The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan , a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent (...) revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law , circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive. (shrink)

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr., considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history and (...) thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism. (shrink)

Modern societies depend on a growing production of scientific knowledge, which is based on the functional differentiation of science into still more specialised scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. This is the basis for the paradox of scientific expertise: The growth of science leads to a fragmentation of scientific expertise. To resolve this paradox, the present paper investigates three hypotheses: 1) All scientific knowledge is perspectival. 2) The perspectival structure of science leads to specific forms of knowledge asymmetries. 3) Such perspectival knowledge (...) asymmetries must be handled through second order perspectives. We substantiate these hypotheses on the basis of a perspectivist philosophy of science grounded in Peircean semiotics and autopoietic systems theory. Perspectival knowledge asymmetries are an unavoidable and necessary part of the growth of scientific knowledge, and more awareness of this fact can help avoid blind and futile struggles between scientific perspectives, and direct efforts toward more appropriate ways of handling these fundamental knowledge asymmetries. Concretely, we show how different kinds of scientific knowledge, expertise, disagreement and learning can be correlated to the perspectival structure of science, and propose how polyocular communication based on observations of the observations made by specialised perspectives can be used to handle such perspectival knowledge asymmetries. This can help overcome the observed problems in carrying out cross-disciplinary research and in the collective use of different kinds of scientific expertise, and thereby make society better able to solve complex, real-world problems. (shrink)

Political decision theory provides a framework for evaluating three approaches to military research and development: offensive weaponry intended for deterrence, the Strategic Defense Initiative and other weaponry intended fordefense, and cutbacks designed to slow the research and development treadmill. Large-scale R&D does not protect against most of the risks facing national security. Nor does an R&D-intensive approach provide the flexibility necessary to adjust military policy in light of rapidly changing international conditions. Considering all factors together, there is a strong theoretical (...) case for placing sharp constraints on military innovation, not just on the quantities of weapons deployed. (shrink)

MORALITY is an area of culture that is highly susceptible to philosophical skepticism. This has been so at least since the time of the Greek Sophists. But modern Western civilization seems to be especially prone to philosophical doubts about the moral enterprise because of widely shared assumptions and views in the modern age about the knowledge-yielding powers of the human mind. This particular trouble spot in the culture has received extensive philosophical attention ever since the seventeenth century, but activity in (...) moral philosophy has never been greater than in our own time. (shrink)

Berkeley's essay on vision was published in the spring of 1709. It was recognised at once as a book of considerable importance, and there was a second edition within the first year. The author was still only 24. His design, he wrote, was to show the ‘manner we perceive by sight the distance, magnitude and situation of objects’. Hitherto, writers on optics had ‘proceeded on wrong principles’.

The business of philosophy is “to think things together,” so far as the reality of things and the capacity of thought allow. That reality presents many contrasts, physical, ethical, metaphysical, light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, the One and the many, the Infinite and the finite, the Eternal and the temporal, and what we mention as last, but not least, for our immediate purpose, Being and Becoming, the Constant and the Contingent. The contrasts need (...) not be regarded as contradictions, negations one of another, as thought the Eleatics with their emphasis on Being, or the Heraclitics with their preference for Becoming. To our immediate scrutiny all stands and all flows may be irreconcilable oppositions; but Einstein is teaching us that there is relativity in all our interpretations of reality. We need not with Indian thought declare Brahma alone real, and all else Maya , illusion. (shrink)

Introduction Anandabodha is a great name in the history of Advaita Vedanta. This is evident from Dr. Das Gupta's reference to him as "the only author of ...