Če želimo učencem in dijakom ponuditi celotno sliko rimske antike, nam na področju kulture in civilizacije v obstoječih učnih načrtih nekaj manjka. Bistveni elementi so nedvomno prisotni; toda če želimo doseči tudi globino, ki jo nudi klasična tradicija, moramo nejezikovne vsebine dopolniti in jih v roku treh oziroma štirih let ponuditi na smiseln, organiziran način. V članku ponujena dopolnitev učnih načrtov je namenjena temu, da bi se pouk kulturno-civilizacijskih vsebin po Sloveniji poenotil (tako kot so jezikovne vsebine že zdaj). Seveda (...) pa moramo vedno imeti v mislih, da se pogovarjamo o eni sami stvari – klasični rimski antiki – ter tematskih sklopov ne na silo ločevati, temveč se jih truditi integrirati in povezovati v eno samo koherentno celoto, ki bo učitelju in učencu v veselje. (shrink)

This article explores the policies of discrimination and oppression towards Protestant communities in interwar Italy exercised by the state authorities and often incited by the Catholic Church. In particular, the circumstances in the multi-ethnic north-eastern region, the Julian March, are analysed in the context of so-called Border Fascism. The Protestant Churches had had in the past a prevalently ethnic character, but with the annexation to Italy, their background had been in several cases either concealed or, through migrations, Italians eventually became (...) majorities. Another significant characteristic is that Slovene and Croatian minorities only rarely adhered to Protestantism, other than the relatively few Seventh-day Adventists and ‘Fratelli’. Based on the archival documents, oppressive actions of the Fascist authorities against Adventists in Trieste as a response to a complaint by the Catholic curia accusing them of proselytism are reconstructed. The investigations and harassments of Adventists show all basic similarities to the episodes of oppression against certain Protestant minorities in other parts of Italy, while the nationality of their members was a crucial factor in determining why of all minority religions, aside from the Jewish, it was this community which experienced the most oppressive police treatment in the Julian March region. (shrink)

The more than 40 readings in this anthology cover the most important developments of the past six decades, charting the rise and decline of logical positivism ...

The paper assesses the rationale, contributions, structure, and challenges of the field of development ethics. Processes of social and economic transformation involve great risks and costs and great opportunities for gain, but the benefits, costs, and risks are typically hugely unevenly and inequitably distributed, as is participation in specifying what they are and their relative importance. The ethics of development examines the benefits, costs, risks, formulations, participation, and options. The paper outlines a series of ways of characterizing such work, arguments (...) for and against its importance, and some of its major sources and contributions, especially from the interdisciplinary stream of work represented over several decades by Denis Goulet. Definitions are diverse since the work covers many different intersections of practice and theorizing, at multiple levels. The paper considers and replies to arguments against discussing development ethics: the claim that it involves only endless proliferation of different opinions, is an expensive luxury that undermines long-run development, is superfluous if one already works with the capability approach or the human rights tradition, or never has influence. Finally, it presents suggestions for how development ethics thinking can have increased impact, with reference to incorporation in policy analysis and planning methods, professional codes and training, and to its intellectual location and communication strategies. The field should articulate the methodological pragmatism which much of it has adopted, consistent with its required role as a practice-oriented interdisciplinary meeting ground. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new rule of Vedic meter. The glides *v and *y are regularly lost before the corresponding high vowels ū̆ and ̆ī in Vedic. I argue that the word-initial glides *v and *y before the short vowels ŭ and ĭ still “make position” and that they should be restored for metrical purposes. This means that word-final syllables of the shape -V̆ C should be scanned long if the following syllable begins with a u- or i- (...) that goes back to *vu- or *yi-. This new rule has consequences for the general metrical shape of the Rigveda, as cadences previously scanned as irregular will be repaired to their canonical shape. The rule can also be employed as etymologically decisive for words that can potentially go back to forms with or without an initial glide. (shrink)

