A conceptual and mathematical model of a social community behavior in a choice situation under a veil of ignorance, where two alternative policies—Rawlsian maximin and Harsanyian utilitarianism—can be implemented through the aggregation of individual preferences over these two policies, is constructed and investigated. We first incorporate in our conceptual model psychological features such as risk-aversion and prosocial preferences that likely underlie choices of welfare policies. We secondly develop and select the mathematical model presented it by means of an autonomous system (...) of ordinary differential equations. A qualitative analysis of this system global phase-plane behavior shows possible tendencies of community development under social choices over Rawlsian or utilitarian societies depending on psychological parameters such as risk aversion and prosocial preferences. (shrink)

Ubiquitous news, global information access, instantaneous reporting, interactivity, multimedia content, extreme customization: Journalism is undergoing the most fundamental transformation since the rise of the penny press in the nineteenth century. Here is a report from the front lines on the impact and implications for journalists and the public alike. John Pavlik, executive director of the Center for New Media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, argues that the new media can revitalize news gathering and reengage an increasingly distrustful and (...) alienated citizenry. The book is a valuable reference on everything from organizing a new age newsroom to job hunting in the new media. (shrink)

As a reference to Lacan’s »mirror stage«, the »Mirror-Selfie-Stadium« show a reflexive turn within subjectification. The individualization of image production through digital and dating platforms is the starting point to reveal as such. In the article reference to so-called primitive accumulation (Marx) the origin of the internal rupture of the bourgeois subject shows that the individual subject in a capitalist society must be an interface for its own capitalist socialization and originates from this quandary situation. The actual techniques of (...) digitization continue this origin by forcing the subject to expand itself, but also its objects, by divisions, splits and valorizing. These divisions at once unleash the productive power of capitalist society. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe avant-garde's fascination with technology around 1900 grew out of several motivations: to shock the antitechnological bourgeois public; to experience a sense of mastery toward the material world, especially with cars, airplanes, and other machines; and to overcome the nineteenth-century separation of art and technology. The article highlights the radical shifts in the perception of technology that correspond with the emerging hands-on encounter with technological objects in homes, cities and at the workplace at the turn of the century. (...) This technological fundamentalism differed sharply from the anxious and symbolically mediated approach to the “materialism” of the machine in the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by a concept of liberation through technological purity which is reflected by the fact that Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier did not just design functional objects but also made special efforts to accentuate their functionalism as part of the aesthetic experience of modernity. As French and Italian artists, especially the Futurists, incorporated speed, virility, and the experience of the elementary in the metaphoric construction of technology, they even expressed a kinship with those painters and sculptors who shifted their focus to the rediscovery of the “primitive” magic in the art works from Africa and Polynesia. (shrink)

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg (...) Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

Si la raison moderne, declaree en son principe par Descartes comme libre affirmation personnelle de l'universel, generalise son application avec le projet rousseauiste d'une politique de la liberte, c'est dans l'ecartelement reconnu entre le volontarisme moral de celle-ci et le constat de son destin historique negatif. Depuis les deux revolutions marquees par l'heritage de Rousseau, celle, pratique, de 1789, et celle, theorique, de Kant, le developpement de la raison politique moderne est ordonne a la fondation et a la determination nouvelle (...) d'un droit essentiellement republicain. Les etudes composant le present recueil analysent les divers aspects et moments d'une telle raison politique moderne, de leur socle doctrinal a leur insertion historique. On s'est interroge notamment sur la signification concrete revetue par eux dans le contexte essentiellement francais, mais egalement europeen et mondial. (shrink)

