The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final (...) chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

Dimitri Lorrain est chercheur en sciences humaines (EHESS), spécialisé dans l'étude de l'art et de la littérature (il a publié des articles sur Michel-Ange, Alberti, ainsi que sur l'art des «?nouveaux commanditaires?»). Installé à Francfort-sur-le-Main, il chronique la vie intellectuelle allemande pour la revue Panorama des idées.

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its (...) Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In the literature on the nature and role of cognitive representation, three positions are taken across the conceptual landscape: robust realism, primitivism, and eliminativism. Recently, a fourth alternative that tries to avoid the shortcomings of traditional views has been proposed: content pragmatism. My aim is to defend pragmatism about content against some recent objections moved against the view. According to these objections, content pragmatism fails to capture the role played by representation in the cognitive sciences; and/or is an unstable view (...) that ends up collapsing into one of the traditional alternatives. I argue that those arguments fail. I show that content pragmatism has as much claim to descriptive adequacy as the traditional theories. Moreover, I defend the robustness of the view by arguing that it does not collapse into any of the traditional positions. Content pragmatism therefore offers a valid and coherent account of the nature of representational content. (shrink)

Computational perspectivalism has been recently proposed as an alternative to mainstream accounts of physical computation, and especially to the teleologically-based mechanistic view. It takes physical computation to be partly dependent on explanatory perspectives and eschews appeal to teleology in helping individuate computational systems. I assess several varieties of computational perspectivalism, showing that they either collapse into existing non-perspectival views or end up with unsatisfactory or implausible accounts of physical computation. Computational perspectivalism fails, therefore, to be a compelling alternative to perspective-independent (...) theories of computation in physical systems. I conclude that a teleologically-based, non-perspectival mechanistic account of physical computation is to be preferred. 1Introduction 2The Mechanistic View of Computation 2.1Teleological functions and meeting the desiderata 3Varieties of Perspectivalism 4Computational Perspectivalism 4.1Computational perspectivalism and pancomputationalism 4.2Computational perspectivalism and miscomputation 5The Varieties of Computational Perspectivalism Assessed 5.1Innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2Non-innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2.1Computational instrumentalism 5.2.2Ontic perspectivalism 6Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Debate on the nature of representation in cognitive systems tends to oscillate between robustly realist views and various anti‐realist options. I defend an alternative view, deflationary realism, which sees cognitive representation as an offshoot of the extended application to cognitive systems of an explanatory model whose primary domain is public representation use. This extended application, justified by a common explanatory target, embodies idealisations, partial mismatches between model and reality. By seeing representation as part of an idealised model, deflationary realism avoids (...) the problems with robust realist views, while keeping allegiance to realism. (shrink)

1. The opening sentences of Being and Time (§1) indicate that, according to Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle raised the question of being. A page later, Heidegger asserts that Aristotle discovered th...

The author reflects on the future of Catholic health care by looking at the essays in this volume by Dennis Brodeur, Clarke E. Cochran, and Christopher J. Kauffman. The author argues that (1) Roman Catholic teaching on the Trinity is defective, yielding an inadequate model of society, (2) Roman Catholic teaching on the Incarnation is defective, yielding an impoverished understanding of the “sacramental,” and (3) the institutional orientation of Roman Catholicism combined with the lack of true sacramental vision makes it (...) nearly impossible for Roman Catholic theory to criticize the current structure of health care financing. (shrink)

In der Wissenschaft spielen Visualisierungen eine immer wichtigere Rolle. Sie sind zum einen Gegenstand der Forschung und zum anderen unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel bei der Präsentation und Distribution von Forschungsergebnissen. Beides stellt neue Anforderungen an den Wissenschaftler und seine praktische wie auch theoretische Arbeit und lässt nach einer kritischen Reflexion dieses Bildhandelns fragen. Was zeigen uns MRT-Bilder in der Medizin wirklich? Wie hat die Weiterentwicklung der Mikroskopie-Technologie unsere Vorstellung von der menschlichen Zelle verändert? Welche Rolle können Bilder bei der Vermittlung von Wissen (...) im didaktischen Kontext spielen? Zeigen uns Visualisierungen die Wirklichkeit? Oder sind sie bloß ein weiterer Anhaltspunkt für die soziale Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis? Kann es eine Logik der Bilder geben? In welchen Begriffen reden wir über Bilder? Ziel des Sammelbandes Visualisierung und Erkenntnis. Bildverstehen und Bildverwenden in Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften ist es, die Forschung mit und an Visualisierungen in den Einzelwissenschaften auf eine reflektierte Basis zu stellen. Zu diesem Zweck werden nicht nur die wissenschafts- und erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen und Herausforderungen beleuchtet, die die Verwendung von Visualisierungen mit sich bringt, sondern auch die Rolle der Visualisierungen im konkreten Anwendungsfall betrachtet. Der Band lässt dabei Geistes- und Naturwissenschaftler, Theoretiker und Praktiker in einen Dialog über den gemeinsamen Forschungsgegenstand treten. (shrink)