The language of ‘human security’ arose in the 1990s, including from UN work on ‘human development’. What contributions can it make, if any, to the understanding and especially the valuation of and response to the impacts of climate change? How does it compare and relate to other languages used in describing the emergent crises and in seeking to guide response, including languages of ‘externalities’, public goods and incentives, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis? The paper examines in particular the formulations in those (...) terms in Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work and Stern's The Economics of Climate Change and Blueprint for a Safer Planet, and how these authors are left groping for frameworks to motivate the changes required for global sustainability. It undertakes comparison also with the languages of human development and human rights, and suggests that, not least through enriching our skills of ‘narrative imagination’, the human security framework supports a series of essential changes in orientation—in our conceptions of selfhood, well-being and situatedness in Nature—and supports a required greater solidarity and greater awareness of our inter-connectedness. (shrink)

This paper presents a structured comparison of the social quality approach with the UNDP-led 'human development' approach and its sister work on 'human security'. Through clarification of their respective foci, roles and underlying theoretical and value assumptions, the paper suggests that partnership of the social quality approach with these 'human' approaches appears possible and relevant for each side.

Work on global ethics looks at ethical connections on a global scale. It should link closely to environmental ethics, recognizing that we live in unified social-ecological systems, and to development ethics, attending systematically to the lives and interests of contemporary and future poor, marginal and vulnerable persons and groups within these systems and to the effects on them of forces around the globe. Fulfilling these tasks requires awareness of work outside academic ethics alone, in other disciplines and across disciplines, in (...) public debates and private agendas. A relevant ethics enterprise must engage in systematic description and understanding of the ethical stances that are expressed or hidden in the work of influential stakeholders and analysts, and seek to influence and participate, indeed embed itself, in the expressed and hidden choice-making involved in designing and conducting scientific research and in policy analysis and preparation; it will contribute in value-critical and interpretive policy analysis. It will explore how the allocation of attention and of concern in research and policy depend on perceptions of identity and of degrees of interconnection, and are influenced by the choice or avoidance of humanistic interpretive methodologies. The paper illustrates these themes with reference to the study of climate change. (shrink)

Three themes in the work of Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897–1966) have especial relevance for current development ethics: first, the importance of counterbalancing a disciplinary philosophical or theological orientation with strong bases in empirical life-experience, practical learning and social sciences; second, the necessity to study capitalism not only ‘development’, and concrete life-needs not only a generalised notion of ‘freedom’; and third, the imperative to employ global and cosmopolitan frames besides national and ‘community’ ones. These themes came to distinguish Lebret as a development (...) ethicist. He began with the first and second from the 1930s, under his banner of ‘Économie et Humanisme’. The third emerged later in consequence of his studies across an interconnected world. The paper elucidates and discusses the three themes in turn. The subsequent sections then briefly consider Lebret’s legacies, influence and continuing relevance: directly, within the Catholic Church’s perspectives since the 1960s on human and global development; and indirectly, for secular work on ‘human development’ and in Anglophone development ethics. (shrink)

“Good governance” may be viewed as governance that effectively promotes human rights, human security and human development. This article discusses human security analysis, which in certain ways offers an integration of these “human” perspectives together with a “social” orientation, by combining a person-focus with systematic investigation of the environing systems of all sorts: physical, cultural, organizational. The importance of such analysis is illustrated through the example of climate change impacts and adaptation. The article presents applications of a human security framework (...) in governance, for policy analysis, planning and evaluation issues in climate change and other fields. The concluding section suggests that human security analysis may provide a way to apply insights from social quality analysis to detailed case investigation and policy analysis, while reducing macro-sociological abstraction and neglect of the natural environment. (shrink)

Several insider accounts of the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals suggest that the process (the procedures used and the emergent organizational and governance system features) was as important as the resulting goal-set. The paper looks at both aspects, and relationships between them: the rising influence of Southern nations (seen in the roles played by Colombia, Brazil, some African countries and the G77); the partial transcendence of traditional inter-bloc negotiation, including through adoption of elements of deliberative decision-making; the major involvement (...) of civil society and business organizations, thanks especially to the IT revolution; the adoption of a goals-targets-indicators frame that has flexibility at national level and implicit reliance on intensive further civil society activism and monitoring. The paper considers these features and the implied prospects for the SDGs in relation to various perspectives on global governance, with special reference to norm-setting: Ruggie’s concepts of ‘global public domain’ and ‘polycentric global governance’, Risse and Sikkink’s ‘norms cascade’, Murphy’s posited required elements for progressive global innovation, and Raskin’s model of transition through responses to crises. It concludes with questions for further work, including regarding the possibly problematic absence of an explicit inspirational value-core. (shrink)

