From Nietzsche's early writings to those marking the end of his intellectual life, the dynamics of what he called "physiology" permeate virtually every facet of his philosophical enterprise. In the following investigation, these dynamics are explored as an interpretive key to not only the dominant themes but also the philosophical motive underlying Nietzsche's philosophy. This motive is described in terms of his diagnosis and attempted cure for the disease of nihilism. In this we maintain that Nietzsche's foremost philosophical task is (...) that of a cultural physician. ;In pursuit of this theme, Nietzsche's "clinical standpoint" is explored and applied with regard to Socrates and Jesus Christ as two case studies in decadence. These two "cases" are a simultaneous physiological investigation into both the ancient Greek and Hebrew cultures. ;This investigation concludes with a detailed analysis of the physiological significance of the Revaluation of all Values, Eternal Recurrence, the Overman and Dionysus as integral to curing the sickness of nihilism. (shrink)

Benefit-cost analysis is typically defined as an implementation of the potential Pareto criterion, which requires inclusion of any impact for which individuals have willingness to pay. This definition is incompatible with the exclusion of impacts such as rights and distributional concerns, for which individuals do have WTP. I propose a new definition: BCA should include only impacts for which consumer sovereignty should govern. This is because WTP implicitly preserves consumer sovereignty, and is thus only appropriate for ‘sovereignty-warranting’ impacts. I compare (...) the high cost of including non-sovereignty-warranting impacts to the relatively low cost of excluding sovereignty-warranting impacts. (shrink)

Si Pierre Bourdieu condamne les sociologies qui ramènent tout à l'économie, il a lui-même un vocabulaire théorique qui semble dériver de l'économie. Comment expliquer ce paradoxe? Cet ouvrage mène l'enquête et s'interroge philosophiquement sur le sens qu'il convient de donner, dans son corpus, au concept d'économie. Nous tentons alors de redéfinir une constellation de notions que l'on réserve généralement à la discipline économique standard. La valeur, l'échange, l'intérêt, l'investissement, le capital ou encore le crédit ont des significations élargies sur lesquelles (...) nous nous proposons de réfléchir afin de lever les équivoques propres à la pensée de Bourdieu. Mais ce livre a également une ambition critique. Nous aimerions montrer que les économistes usuels doivent abandonner leur prétention au monopole sur ce lexique. Ils ne l'appréhendent en réalité que dans une sphère restreinte de pratiques, qui doit être de nouveau articulée à une économie symbolique étendue."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This book excavates the political thought embedded in Heidegger’s philosophy. Though keenly aware of the controversy over Heidegger’s National Socialism, Ward highlights the political ramifications of Heidegger’s thought as opposed to entering the polarized debate concerning the “Heidegger Case.” Chapter 1 accesses Heidegger’s political thought via the distinction Heidegger made between science and philosophy. This leads to Heidegger’s view that modern “culture,” is basically “... superficial and merely contemporary. ‘Liberalism’ will be its political embodiment”. Chapter 2 pursues these themes with (...) special emphasis on Heidegger’s opposition to any naturalistic or biological interpretation of human beings, and this in contrast with the racism of National Socialism. The third chapter describes how, for Heidegger, the rank of a people can be determined in terms of how that people comes to terms with the question of Being. Those who have not fallen away from this question still stand at the highest rank, while those who have are spiralling into decline. As in chapter 2, Nietzsche looms large in this chapter, and one gets the distinct impression here that Heidegger has taken up the Nietzschean project of restoring an order of rank sans physiologie. In chapter 4, Ward articulates “the decisive difference between Heidegger’s National Socialism and that of the National Socialists themselves”. This difference is explored through Heidegger’s interpretation of work—both physical and intellectual—as a means to understanding Heidegger’s critique of Marxism, the role of the university, and, therewith, the primarily philosophical foundation of the sciences within the spiritual mission of the German people. (shrink)

Research in person and face perception has broadly focused on group-level consensus that individuals hold when making judgments of others. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that individual variation is larger than shared, stimulus-level variation for many social trait judgments. Despite this insight, little research to date has focused on building and explaining individual models of face perception. Studies and methodologies that have examined individual models are limited in what visualizations they can reliably produce to either noisy and blurry (...) or computer avatar representations. Methods that produce low-fidelity visual representations inhibit generalizability by being clearly computer manipulated and produced. In the present work, we introduce a novel paradigm to visualize individual models of face judgments by leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision methods. Our proposed method can produce a set of photorealistic face images that correspond to an individual's mental representation of a specific attribute across a variety of attribute intensities. We provide a proof-of-concept study which examines perceived trustworthiness/untrustworthiness and masculinity/femininity. We close with a discussion of future work to substantiate our proposed method. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated how emotion resembling cues in the face help shape impression formation. Perhaps most notable in the literature to date, has been work suggesting that gender-related appearance cues are visually confounded with certain stereotypic expressive cues. Only a couple studies to date have used computer vision to directly map out and test facial structural resemblance to emotion expressions using facial landmark coordinates to estimate face shape. In one study using a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect emotional (...) expressions structural resemblance to a specific expression on a non-expressive face was found to influence trait impressions of others. In another study, a connectionist model trained to detect emotional expressions found different emotion-resembling cues in male vs. female faces. Despite this seminal work, direct evidence confirming the theoretical assertion that humans likewise utilize these emotion-resembling cues when forming impressions has been lacking. Across four studies, we replicate and extend these prior findings using new advances in computer vision to examine gender-related, emotion-resembling structure, color, and texture and their impact on gender-stereotypic impression formation. We show that all three are meaningfully related to human impressions of emotionally neutral faces. Further when applying the computer vision algorithms to experimentally manipulate faces, we show that humans derive similar impressions from them as did the computer. (shrink)

In _The Smile of Tragedy_, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. (...) Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

A moral Kantian approach can be developed to deal with the nonidentity problem with regard to environmental intergenerationl justice—at least in cases of depletion or risky policy. Being a duty-oriented moral theory, this approach allows both that people coming into existence in a nonidentity situation can be glad to exist while simultaneously taking into account depletion or risky policy, to which their existence is causally related, as possibly being morally wrong because of a violation of moral duties.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 564-566, July 2012.

