Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change. We examine the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, hypothesizing that the process of grammaticalization motivates a positive relationship between the two features. To test this, we conduct a (...) typological survey of 95 diverse languages and a corpus study of 21 languages with substantive corpora from the DoReCo project. The first study establishes a significant positive correlation between syllable complexity, measured in terms of maximal syllable patterns, and the index of synthesis. The second study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between syllable complexity and synthesis holds at local levels and within noun and verb types, as predicted by a grammaticalization account. While the findings of the corpus study are limited in their statistical power, the observed tendencies are consistent with our predictions. This study contributes important findings to the complexity literature, as well as a novel method which incorporates broad typological sampling and deep corpus analysis. (shrink)

As is often the case in clinical ethics, the discourse in COVID-19 has focused primarily on difficult and controversial decision-making junctures such as how to decide who gets access to intensive care resources if demand outstrips supply. However, the lived experience of COVID-19 raises less controversial but arguably more profound moral questions around what it means to look after each other through the course of the pandemic and how this translates in care for the dying. This piece explores the interface (...) between the pandemic, ethics, and the role of palliative care. We argue that the ethical discourse should be broader, and that the principles that underly the discipline of palliative care provide a solid ethical foundation for the care of all patients through the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

rnst Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany, on July 5, 1904, making him, at age 95, the grand old man of evolutionary biology, one of the primary architects of the modem synthesis of genetic and evolutionary theory, and arguably one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. His career interests have spanned a remarkable five different fields, including: (1) ornithology, (2) systematics, (3) zoogeography, (4) evolutionary theory, and (5) philosophy and history of science. Such broad research interests grew (...) from his education at a German Gymnasium (the equivalent of American high school, but at that time considerably more demanding), followed by a Candidacy in Medicine at the University of Greifswald in 1925 and a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Berlin in 1926. (shrink)

When Carl Wellman introduced the reasoning-type conduction, he endorsed a dialectical view on natural language argumentation. Contemporary scholarship, by contrast, treats conductive argument predominantly on a product view. Not only did Wellman’s reasons for a dialectical view thus fall into disregard; a product-treatment of conduction also flouts the standard semantics of ‘argument’. Attempting to resolve these difficulties, our paper traces Wellman’s preference for a dialectical view to the role of defeasible warrants. These act as stand-ins for value hierarchies that arguers (...) of normal suasory inclination find acceptable. We also improve on extant ways of diagramming conduction and distinguish two of its structural variants. (shrink)

In his first summer lecture at Berkeley in 1914, Josiah Royce, American philosopher of community, confessed as follows.

This research looks what happens to human reproduction when human genetic information is digitized. By employing speculative design as a transdisciplinary strategy to construct such an alternative future to open up public dialogues, it aims to stimulate audiences in an artistic way to deliberate two key questions: (1) how will biotechnology recondition and recontextualize the natural processes of genetic information (i.e. expression, replication, transmission and mutation) and our physiological processes (e.g. reproduction)? And (2) what might be the ethical, legal and (...) social implications (ELSI) for using such biotechnology? To this end, this practice-based research introduces the ‘e-gamete Digital Procreation Service’ (2019) – a speculative design project that has been developed as an approach to invite audiences to a future scenario of network-transmitted genetic information and computer-simulated human procreation. The carefully designed future service (an ironic practice of commercialization) allows human reproduction to take place outside of the human body. Audiences are encouraged to contemplate what novel situations might occur within their own futures and to consider broader questions like how family, parenthood, marriage, etc. are redefined and what new social relationships might emerge. By employing speculative design as an artistic research tool/tactic to step outside the technical limitations and craft the future service, the project asks vital question about the future in a provocative and quasi-realistic manner. Thus, the research forms a unique entanglement of sensitive topics by dealing with future biotechnology and human reproduction. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Badiou’s oeuvre from the vantage point of the last volume of his Being and Event trilogy. It determines the perspective and task of The Immanence of Truths and demonstrates in what way an “absolute ontology” is the result of an act of forcing that serves as the measure for a truth’s truthness. This allows to argue that Badiou’s is and always was a philosophy of freedom.

The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the (...) indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. (shrink)

This article examines a contemporary proposal of how to conceive of materialism, more specifically of a materialist dialectics. This proposal was formulated by Alain Badiou and it is of huge interest for the contemporary discussion as it inscribes the very historical coordinates in which it was articulated into its own proposal. The article develops this by arguing that Badiou's materialist dialectic historically situates itself after idealist options seem to have become impossible. However, the very dialectical kernel of this materialism leads (...) Badiou to claim that after the perpetuated struggle between materialism and idealism is declared to have been overcome, the very split separating the two returns in an inverted form inside materialism, splitting it again into two. Thereby the immanent split in materialism leads to two options: either one defends a materialism devoid of any idealist reference or a materialism which seeks to rescue something of idealism. The article concludes by suggesting that only from a detailed reconstruction of the functioning of philosophy in Badiou's system does it become possible to conceive of the threats that any materialism today faces and to delineate the proposed option of how to avoid them consistently. The article demonstrates how, today, materialism can only be properly materialist by resurrecting something of idealism, which is why it deserves the name of what I call an “idealism without idealism.”. (shrink)

An attempt to discover what can be learned from the recent work of Frank Tipler on the Omega Point theory requires an analysis of his framework of understanding from scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives. A critique of his crucial ideas, and of the salient points raised by some of his critics, can then be undertaken within the compass of his strengths. A critique of the critiques of Tipler's work allows one to evaluate the extent and limitations of his contributions.

