> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature (...) and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

SummaryIt is shown that the concept of understanding cannot be reduced to a combination of knowing that, knowing how, and knowledge by acquaintence. First, it is shown that understanding and knowledge have different objects. Then “understanding what” is analyzed along Aristotelian lines. In the central part of the paper it is shown that understanding objects defined by constitutive rules involves a non‐propositional component. This notion of “understanding” is shown to cut across the humanist‐scientist dichotomy.

This paper suggests that medically the term a 'human being' should be defined by the presence of an active human brain. The brain is the only unique and irreplaceable organ in the human body, as the orchestrator of all organ systems and the seat of personality. Thus, the presence or absence of brain life truly defines the presence or absence of human life in the medical sense. When viewed in this way, human life may be seen as a continuous spectrum (...) between the onset of brain life in utero (eight weeks gestation), until the occurrence of brain death. At any point human tissue or organ systems may be present, but without the presence of a functional human brain, these do not constitute a 'human being', at least in a medical sense. The implications of this theory for various ethical concerns such as in vitro fertilisation and abortion are discussed. This theory is the most consistent possible for the definition of a human being with no contradictions inherent. However, having a good theory of definition of a 'human being' does not necessarily solve the ethical problems discussed herein. (shrink)

This unique publication outlines the development of legal theory from pre-Roman times to the twentieth century. It aims to relate the evolution of legal theory to parallel developments in political history, and accordingly offers the reader an account of relevant contemporaneous political, religious, and economic events. Each chapter commences with a general historical background for the relevant period, and discusses how political events and political and legal theory are both related to one another and occasionally influence one another.No other English (...) publication aims to anchor legal theory to contemporary general history in this way, shunning the more conventional approach to legal theory via the study of 'traditions' or 'schools', and it is hoped that this study will provide a much-needed basic text for students of jurisprudence, legal theory and politics. (shrink)

Tenseless theories of time entail that the only temporal properties exemplified by events are earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than. Such an account seems to conflict with our common experience of time, which suggests that the present moment is ontologically unique and that time flows. Some have argued that only a tensed account of time, one in which past, present and future are objective properties, can do justice to our experience. Any theory that claims that the world is different (...) from how we experience it must nonetheless be consistent with the having of that experience. Accordingly, in this essay I defend the tenseless theory by arguing that it can indeed account for certain key features of our experience of time without recourse to tensed properties. (shrink)

The Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon the orator.--The Politeia of the Spartans by Xenophon.--The Boeotian Constitution from the Oxyrhynchus historian.--The Constitution of Athens by Aristotle.

SummaryWe need to classify emotions as objectual and non‐objectual. Some of the objectual emotions are dependent on the characterizations of their objects. So in these cases reason guides the emotions. But there are also other cases in which the conceptual dependency goes the other way. in the case of aesthetic judgments and certain types of judgments involving purpose, or compassion, the ability to make these judgments is dependent on being in certain emotional states. Thus in some cases emotions aid and (...) supplement reason.RésuméNous devons classer les émotions comme objectuelles et non objectuelles. Quelques‐unes des émotions objectuelles sont dépendantes des caractéristiques de leurs objets. La raison guide alors les émotions. Mais il y a aussi des cas ou la dépendance conceptuelle suit ?on;autres voies. Dans le cas de jugements esthétiques et de jugements comportant des buts, ou de la compassion, la capacityé de porter ces jugements est dépendante de certains états émotionnels dans lesquels se trouve le sujet. Ainsi, dans certains cas, les émotions aident et completent la raison.ZusammenfassungWir müssen die Gefühle in objektuelle und nicht‐objektuelle einteilen. Einige der objektuellen Gefühle sind von der Charakterisierung ihrer Objekte abhängig. In diesen Fällen lenkt die Vernunft die Gefühle. Es gibt aber auch Fälle, in welchen die begriffliche Abhängigkeit umgekehrt verläuft. Im Falle von ästhetischen Urteilen und von gewissen Urteilen, die Zwecke oder Mitgefühle betreffen, hängt die Fähigkeit, solche Urteile zu fällen, davon ab, dass man sich in bestimmten Gemütszuständen befindet. So kommt es, dass in einigen Fällen Gefühle die Vernunft unterstützen und ergänzen. (shrink)

The questions that occupied early Ionian philosophers are very general in nature, and are not linked to the various skills and crafts that surface early in Greek civilization. The awe and wonder fuelling these questions were directed towards large scale phenomena, and—according to the interpretation presented in this essay—called for more than mere re-descriptions or re-labellings of various features of reality. They called for explanations, but the notion of an intellectually adequate explanation took a long time to develop. Conceptions of (...) adequate explanation were changing throughout Pre-Socratic philosophy. It was left to Aristotle to attempt to capture the various models, and give them a unifying structure within an explicit theory. (shrink)