Pourrait-on enrichir la théorie des actes de langage pour traiter du discours? Wittgenstein et Searle ont signalé des difficultés. Beaucoup de discours n’ont pas de but conversationnel, leur arrière-plan est indéfiniment ouvert, ils contiennent des énonciations dépourvues de pertinence et de félicité, et ainsi de suite. À mes yeux, l’objectif principal de la pragmatique du discours est d’analyser la structure et la dynamique des jeux de langage à but conversationnel. Pareils jeux de langage sont indispensables à tout genre de discours. (...) La logique peut analyser leurs conditions de félicité car leur poursuite obéit à des règles constitutives. Beaucoup d’énonciations ne sont pas littérales ou sérieuses. Les unités de la conversation sont les actes illocutoires tentés, qu’ils soient littéraux, sérieux ou non. Comme Montague, je préconise l’usage de formalismes logiques en pragmatique. J’expliquerai comment il convient de réviser et développer les logiques intensionnelle et illocutoire, la logique des attitudes et de l’action afin de modéliser notre capacité de dialoguer. Je comparerai mon approche à d’autres sur le plan de la méthodologie, des hypothèses et des enjeux.Could we enrich speech-act theory to deal with discourse? Wittgenstein and Searle pointed out difficulties. Most dialogues lack a conversational purpose, their background is indefinitely open, they contain irrelevant and infelicitous utterances, etc. In my view, the primary aim of discourse pragmatics is to analyze the structure and dynamics of language-games whose type is provided with an internal conversational goal. Such games are indispensable to any kind of discourse. Logic can analyze their felicity-conditions because they are conducted according to systems of constitutive rules. Speakers often speak non-literally or non-seriously. The units of conversation are attempted illocutions whether literal, serious or not. I will show how to construct speaker-meaning from sentence-meaning, conversational background and maxims. Like Montague, I believe that we need the resources of formalisms and of logic in pragmatics. I will explain how to further develop intensional and illocutionary logics, the logic of attitudes and of action in order to characterize our ability to converse. I will compare my approach to others as regards hypotheses, methodology and issues. (shrink)

La Unión de Consumidores de España (UCE) es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro fundada en el año 1984 gracias a la integración en una misma institución de las diferentes asociaciones de consumidores de ámbito regional y local. UCE, al igual que otras asociaciones de consumidores, nace en plena transición al amparo de lo establecido en los artículos 22 y 23 de la Constitución Española.

The playful re-working of the idiomatic expression ‘the apple of my eye’ to the ‘eye/I of my Apple’ provides the answer to the question on technology, emphasising its importance for societies, specifically the South African society, and embodied personhood, and at the same time its determinative contextual character. The answer to the question on technology firstly takes as the vantage point a few personal comments by the author in relation to the question at hand. Secondly, brief remarks on technology and (...) approaches to the question are made before the focus on ethics is explicated and motivated. Lastly, a deep concern is identified and is poignantly described as the probable wicked technologisation of the African soul. (shrink)

In her work Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Marilyn McCord Adams offers an account of the problem of evil that deals with the interaction between certain types of evil and the human capacity for meaning production. This paper attempts to consider certain implications of her presuppositions and, in so doing, to uncover several challenges to her broader project entailed by said implications. More specifically, this paper considers, within the context of Adams’ broader project, the status of perpetrators of (...) horrendous evils with respect to their ability to conceive of said evils, evils that destroy meaning-making capacities in their victims and evils that twist and subvert the meaning-making processes of their victims or observers. (shrink)

This paper provides a mathematical model of scientific discovery. It is shown in the context of this model that any discovery problem that can be solved by a computable scientist can be solved by a computable scientist all of whose conjectures are finitely axiomatizable theories.

Eu irei me limitar à leitura cuidadosa e austera da monogra"a sobre a Antropologia pragmática de Kant, de autoria de M. Foucault. Minha intenção é empreender um trabalho de crítica no interior dos estudos kantianos, diante dos quais tratarei Foucault como kantiano, como estudioso de Kant, como um acadêmico que procura apresentar uma exegese interpretativa do texto kantiano e pretende, com isso, a legitimidade do seu trabalho. Isto irá me permitir avaliar a interpretação foucaultiana de Kant com o intuito de (...) reconsiderar o lugar e o alcance da Antropologia Pragmática na constituição da "gura do homem como objeto das ciências. (shrink)

This volume contains three essays of interrelated themes: vegetarianism, ecology, and business ethics. Each theme is examined from a halachic, ethical, philosophical, and socioeconomic viewpoint and is closely analyzed within the broad spectrum of Judaic sources, leading to a number of practical conclusions which seek to illuminate the challenging situations in each field.

I scrutinize the relationship between the way emotions give rise to modal judgement and the metaphysical necessity we ascribe to the latter. While moral concepts are often described as response-dependent, I propose to analyse them as response-enabled or grokking. I discuss how grokkingness is embedded in the emotional mechanisms that provoke imaginative resistance; how it shapes our manifest image of the world and the place of morality in it; the latter’s deep contingency as contrasted to its metaphysical necessity; and what (...) is essential to a moral outlook notwithstanding deep contingency. (shrink)