Die Idee zu der in diesem Band dokumentierten Tagung ist im Rahmen des disziplinübergreifenden Nachwuchswissenschaftsnetzwerkes THESIS entstanden. Der Dialog über die fachlichen und disziplinären Grenzen hinweg hat bei THESIS seit dessen Gründung im Jahre 1990 stets einen großen Raum eingenommen. Anderen Fächern Respekt und Interesse entgegenzubringen und sich nicht von stereotypen Vorurteilen leiten zu lassen, ist konstitutiver Bestandteil im Selbstverständnis des Netzwerkes. Selbstverständlich gibt es in einem solchen Verbund eine Reihe von Gelegenheiten (darunter auch den einen oder anderen entwicklungsfördernden Konflikt), (...) das eigene Bild vom Anderen und das andere Bild vom Eigenen zur Sprache zu bringen und zu hinterfragen. Auf der Basis dieser bestehenden Kommunikationsstrukturen trafen sich am 11. Oktober 2003 in Göttingen 12 junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler zwischen, über und auch auf den Grenzen ihrer eigenen Herkunftsdisziplinen, um den Trendbegriff [alpha]Transdisziplinarität" auf seine Substanz zu prüfen. (shrink)

In this book, Frank Griffel presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the life and thought of this important figure.

L'interpretation analytique est attentive aux proprietes logiques et semantiques du cogito, proprietes qui peuvent apporter des solutions a certains problemes cartesiens, traditionnels ou apparus en philosophie analytique. C'est ainsi que la forme logique et les aspects pragmatiques du cogito permettent d'evaluer son caractere intuitif et la certitude qu'il comporte. De meme l'analyse de son caractere indexical met-elle en evidence la plausibilite d'un mode de renvoi subjectif a des pensees objectives. De meme encore la transition du cogito a la res cogitans (...) reste concevable, a la croisee d'une perspective a la premiere personne et d'une contrainte referentielle objective. Il ressort de ces analyses une epistemologie et une ontologie cartesiennes minimales qui ne pretent a aucune inference vers un dualisme radical, mais qui favorisent plutot une certaine analogie dans l'attribution des predicats mentaux et corporels, prise dans la perspective de la premiere personne. (shrink)

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full (...) story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

The Jewish Philosophy Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on Jewish philosophy from the Bible to postmodernism. The Reader is clearly divided into four separate parts: Foundations and First Principles, Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. Each part is clearly introduced by the editors. The readings featured are representative writings of each era listed above and are from the following major thinkers: Abrabanel, Baeck, Bergman, Borowitz, Buber, Cohen, Crescas, Fackenheim, Geiger, Gersonides, (...) Goodman, Graetz, Halevi, Hartman, Heschel, Hess, Hirsch, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Paquda, Kellner, Kook, Krochmal, Leibowitz, Levinas, Maimonides, Maybaum, Mendelssohn, Novak, Philo, Plaskow, Rosenzweig, Saadia, Scholem, Seeskin, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, Strauss, Wolf, Zunz. (shrink)

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

Als »Subjektphilosophie« hat man das neuzeitliche Denken insgesamt charakterisiert. Diese Auszeichnung verdankt das Subjekt der verwegenen Hoffnung, es eigne sich zum ultimativen Prinzip der Wissensbegründung. Das Interesse an einer Aufklärung seiner Struktur wurde dadurch jedoch in den Hintergrund gedrängt. Diese Struktur steht im Zentrum von Manfred Franks jüngstem Buch, das einen Blick auf die moderne Geschichte der Subjekttheorien mit Analysen der inneren Beschaffenheit und der Zeitlichkeit des Subjekts sowie seines Verhältnisses zur Intersubjektivität und einer Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und neuesten analytischen (...) Theoriebildungen verbindet. Dem Begriff der Präreflexivität kommt dabei die Schlüsselrolle zu. (shrink)