How has reason, believed since the Enlightenment to be the ally of freedom in the search for a better, more humanly satisfying world, been reduced to a technical rationality that has actually impoverished the bases of human freedom? What might be the options and obligations for sociologists who wish to restore reason to its proper status? -/- Working within the tradition of C. Wright Mills and Jurgen Habermas, Frank Hearn sets out to answer these questions. He surveys the treatment (...) of the relation between reason and freedom in both the classical tradition (especially the writings of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud) and an increasingly significant segment of social thought and criticism (and, for example, in the contrasting visions of Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch.) He then analyses both the concrete social and historical forms of expression taken by what Mills calls 'rationality without reason' and their impact on individual autonomy and the freedoms associated with democratic politics. Finally, he develops Mills's and Habermas's claims that the cultivation of democratic publics and a critical social theory committed to a vibrant public life are indispensable to the protection and revitalization of the values of reason and freedom and of the practices they entail. -/- This book updates and enriches Mills's influential argument by demonstrating its affinity with critical theory, by showing its contributions to a critical understanding of the classical tradition, and by showing its implications for contemporary social, political, and economic developments. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 54 - 69 In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as _Boden_ or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure _Boden_ as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as _Boden_ to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing (...) himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the second half of the 20th century. The first concerns the origins of the great Foucaldian thesis of the autonomy of power, and the second concerns the conceptual implications of the events of the 1950s surrounding the politics of communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There are many apparent responses to these questions in the existing literature. However, they are rendered insufficient by their (...) refusal to address the need for a specifically intellectual history. With regard to Foucault’s thesis of the autonomy of power, philosophers seem happy to abstract Foucault’s insight from its context, resting on the implication that it may have come out of nowhere. Conversely, when it comes to the implications of historical developments on political philosophy, historians seem to satisfy themselves with wordplay: before so many histories of the intellectuals, who needs intellectual history? It is however rather obvious that both history and philosophy are set to benefit from a specifically intellectual history, that is to say, from an account neither of an idea nor of a context, but of how the historical context of the early fifties made the Foucaldian idea conceivable. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a basis for a fruitful correspondence between the projects of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that both philosophers are committed to an ontology of relation and they both regards any terms to these relations as being hypostases of a horizontal movement. This commits them to very parallel views of history, politics, and perception.

The book maps out the dynamic relations between the forces at play in politics and the economy in the West through a philosophical analysis of the relations between the concepts of politics and of the economy. It finds that their porous relations inform what it is for humans to live.

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude (...) that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence. (shrink)

Those who are interested in Freud and psychoanalysis will be familiar with questions such as ‘Is Freudian psychology pseudo-scientific?’ ‘Is Freudian psychology falsifiable?’ ’Is unfalsifiability an adequate criterion of pseudo-science?’, and they might naturally suppose that it is these questions of which Erwin has attempted a ‘final accounting’. Surprisingly, these questions hardly feature in Erwin's book. Though at the outset Peter Medawar's notorious judgment that psychoanalysis is ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’ is cited, Erwin does (...) not seem to think it is part of his final accounting to say either whether he thinks it justified or, if not, why someone of Medawar's distinction should nevertheless have thought so. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has a remark in which he admonishes us to remember that not everything which is expressed in the language of information belongs to the language game of giving information. In this paper I want to illustrate how the language of information may be used to disguise the character of the interest we take in social life, an interest whose candid and undisguised manifestations are to be found in literature.

Wittgenstein has a remark in which he admonishes us to remember that not everything which is expressed in the language of information belongs to the language game of giving information.In this paper I want to illustrate how the language of information may be used to disguise the character of the interest we take in social life, an interest whose candid and undisguised manifestations are to be found in literature.

This article assembles reasons for holding that the propaedeutic rationale for much of the discourse produced by ‘ethogenic science’ is inadequate. One reason is that the interactional principles that are the pretext for assembling the situational vignettes, which are the staple of ethogenics, are truisms and do not require documentation. Our familiarity with the risks and rewards of social life is already considerable and it is not clear how, or to what end, ethogenic science can augment them. Moreover ethogenic theorists (...) do not explain how a discipline that eschews experiment and causal inquiry can transcend the understanding of the subject and how, if it does not, it can do more than provide perspicuous views of the social facts and practices already known, or at least within reach of unspecialized observation. The programme of uncovering the mechanisms by which we register and evince our social standing is not one of which we are given a coherent account and is, in any case, not to be served by multiplying examples of how respect and contempt are merited or meted out. It is suggested that the need such discourse surreptiously meets is that of an autonomous craving for Wittgensteinian Übersichten - overviews - of the vicissitudes of social existence. (shrink)

His discussion of aesthetics was mingled in a curious way with criticism of assumptions which he said were made by Frazer in The Golden Bough and also with criticisms of Freud ’.

His discussion of aesthetics was mingled in a curious way with criticism of assumptions which he said were made by Frazer in The Golden Bough and also with criticisms of Freud ’.

The ‘abominable mess’ of which Wittgenstein complains is that of confounding reasons and causes. What does Wittgenstein mean to call attention to by this contrast and why does he think himself entitled to hold that Freud confounded them? Sometimes by reasons he means just what someone says on being asked why he did what he did or reacted as he reacted, and sometimes what an experience meant to a subject on further reflection upon it—its ‘further description’.