Even though researchers regularly use neutral affect induction procedures as a control condition in their work, there is little consensus on what is neutral affect. This article reviews five approaches that researchers have used to operationalize neutral AIPs: to produce a minimal affective state, in-the-middle state, deactivated state, typical state, or indifferent state. For each view, the article delineates the theoretical basis for the neutral AIP, how to assess it, and provides recommendations for when and how to use it. The (...) goal of the article is to encourage researchers to state their theoretical assumptions about neutral affect, to validate those assumptions, and to make appropriate conclusions based on them. (shrink)

Special sections are planned for forthcoming issues 20:1, 20:2 and 20:3 Issue 20:1 – submissions due 15 January, 2024Issue 20:2 – submissions due 15 MayIssue 20:3 – submissions due 15 SeptemberFor...

The article discusses a recurrent discursive mechanism by which contemporary societies respond to the emergence of a crisis. Faced with the surplus of objectivity produced by a particular crisis – be it the global economic crisis, the refugee crisis, the climate emergency or the recent pandemic – a two-component defence mechanism is formed in discourse, which in turn also assumes a pseudo-objective status. In the first step, after the initial attempt to directly deny the emergence of a crisis is overturned, (...) the crisis is affirmed by a compromise constatation of its existence that underscores the supposedly central insight that the crisis has brought; in the second step, the constatation is supplemented by a pseudo-objective rule of action. In the case of the current pandemic, discussed in detail in the third section of the article, the rule of action has been formed as a political generalisation of the principle of proportionality. Since it is not applicable to the basic dynamic principles of the pandemic and consequently cannot solve the crisis, it has been gradually reduced to a minimum: we must learn to live with the virus. (shrink)

The article discusses the mechanisms of climate change denial. It starts from the observation that habituation to denial is based on a process that is exactly the opposite on the content level: the process of repeated aha-experiences, i.e., sudden insights into reality of the climate crisis. In the first part, the author summarises the developments of recent years, which came to a symbolic end at COP 28 in Dubai, when the President introduced the contradictory idea that the transition to a (...) sustainable paradigm is only possible by simultaneously maintaing the fossil fuel paradigm. In the second part, the article summarises some of the main points of what was probably the first interdisciplinary symposium on climate change, organised in 1975 by Margaret Mead. Referring to the conference’s position paper, the author first develops the basic framework for productive interaction between the social and natural sciences as Mead envisioned it and then presents the social consequences of the fact that the relationship remained institutionally disorganised—and eventually had to organise itself. (shrink)

In his important paper "1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences" (1984), Philip Kitcher defends biological antireductionism, arguing that the division of biology into subfields such as classical and molecular genetics is "not simply... a temporary feature of our science stemming from our cognitive imperfections but [is] the reflection of levels of organization in nature" (p. 371). In a recent discussion of Kitcher's views, Alexander Rosenberg has argued, first, that Kitcher has shown that the reduction of classical to (...) molecular genetics is impossible only because of our intellectual limitations and, second, that this kind of antireductionism supports an instrumentalist approach to biological theory. I argue that both of Rosenberg's claims should be rejected despite the fact that Kitcher misdiagnoses the central reason for the failure of reduction. (shrink)

In the first part of the article, the author analyses the last phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, which he terms “ex-communication”. A characteristic of this phase is not only virus”, but also the irrevocable transition to “living with the virus” but also the retroactive erasure of potentially valuable lessons from the pandemic for dealing with other crises. After outlining a new legal understanding of climate emergency in the second part of the text, the author concludes by focusing on the global (...) warming debate in the 1970s. In doing so, he posits that we must search for the origin of all forms of “climate delay” (Lamb et al.) in the confluence of two contradictory tendencies during that period: the determination to stop global warming early and the techno-utopian desire to prevent the onset of an ice age by deliberately warming the atmosphere. The irony is that the caution offered as a way out of the contradiction not only failed to mitigate climate change but ultimately prevented the onset of an ice age for the foreseeable future. Such clear signals of the Anthropocene present us with a new choice, i.e. a choice between two versions of the self-evident, two versions of the impossible. (shrink)