English summary: »Selbstbestimmung« is a basic concept in the German ethical discourse, similar to »autonomy«, »liberty«, or »human dignity«. Even though this term is clearly in need of further definition, it has been barely addressed in the theological discourse. The contributions to this volume take a variety of approaches to the question of how we have to understand and interpret the concept of »self-determination« within the framework of theological ethics. In order to achieve this, the authors resort to the orientation (...) and perspectives of reality fostered by reformatory theology. Apart from a fundamental essay that in tracing the different facets of the term »self-determination« refers back to the theology of Martin Luther, the anthology contains a number of contributions from the field of applied ethics. German description: Der Begriff »Selbstbestimmung« gehort zu den Grundbegriffen der Ethik. Er begegnet in vielen aktuellen ethischen Diskursen Ahnlich haufig wie die Begriffe »Autonomie«, »Freiheit« oder »Menschenwuerde«. Trotz eines offensichtlichen Klarungsbedarfs hat sich die Theologie dieses Begriffs bisher noch kaum angenommen. Die Beitrage des vorliegenden Sammelbandes stellen sich in unterschiedlicher Perspektive der Frage, wie das Konzept »Selbstbestimmung« im Rahmen theologischer Ethik verstanden und inhaltlich gefuellt werden kann. Dafuer wird die Orientierungsleistung des von der reformatorischen Theologie gepragten Wirklichkeitsverstandnisses fruchtbar gemacht. Neben einem grundlegenden Aufsatz, der den Begriff »Selbstbestimmung« mit Hilfe von Impulsen aus der Theologie Martin Luthers entfaltet, stehen Aufsatze aus dem Bereich der angewandten Ethik. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey was the greatest of the remarkable generation of Cambridge philosophers and logicians which included G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes. Before his tragically early death in 1930 at the age of twenty-six, he had done seminal work in mathematics and economics as well as in logic and philosophy. This volume, with a new and extensive introduction by D. H. Mellor, contains all Ramsey's previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. The (...) latter gives the definitive form and defence of the reduction of mathematics to logic undertaken in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica; the former includes the most profound and original studies of universals, truth, meaning, probability, knowledge, law and causation, all of which are still constantly referred to, and still essential reading for all serious students of these subjects. (shrink)

We attempt to extend the nominalistic project initiated in Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers to modern physical theories based in differential geometry.

Textes de philosophes français et britanniques issus du colloque tenu à l'Université de Nantes en 1998. Ils sont consacrés à la philosophie analytique de la religion et abordent des sujets tels que la nature et la justification des croyances religieuses, la question du mal, celles des preuves de l'existence de Dieu, de la théodicée, du langage religieux, du miracle, de la prière, etc.

La 4e de couverture indique : « Pour Hegel, l'absolu est esprit. L'esprit est donc principe de tout ce qui a sens (d'abord le logique) et être (d'abord la nature). Mais c'est seulement une fois qu'il est, en tant qu'esprit au début purement subjectif (en gestation dans l'existence naturelle du sens logique), devenu pour lui-même, objet de lui-même, comme esprit, que, dans une telle présence à soi de son faire, il agit véritablement. Se reconnaissant alors, et par là se satisfaisant, (...) dans la nature spiritualisée qu'est l'" esprit objectif " et dans l'" esprit absolu " où il triomphe de sa propre naturalisation ou incarnation, il se fixe, en les fixant elles-mêmes, dans leurs figures respectives : droit, morale, vie sociale-politique ; art, religion, philosophie. Certes, l'esprit ne s'enferme dans aucun des actes qui le configurent de la sorte en le différenciant de sa présence totale à lui-même, mais, vérifiant celle-ci dans leur totalisation, il jouit réellement de lui-même dans leur remémoration pratique réitérée, qui fait bien d'eux les Actes de sa constitution. Les grandes figures de l'esprit sont évoquées dans ce recueil comme une telle auto-différenciation de son identité à soi absolue, par là en leur relation différentielle intime les unes aux autres, donc en leur problématicité. L'esprit, qui n'est qu'à se reconstruire en ses Actes, se révèle ainsi toujours vivant au cœur même de leur système. ». (shrink)

This collection introduces the reader to some of the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible world semantics for conditionals, the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals, implicature and the material conditional, and subjunctive versus indicative conditionals. Contributors include V.H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker.

