Through accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s views of linguistic expression and understanding, and by tracing the evolution of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language offers a comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language.

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)

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)

Rather than attempting to combine the two meta-methodological programmes for justifying the epistemological study of science, which is the case of Laudan's normative naturalism, this paper aims at presenting a third alternative to the controversy between the traditional normativism and the reductionistic naturalism. The paper is a preliminary move in developing a theory of the autopoietic cognitive organization of science. The underlying assumption of this project calls that science is a self-constructing, self-specifying and homeostatic system. The scrutinizing of these three (...) predicates leads to the view that the epistemological propositions about science cognitive organization are neither normative, nor descriptive, but transcendental ones. The final discussion shows the connection between this project and the theory of group rationality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to bring the legal status of third-country citizens closer to that of member states, as a different special regime according to the relative agreements concluded for certain categories of foreigners without disregarding the value of some elements of fact, such as residence, family ties, performance of specific economic activities or interests of international politics for respect of these obligations, with the not always uniform content that the union evidently had to entrust to member states (...) a union of intent through “supervision" as well as the interpretation carried out by The Court of Justice of the European Union which has strongly reduced state's competences aiming at a European integration still in progress and especially after Brexit. (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)

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)

_ _In __The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism__, Dimitri Ginev draws on devel-opments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those (...) who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature. Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research. (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)

Spinoza and Rembrandt were contemporaries and in fact they were neighbours in Amsterdam. Even though there is no record that they ever met, it is hard to imagine that they never crossed paths. This article seeks to explore common ideas that we can find in the philosopher and the painter. This contributes both to a philosophical examination of Rembrandt and examines the possibility of an aesthetics in Spinoza.

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)

One of the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present article challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a social practice that conflicts with the considered judgments that the proper recognition of moral autonomy would authorize. The core of my case is the (...) analysis of whether a punishment should be understood as a restriction of a criminal's freedom properly understood. I argue that the affirmative view faces serious difficulties that have not been, and are not likely to be, resolved by retributivist justifications that draw their support from Kantian moral theory. (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)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

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)

In a stimulating paper, Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) argued how a decision maker could undertake dynamically inconsistent choices when, in an extensive form decision problem, she has a particular type of imperfect recall named absentmindedness. Such memory limitation obtains whenever information sets include decision histories along the same decision path. Starting from work focusing on the absentminded driver example, and independently developed by Segal (2000) and Dimitri (1999), the main theorem of this article provides a general result of dynamically consistent (...) choices, valid for a large class of finite extensive form decision problems without nature. (shrink)

In Constituent Power, Violence, and the State, Dimitri Vouros examines the question of political violence by placing the thought of Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in conversation with contemporary theories of sovereignty and constituent power. Vouros argues that the violence sustaining the modern state inhibits institutional accountability and derails constituent power. The paradox of modern law-which is both the expression of the people's will but also alienated from them-sets the stage for political contestation. For Vouros, the multitude's potentiality (...) is actualized through either organized or spontaneous acts of resistance against state force. Antagonism is therefore a key element of the political and must be included in any theory of political agonism. A strong notion of constituent power ensures the integrity of the public sphere and the expansion of citizens' political agency. Bringing all these ideas together is unique for this field of investigation. Accessible and engagingly written, Constituent Power, Violence, and the State is a must read for researchers in political theory and political philosophy. Critical legal studies scholars and social theorists will also profit from this book. (shrink)

This article approaches Charles Batteux’s (1713-1780) concept of taste (one as central to 18th-century nascent aesthetics as it is complex) through the lens of virtue aesthetics, mostly borrowing from Roger Pouivet’s work (2006, 2017). Firstly, it argues that Batteux’s account of taste matches Pouivet’s description of aesthetic virtues, and that taste, as a function of the soul, is the golden mean between corresponding intellectual vices. Secondly, it examines the ways the aesthetic virtue of taste interacts with two other intellectual virtues (...) discussed by Batteux, namely intelligence and genius. In sum, it argues that re-reading Batteux’s philosophy of literature through the lens of contemporary, analytical virtue aesthetics makes it relevant to contemporary aesthetic theory, and not only for students of the history of literary theory. (shrink)

The article argues that Spinoza’s political philosophy is best understood by tracing the influence of epicureanism in his thought.