What arguments does Plato offer to explain the pre-eminence he confers to the idea of the Good in Republic, 6? Considering in detail the short but key section of the Republic (504b-506d) that precedes the analogy between the Good and the Sun, this paper argues that it is what Plato claims to be the universal recognition that the Good exists independently of any opinion that makes it so important for human thought. Nothing less than the concept that can make everything (...) else intelligible, as the sun makes everything in the sensible world visible. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the concept of natural liberation in classical Sāṃkhya. On the basis of the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa and its traditional commentaries, I will attempt to demonstrate that liberation from suffering in Sāṃkhya is not the result of rational inquiry—the prevailing view among contemporary scholars. The Sāṃkhya does not necessarily prescribe yogic practice as argued by other scholars. Instead, I will defend a position expressed by K.C. Bhattacharyya and Frank R. Podgorski, according to which liberation in (...) classical Sāṃkhya is a natural and spontaneous process of suffering transforming into its own cure. I will argue that although traditional authorities may disagree over the form the liberating process takes on the phenomenal level, there is a general agreement that the natural forces are the primary drives and agents of liberation. (shrink)

Placing the notion of sin in the context of a meontic account of evil, and emphasizing the effect of sin on the sinner himself, this commentary exposes the insufficiency of restricting oneself to human efforts at atonement, and of thus underemphasizing the role of Christ. Collange’s claim that the teaching of “predestination” is rooted in Paul and that the doctrine of merits and indulgences is rooted in Augustine is criticized, and Luther’s “forensic” understanding is linked with Augustine, rather than with (...) Paul. Collange’s reduction of the concern for holiness to respect and trust is contrasted with holiness’s essential context of loving unification with God. The commentary closes by exposing the unsatisfactory scantiness of Collange’s treatment of cloning, health-care economy, and of the evils of life. (shrink)

This paper outlines the background development of “intelligent“ technologies such as speech recognition. Despite significant progress in the development of these technologies, they still fall short in many areas, and rapid advances in areas such as dictation are actually stalled. In this paper we have proposed semi-automatic solutions — smart integration of human and intelligent efforts. One such technique involves improvement to the speech recognition editing interface, thereby reducing the perception of errors to the viewer. Other techniques that are described (...) in the paper are batch enrollment, which allows the user to reduce the amount of time required for enrollment, and content spotting, which can be used for applications that have repeated content flow, such as movies or museum tours. The paper also suggests a general concept of distributive training of speech recognition systems that is based on data collection across a network. (shrink)

This book explains the key concepts that surround the issue as well as the nature of the hard problem and the several approaches to it. It gives a comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon, incorporating its main metaphysical and epistemic aspects as well as recent empirical findings, such as the phenomena of blindsight, change blindness, visual-form agnosia and optic ataxia, mirror recognition in other primates, split-brain cases, and visual extinction.

This article discusses the unique practice of many philosophers in classical India to write on several philosophical and religious systems, each time adopting a sympathetic point of view for a different tradition. The article describes the development of this phenomenon in the context of interreligious debates between Buddhists, Jains, and Brahmins in the course of three distinct historical periods, transitioning from pluralism about views to pluralism about philosophical systems and culminating in the ideal of _sarva-tantra-sva-tantra_, a polyvocal philosopher and a (...) polymath. Contrary to such approaches as nihilism, agnosticism, skepticism, and dogmatism, pluralism about views and systems was an attempt to justify the acceptance of several competing schools of thought. The article demonstrates that varieties of pluralism about views and systems played a role in forming and broadening philosophical alliances to defeat religious rivals, but also enhanced the scholarly reputation of erudite thinkers capable of “proving and refuting any system by will.”. (shrink)

This paper explores the way that Elizabeth Presa's artworks respond to Jacques Derrida's thought. By examining how the particularity (the beside) and its supplements (the besides) operate in Presa's works, it is shown how this movement between beside and besides is also central to Derrida's thought.

Extreme self-sacrifice in the context of phenomena, such as sports hooliganism, combines aspects of local and extended fusion. How can we best account for such phenomena in the light of the theory presented here, and how can we make a tangible distinction between the two types? I propose ways to explore and operationalize this distinction and the concept of fusion more generally.

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.