Discussions of global ethics—about the types of ethical claim made on individuals and groups, not only states, by individuals and groups around the world—have had to move beyond the categories inherited in the International Relations discipline. Many important positions are not captured by a framework developed for discussion of inter-state relations. The blindspots seem to reflect an outmoded expectation that (i) giving low normative weight to national boundaries correlates strongly with (ii) giving more normative weight to people beyond one's national (...) boundaries, and vice versa; in other words that these two dimensions in practice reduce to one. The paper develops an enriched categorisation. We need to recognise the separate importance of the two dimensions, and thus distinguish various types of ‘cosmopolitan’ position, including many varieties of libertarian position which give neither national boundaries nor pan-human obligations much (if any) importance. (shrink)

The article discusses the structural dynamics of the Covid 19 pandemic and defines it as an essentially finite crisis. However, this definition does not simply come down to the abstract necessity that the pandemic must end at some point, but rather to the fact that the idea of an end has determined the entire course of the pandemic. From the outset, this idea took two antagonistic forms: From the first perspective, the pandemic can only be ended by eliminating the source (...) of the intrusion; from the second perspective, ending the pandemic amounts to society finding a way to adapt to the intrusion. Apart from analyzing the often paradoxical implications of this essentially antagonistic idea for the “objective” evolution of the pandemic in its various phases, the article also demonstrates the inherently sadistic structure of the prevailing societal response. Precisely because this response was aimed at an impossible total normalization, it prepared the ground for the pandemic to possibly mutate into a genuine Anthropocene crisis, the endemic pandemic. (shrink)

A few years ago, Bas van Fraassen reminded philosophers of science that there are two central questions that a theory of explanation ought to answer. First, what is a explanation—when has something been explained satisfactorily? Second, why do we value explanations? . For a long time, discussions of explanation concentrated on technical problems connected with the first of these questions, and the second was by and large ignored. But, in fact, I think it is the second question which raises the (...) more fundamental and interesting philosophical issues. I shall offer reasons for thinking that the answer to the first question requires acceptance of the sort of fullblown notion of causation that only a scientific realist can love, and that the answer to the second question requires a realist construal of scientific theories and scientific methodology. My argument will be mainly negative, surveying the problems facing some major alternative accounts of explanation. A full elaboration of the realist perspective will have to await the completion of work in progress. (shrink)

In the article, I argue that Gadamer's hermeneutic phenomenology could serve as a basis for the understanding of contemporary social challenges by providing us with pre-requirements for conducting responsible ethics and politics, particularly due to its exposition of awareness of our finiteness, the importance of conversation and the significance of practical wisdom. I also claim that Gadamer's hermeneutics cannot be fully appropriated and that it should be supplemented with the philosophy that is attentive to the ever-present possibility of radical difference (...) which eludes domestication and demands creative response to its challenge. I emphasize the role of imagination in responsible approaching to the true alterity and investigate Kant's, Castoriadis' and Ricoeur's insights into said faculty. I conclude that both the awareness of our historicity, which orients us in the world, and imagination, which assists us in reaching to the other, must be recognized as the pre-conditions of responsible ethical action in contemporary society. (shrink)

According to usage‐based approaches to language acquisition, linguistic knowledge is represented in the form of constructions—form‐meaning pairings—at multiple levels of abstraction and complexity. The emergence of syntactic knowledge is assumed to be a result of the gradual abstraction of lexically specific and item‐based linguistic knowledge. In this article, we explore how the gradual emergence of a network consisting of constructions at varying degrees of complexity can be modeled computationally. Linguistic knowledge is learned by observing natural language utterances in an ambiguous (...) context. To determine meanings of constructions starting from ambiguous contexts, we rely on the principle of cross‐situational learning. While this mechanism has been implemented in several computational models, these models typically focus on learning mappings between words and referents. In contrast, in our model, we show how cross‐situational learning can be applied consistently to learn correspondences between form and meaning beyond such simple correspondences. (shrink)

Yih, Uusberg, Qian, and Gross proposed an appraisal approach to help conceptualize five different states that researchers have used as neutral control conditions. This approach has the poten...