Simultaneous critical editions based on all available evidence, with an introduction, English translations, and commentaries of the Greek text and a medieval Arabic translation of Theophrastus’s On First Principles , together with a methodological excursus on Graeco-Arabic editorial technique and normative glossary.

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)

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)

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.

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a (...) theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

While Orthodox Christianity does not find explicit statements about the morality of prolonging life in the usual doctrinal sources, the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church, there are elements in Tradition which bear upon the issue. These include Orthodox spirituality's emphasis on the “wholeness” of the human person, its liturgical and synergistic view of human life, and its understanding of our moral ambiguity as fallen human beings in a fallen world. This last point, in particular, means that we do (...) not usually have a clear choice between right and wrong, and that we cannot always trust ourselves to know which choice is the right, or even the better one. Therefore, we must always approach decisions about death and dying with humility and in a spirit of repentance, aware of the imperfection of all we do and trusting in the mercy of God. (shrink)

abstract: I argue that Merleau-Ponty's reading of Hegel's account of experience exerts a significant and hitherto overlooked influence on his attempt to recast Phénoménologie de la perception 's account of intentionality. This reading informs two important claims of his later projects: that intentional relations are more fundamental than their relata, and that a metaphysical condition irreducible to consciousness or object constitutes the structure of intentionality. I argue that these positions inform key tenets of reversibility, and that a revisionary interpretation of (...) Hegel's absolute offers Merleau-Ponty a model for the principle that individuates the basic conditions of experience. In addition to demonstrating that he was a more assiduous reader of Hegel than many commentators assume, and highlighting some overlooked debts to Hegel, these results show that Merleau-Ponty's later thought inherits significant idealist commitments, which should motivate us to reconsider its standing within post-Kantian philosophical currents. (shrink)

Business Efficiency and Ethics presents both the theory of business efficiency and ethics, and a wealth of case studies based on practical experience. This unique perspective offers a framework for identifying this behaviour and reestablishing appropriate business behavior standards.

The paper presents a variation of the EMAIL Game, originally proposed byRubinstein (American Economic Review, 1989), in which coordination ofthe more rewarding-risky joint course of actions is shown to obtain, evenwhen the relevant game is, at most, ``mutual knowledge.'' In the exampleproposed, a mediator is introduced in such a way that two individualsare symmetrically informed, rather than asymmetrically as in Rubinstein,about the game chosen by nature. As long as the message failure probabilityis sufficiently low, with the upper bound being a (...) function of the gamepayoffs, conditional beliefs in the opponent's actions can allow playersto choose a more rewarding-risky action. The result suggests that, forefficient coordination to obtain, the length of interactive knowledge onthe game, possibly up to ``almost common knowledge,'' does not seem to bea major conceptual issue and that emphasis should be focused instead onthe communication protocol and an appropriate relationship between thereliability of communication channels and the payoffs at stake. (shrink)

Yannis Ritsos es uno de los poetas más influyentes de la generación griega de 1930, análoga a la generación del ‘27 en España. Los poetas de esa generación trajeron el surrealismo a la poesía griega, y, algunos como Ritsos, un claro compromiso político, reflejado en su poesía. Su obra más conocida/traducida es de carácter políticamente comprometido, de tono seco y épico. La "Sonata del claro de luna", el poema aquí traducido, es de un lirismo marcadamente diferente, y es menos conocido, (...) aunque sea de una belleza y recursos artísticos impactantes.PALABRAS CLAVE: Yannis Ritsos, Sonata del claro de luna, generación de 1930, poesía griega del siglo XX, poesía y contexto histórico.Yannis Ritsos is one of the most influential poets of the socalled 1930 generation of Greek poets who introduced surrealism in Greek poetry, and for some, such as Ritsos, a strong political engagement reflected in their poetry. His most read/translated work is imbued by a politically engaged, stark and epic tone. The poem translated/presented herewith is of a markedly different, lyrical character, and is less well-known, despite its arresting beauty and artistic elements.KEYWORDS: Yannis Ritsos, Moonlight Sonata, 1930 generation, XX-century Greek poetry, poetry and its historical context. (shrink)