and with sexual penetration, (b) stages “a game of appearance and disappearance” through which he evades the reader’s attempts to “pin him down” (p. 42), (c) reveals that words contain within themselves other words, (d) blurs boundaries between languages and disciplines, and (e) “demonstrates how meaning is generated through an aleatory scattering of semes” (p. 57).Sartiliot also attends to Joyce and Brecht, who achieve similar ends through their citational practices: “both have elevated ‘plagiarism’ to the level of originality” and both “have shown that writing is always and inevitably quoting” (p. 75). Because everything in Finnegans Wake is a quotation—even the characters—Joyce undercuts meaning: a text without boundaries cannot be ingested. Finnegans Wake is like quantum physics: “neither intimated that God was dead, but both confronted the world with a model of representation that intimated that ‘God played dice’” (p. 84).Brecht’s characters, like those of Finnegans Wake, are quotations rather than originals: “empty signifiers” whose very names are not their own, they challenge “the bourgeois myth of the identity and continuity of the subject” (p. 130). [End Page 367] As Copernicus removes humanity from the center of the universe and Marx removes humanity from the center of history, so Brecht removes humanity from the center of theatrical representation, revealing that “the subject as a fully present identity and entity” is delusory, and humanity is “a linguistic (and thus political) construct” (p. 124). In sum, by their citational practices Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht question “the notions of origin, closure, and authorship associated with the conception of the book” (p. 124).Citation and Modernity contains moments of insight. For instance, Sartiliot says of Finnegans Wake that “while Joyce was doing away with quotation marks in his own texts, he was forcing his critics to surround most of their critical terms with quotation marks, as a sore sign [sic] of their inability to find the right word to describe what he was doing” (p. 75). In other respects, however, her book is not satisfying. The most obvious problem is that her own citational practices contradict her thesis. After writers like Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, she says, we can no longer return to traditional quotation based on classical rhetoric, yet her own quotation is strictly traditional: it illustrates and ornaments, and maintains a clear distinction between her own words and those belonging to someone else.There are other failures to live up to the book’s own standards. Sartiliot claims that the chief purpose of quotation is to attack the authority of the quoted father, to “subvert the notions of filiation and tradition” (p. 149) and “eclipse the precursor” (p. 8), yet her own book steadfastly upholds filiation and tradition. From the cover, which makes much of her having been a student of Derrida, to the pervasive jargon (totalization, hymen, logocentrism, dissemination, etc.), the book defers all too consistently to the authority of its father, and consequently fails to challenge its readers.Harvey L. HixKansas City Art InstituteCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Belgian Constitution of 1831 marked a decisive step in the continental evolution from Restoration constitutional monarchy, based on the monarchical principle, towards the establishment of parliamentary constitutional monarchy. At the time, the new balance of power desired by the Belgian revolutionaries was captured by the phrase ‘republican monarchy’. It is remarkable that this concept, despite being so central to the founding fathers’ deliberations, has hardly been commented upon by later historians and public lawyers. This article aims to reconstruct the (...) origin, meaning and uses of this concept in the context of the 1830 revolutionary wave. French revolutionary veteran general Lafayette was responsible for popularizing republican monarchy in the July Revolution, although the term’s origins went back to eighteenth-century debates on the reform of absolute monarchy. Lafayette used it to summarize the institutional demands of the republican movement vis-à-vis king Louis Philippe. Its transnational migration to the Belgian context subsequently entailed a shift in meaning which will be charted through an analysis of the Belgian constituent and public debates. Finally, the reasons for the concept’s sudden disappearance from the political stage will be addressed. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

"This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition..., offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship"--Front flap of dust jacket, volume 1.

This review considers Semantic Syntax and Slavic Transformational Syntax particularly in the light of their contributions to the theory of grammar. Semantic Syntax is shown to have a polemical bias against the Aspects model and toward generative semantics. Its editor's position in the constellation of semantic logicians is defined; pro-Chomskian objections to the logical-cognitive semantic theory are advanced. Slavic Transformational Syntax is comprised of essays with a wide range of theoretical stances; the insights of the radical case grammar of James (...) Miller are compared with those of Semantic Syntax. Remarks on deixis by Richard Brecht are discussed in relationship to semantic-logic approaches. Certain similarities of Jakobsonian functionalism and generative semantics are discussed. (shrink)

forthcoming in R. Cameron, B. Hale and A. Hoffmann (ed.s), The Logic, Epistemology and Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford University Press. Presents a concept-grounding account of modal knowledge.

Why do moral people so often fail to act morally? Standard scientific answers point to poor moral judgment (based on deficient character development, reason, or intuition) or to situational pressure. I consider a third possibility: a relative lack of truly moral motivation and emotion. What has been taken for moral motivation is often instead a subtle form of egoism. Recent research provides considerable evidence for moral hypocrisy—motivation to appear moral while, if possible, avoid the cost of actually being moral—but very (...) little evidence for moral integrity—motivation to actually be moral. The lack of truly moral motivation may, in turn, be linked to a lack of truly moral emotion, at least in response to violation of certain moral standards. (shrink)

Анотація. У статті проаналізовані досягнення Соціального Вчительства Католицької Церкви, репрезентовані працями Лева ХІІІ, Пія ХІ, Пія ХІІ, Івана Павла ІІ, що розкривають змістовні характеристики поняття «принцип субсидіарності», його роль і значення в системі християнських цінностей. Принцип субсидіарності робить можливими такі взаємовідносини в соціальному житті, коли спільнота вищого порядку не втручається у внутрішнє життя спільноти нижчого порядку, перебираючи на себе належні тій функції; заради спільного добра, спільного блага вона надає їй у разі потреби підтримку й допомогу, узгоджуючи у такий спосіб її (...) взаємодію з іншими соціальними структурами. Принцип субсидіарності скеровує соціальну практику на утвердження спільного блага в людському співтоваристві. Поширення і застосування принципу субсидіарності протистоїть небезпеці «одержавлення» суспільства та найзагрозливіших проявів колективізму, обмежує абсолютизацію влади, бюрократизацію державних і соціокультурних структур, стає одним із гарантів дотримання прав і свобод громадян своєї країни. (shrink)

I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology typically pose questions about individuation by asking “what is an individual?” For example, we ask, “what is an individual species”, “what is an individual organism”, and “what is an individual gene?” In the first part of this chapter, I present my account of the gene concept and how it is used in investigative practices in order to motivate a more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking “what is a gene?”, I ask: “how do biologists individuate genes?”, “for what (...) purposes?”, and “do their practices of individuating genes serve these purposes?" In the second part of this chapter, I propose that we use this approach when analyzing concepts of organisms and biological individuals. Following philosophical pragmatism, I argue that we should abstain from attempts to situate individuation of Darwinian individuals or of holobionts in a philosophy of nature. Instead, we should analyze practices of individuating organisms in terms of three-place relations between the world, ideas, and human purposes and actions. I conclude with three lessons: an ontological, an epistemological, and a meta-philosophical lesson, which I suggest, apply to philosophy of science generally and to philosophy and metaphysics at large. (shrink)

In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.