The main aim of the present study is to identify which mental footnotes (related to Adam Smith’s Capitalism) have more weight in the current cognitive processing of participants. We used the “Wealth of Nations” as the main source of the concepts from this author. An experimental design (based on a previous qualitative research) was carried out to test the influence of mental footnotes on the citizens’ decision on the validity of the concepts. The findings point out that there (...) are strong, current, mental footnotes related to the Adam Smith’s concept of price. People mostly understand that, for every product, the entrepreneur has to recover their initial investment and to gain a profit. On the other hand, the fact that entrepreneurs have to pay some expenditures and they need to have profits determines the price of products. (shrink)

It’s 2019. Computers can drive cars, operate stores, and outperform humans in sophisticated games. However, computers cannot correctly read a PDF with footnotes. Alas, many people have to rely on their computers to read PDF papers. So, many people face significant obstacles while trying to consume written research. That seems bad. Insofar as we can prevent this bad outcome without making matters worse, we should.

No other branch of the philosophy of science is as backward as the philosophy of biology. When physicists or philosophers “explain biology,” they not only tend to use wrong terminologies but they usually throw away that which is typically biological. This error is second only to the even worse one of adopting vitalistic interpretations. Vitalism is now dead, as far as biologists are concerned, and a biologist can now talk about the differences between the philosophy of physics and the philosophy (...) of biology without being suspected of being a concealed vitalist. (shrink)

Footnotes to the Synthesis? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9569-6 Authors John O. Reiss, Department of Biological Sciences, Humboldt State University, 1 Harpst St., Arcata, CA 95521, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

I. M. Crombie, in Plato: The Midwife's Apprentice, assembles the results of studies already published in two previous volumes. This latest book contains his "conclusions only without the arguments on which, it is hoped, they rest". A stereotyped "Platonism," the book insists, "renders static and dogmatic a body of philosophical work that was essentially dynamic, critical and exploratory... freezing into a set posture something which really consists of many postures". In contrast, "Plato conceived of philosophy as an almost unending struggle (...) to give satisfactory expression to what, in one sense, we know perfectly well all along," and "to achieve an explicit understanding of that which we understand implicitly all along". In this way the midwifery required by Plato's doctrine of anamnêsis is explained and justified in a development that goes "a little beyond what the texts allow," but of which Plato himself, the author thinks, would not have disapproved. Though the "splendid vitality" of Plato's writings consists in their never satisfied dialectical inquiry, "there is also something of value for us in Plato's more positive conception of philosophy". Yet, in comparison with the common view "that Plato's metaphysical doctrine is the key to his whole philosophy," it is much nearer the truth to maintain "that the key to Plato's philosophy is his conception of the nature of philosophical activity". (shrink)

In his second book on being and event, Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou describes Plato’s late dialogue, The Sophist as “one of the first transcendental inquiries in the history of thought”. In this dialogue, Plato introduces what he calls the Idea of the Other, the possibility of a being of non-being, an inevitable break with the Parmenidean tradition. However, according to Badiou, Plato fails to provide an example of how this Idea of the Other can manifest itself or be effective (...) in a world, or in other words, appear. This paper argues that not only there is such an example in Plato’s Sophist, namely, the phantasma, but also that it can be strongly related to Badiou’s philosophical system. (shrink)

Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice. In fact, however, footnoting practices have varied widely, over time and across space, between individuals and among national disciplinary communities. Little clarity has prevailed in the discussion of the purpose footnotes serve; even less attention has been devoted to the development they have undergone. This essay sketches the history of the footnote in the Western historical tradition. Drawing on classic work by A. D. Momigliano, (...) H. Butterfield, and others, it shows that critical research into and argument about sources have long formed part of the historical tradition. Classical political historians could not insert much explicit reflection about the use of sources into their work without violating the rhetorical rules they accepted. But their histories, as the case of de Thou shows, often rested on careful critical work. And the many historians who did not provide instructive narratives of war and high politics, but rather, accounts of local history or religious institutions, discussed their sources, and sometimes quoted them extensively. These varied traditions were only integrated, however, by the invention of the footnote in its modern form, which made it possible to combine a high literary narrative with erudite investigations. The footnote in its modern form seems to have been devised in the seventeenth century, as part of an effort to counter skepticism about the possiblity of attaining knowledge about the past. It was used to great intellectual and literary effect in the eighteenth century, when individuals as different as Gibbon and Möser made the foundations of their texts into elaborate mosaics of erudite research and ironic reflection. Ranke did not invent, but dramatized, the historical footnote. He made the research that produced it as vital to the historian's culture and as central to the historian's achievement as the high style that had distinguished pragmatic exemplar history of the traditional kind. The historical footnote emerges not as a simple trademark guaranteeing quality nor as a uniform piece of scholarly technology, but rather as the product of long collective struggles and individual efforts to devise a visibly critical form of historical writing. (shrink)