I argue that it may well be the case that space and time do not consist of points, indeed that they have no smallest parts. I examine two different approaches to such pointless spaces : a topological approach and a measure theoretic approach. I argue in favor of the measure theoretic approach.

Historicism -- Time -- Interpretation -- Representation -- Reference -- Truth -- Meaning -- Presence -- Experience (I) -- Experience (II) -- Subjectivity -- Politics.

An introduction to informal logic, critical thinking and rhetoric utilizing actual public discourse .

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-BeingDaniel H. FrankHava Tirosh-Samuelson. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 596. Cloth, $50.00.Franz Rosenzweig tried hard to convince the neoKantian Hermann Cohen of the merits of Zionism and the normalization it would bring to Jews and Jewish life. His attempt met with this response from Cohen: "Oho! So the gang (...) now wants to be happy, does it?" For those ignorant of the history of Jewish philosophy, one might imagine that Jewish philosophers, no less than their non-philosophical kinsmen, were so weighed down by the burdens of history and persecution that happiness could play no role in their theorizing. But happiness plays a key role in the history of Jewish moral and political philosophy, especially in the premodern period. Even Spinoza, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, the great critic of the rabbinic tradition and of Maimonides in particular, is concerned in his Ethics with identifying those activities that together constitute human well-being and the good life. Only lately, since the Enlightenment and Kant, has non-eudaimonism been a live option for Jewish thinkers. Only with the rise of (modern) Orthodoxy, and its predilection for construing goodness as rectitude and rule-following, has eudaimonism fallen out of favor. But with Tirosh-Samuelson's weighty volume on happiness in premodern Judaism, there can be no excuse in the future to imagine that all Jews are, or must be, closet Kantians, strict deontologists. To think otherwise seems to come close to taking on the classical (anti-Semitic) dichotomy of legalistic Judaism vs. spiritual Christianity. In it own way, Happiness in Premodern Judaism is a critique of such a one-sided, monochromatic view of Judaism, whether from the Christian or even from the Jewish side.Tirosh-Samuelson writes explicitly as an intellectual historian, rather than as a philosopher. She understands herself and her project as one that presents just the facts, without evaluating them. While one may cavil at a lost opportunity, in the present case this would be churlish, given the enormous erudition on display. After an introductory chapter outlining the foundational moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, the text presents the (Greek-inspired) areteic wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, the teleological theocentrism of the rabbis, the Greco-Arabic Islamicate culture that nurtured Jewish philosophers from Saadia in the tenth century to Maimonides in the twelfth, the rabbinic and kabbalistic critiques of the philosophical ideal of happiness commencing [End Page 338] with the translation (into Hebrew) of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and finally, very important and the focus of much recent scholarly work, the transformation of Jewish eudaimonism through direct contact with Christian Scholasticism and later with the humanist Renaissance. All in all, a millennium and a half of Jewish intellectual history is presented in a sober and scholarly way.Not surprisingly Maimonides plays a pivotal role in the story that Tirosh-Samuelson relates. A Janus-like figure, he represents the culmination and height of accommodation with Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophical culture. However, with the gradual worsening of the socio-economic condition of European Jewry in the thirteenth century, his accommodationism seemed traitorous, and as a result generations of thinkers, mystics and philosophers alike, strove to critically distance themselves from Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Tirosh-Samuelson is admirably clear in pointing out that such anti-Maimonidean tendencies are ill-characterized as anti-philosophical. Hasdai Crescas in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries launched a massive critique of Maimonides' physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, but did so in as rigorous a manner as any philosopher would. The picture that enfolds over the course of the text is one of vigorous dialectic between partisans of 'alien' (Greek) wisdom and those who viewed such wisdom with considerable suspicion. Such a dialectic parallels, not surprisingly, developments in Christian philosophy.The trajectory of the story of premodern Jewish musings on happiness is from the centrality of reason and intellect, and the contemplative activity that is reason's preeminent actuality, to the primacy... (shrink)