Aim: The main aim of the present study is to identify which mental footnotes (related to Marx’s and Engels’ Socialism) have more weight in the current cognitive processing of citizens. Background: We used the “Manifesto of the communist party” as the main source of the thoughts from these authors. Method: An experimental design (based on a previous qualitative research) was carried out to test the influence of mental footnotes on the citizens’ decision on the validity of the concepts. (...) Results: The findings point out that there are strong, current, mental footnotes related to the Marx’s and Engels’ concept of bourgeoisie. Conclusions: The Marx’s and Engels’ Philosophy is currently alive, at least, some concepts related to bourgeoisie. People mostly think that the current means of production of modern bourgeoisie were developed in the feudal age, proletariat struggles with bourgeoisie from the beginning, Communism and Socialism are the only political movement that recognized this bourgeoisie-proletariat antagonism and the means of production are nowadays extended to other social classes. The present methodology (from an Experimental Psychology perspective) means a reliable technique to extract the essence of a text and to test the influence of its concepts on human cognitive processing. (shrink)

A spoonful of oil can ruin a barrel of honey. One footnote can destroy the coherence of a 262 page article.

This book is a guide for beginning students of philosophy as they begin to systematically reflect upon philosophical matters. The author uses primary texts, commentaries, and guided readings to encourage students to enter into conversation with contemporary scholarship, great thinkers, and with peers to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy.

This brief response to Goodenough and Deacon’s essay “From Biology to Consciousness to Morality” sets forth Michael Polanyi’s criticism of evolutionary ideas of his day. It analyzes Polanyi’s approach to biology and suggests there are affinities with the provocative evolutionary sketch Goodenough and Deacon provide of the development of the human capacity for moral experience.

Dance is an elusive art form, existing in the moment of performance. Its transience poses special obstacles to analysis by scholars. Program notes, reports by critics, personal memories, and still photographs provide secondary sources limited in their potential for sustained analysis and study of actual dances.

Based on Merleau-Ponty's description of nature as that on which we ultimately rely, this essay cultivates the thought that this description also fits an idea of God and therefore of Deus sive Natura. Guided by an outline for a phenomenology of climbing, it is argued that what Heidegger calls readiness to hand presupposes readiness-to-foot (Zufussenheit). The latter gives ground for gratitude not only because it gives ground for enjoyment as gratification, but because it also gives ground for joy understood as (...) a grace, grace understood as having its ground in Natura. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTwo footnotes added to the version of Catharine Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay Of Human Understanding reprinted in her Works have led to various accusations, including that s...

This chapter articulates two concerns that Karl Jaspers raised (with Hannah Arendt) about the common practice of viewing moral evil as unintelligible. The first is that this involves exoticizing the act and/or perpetrator in such a way that moral condemnation becomes difficult. The second is that it can lead us to treat the perpetrator, place, or victim as tainted or stained by a force whose motives we cannot grasp; this in turn can lead to magical thinking about evil as somehow (...) contagious or contaminating. After distinguishing some of the main categories of evil discussed in the western tradition, I examine ways in which moral evil, in particular, has been characterized as unintelligible, and try to discern which of them raises these Jaspersian concerns. I argue that there are at least two conceptions of “radical evil”—not the Kantian one, but the ones articulated by Hannah Arendt—that do so. (shrink)

Based on Merleau-Ponty's description of nature as that on which we ultimately rely, this essay cultivates the thought that this description also fits an idea of God and therefore of _Deus sive Natura_. Guided by an outline for a phenomenology of climbing, it is argued that what Heidegger calls readiness to hand presupposes readiness-to-foot. The latter gives ground for gratitude not only because it gives ground for enjoyment as gratification, but because it also gives ground for joy understood as a (...) grace, grace understood as having its ground in _Natura_. (shrink)

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith (...) in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794. (shrink)