We seek to constitute the extended mind’s fourth wave, socially distributed group cognition, and we do so by thinking with Hegel. The extended mind theory’s first wave invokes the parity principle, which maintains that processes that occur external to the organism’s skin should be considered mental if they are regarded as mental when they occur inside the organism. The second wave appeals to the complementarity principle, which claims that what is crucial is that these processes together constitute a cognitive system. (...) The first two waves assume that cognitive systems have well-defined territories or boundaries, and that internal and external processes do not switch location. The third wave rejects these assumptions, holding instead that internal processes are not privileged, and internal and external processes can switch, and that processes can be distributed among individuals. The fourth wave would advocate socially distributed group cognition. Groups are deterritorialized collective agents; they are ineliminatively and irreducibly real, they have mental states. Individuals constitute groups, but groups also constitute individuals. What counts as an individual and a group is a function of the level of analysis. And they are conflicted. (shrink)

We offer obeisances to Lord Śiva, guru of knowledge, lord of the dance, who purifies by the very utterance of his name, who transcends all dualities. May he grant us permission to argue with his devotees. May he also give us his blessings to convince them.Properly speaking, comparative philosophy does not lead toward the creation of a synthesis of philosophical traditions. What is being created is not a new theory but a different sort of philosopher. The goal of comparative philosophy (...) is learning a new language, a new way of talking. The comparative philosopher does not so much inhabit both of the standpoints represented by the traditions from which he draws as he comes to inhabit an.. (shrink)

_The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill_ took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of the (...) volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the _Works_ are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.:Nominalism and the Paradox of ModernismJ. M. Bernstein (bio)If Schopenhauer's thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order (...) but changed in the slightest degree.—T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic TheoryAdorno's philosophy as a whole, and his aesthetic theory in particular, is irrevocably bound to the tradition and achievements of high modernism. Although Adorno himself did not recognize American Abstract Expression as the apotheosis of high modernism in painting, that judgment now hardly seems contentious.1 And that raises a problem: it is the problem of R. Mutt, again, the problem of the porcelain urinal called Fountain, which was refused admittance to the Society of Independent Artists' Exhibition in April 1917 in spite of the Society's proclaimed democratic slogan "No jury, no prizes"—the work whose life or after-life begins with the beautiful photograph of it by Stieglitz set against the background of Marsden Hartley's The Warriors and that appeared shortly thereafter in the new avant-garde journal The Blind Man. Whatever the immediate repercussions of Fountain, there can be little doubt that much of what is most vital in art in the second half of this century is unthinkable without it; Duchamp's readymade offers an exemplary alternative to the tradition of high modernist painting that has continued to be generative. For a modernist like Adorno, for whom authentic art is that which best rises to the demands and necessities of artistic materials, for whom internal consistency and rigor would appear to be everything, for whom, finally, aesthetic form is the "objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent" [AT 143; emphasis mine], Duchamp's gesture of simply naming or claiming artistic status for an ordinary bathroom fixture must be anathema. In this respect, Adorno's aesthetic theory would seem to be in the same predicament as Clement Greenberg's modernism: inextricably bound to a tradition that history has left behind. And while the option of refuting the claim of Fountain is certainly possible, and should not be too quickly suppressed (there is something in the claim that will forever be skeptically self-defeating), nonetheless there does appear to be an exemplariness to Fountain that exceeds the narrow provocation of Duchamp's nominalist gesture; something in the readymade, in fact, seems (art historically? aesthetically? conceptually?) irresistible. If so, then modernist [End Page 83] formalism must either find a way of accommodating the readymade without departing from its internal logic or find its claim to our attention forfeited.After laying out the bold outlines of Adorno's formalism, the remainder of this essay will seek to uncover an account of the readymade in the context of what I will eventually call "the paradox of modernism" in order to locate in what way the readymade can be accommodated to a defense of Adorno's late modernism. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume that the best overall defense of Duchamp's gesture, which makes it foundational for the understanding of modern art, is that offered by Thierry de Duve in his Kant after Duchamp. My elaboration of Adorno's late modernism will hence proceed, in part, through a charting of some of the fault lines in de Duve's Duchamp. My contention shall be that the generativity of Fountain as readymade not only belongs within modernism, but is only intelligible within a wholly modernist and formalist frame of reference.Adorno's Formalism and the Material MotiveAdorno opens the section of Aesthetic Theory entitled "Coherence and Meaning" with the drastic sounding thesis that "Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical" [AT 136]. He continues:In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, which criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal... (shrink)

It is impossible to deduce the properties of a strongly emergent whole from a complete knowledge of the properties of its constituents, according to C. D. Broad, when those constituents are isolated from the whole or when they are constituents of other wholes. Elanor Taylor proposes the Collapse Problem. Macro-level property p supposedly emerges when its micro-level components combine in relation r. However, each component has the property that it can combine with the others in r to produce p. Broad’s (...) nondeducibility criterion is not met. This article argues that the amount of information required for r is physically impossible. Strong Emergence does not collapse. But the Collapse Problem does. Belief in Strong Emergence is strongly warranted. Strong Emergence occurs whenever it is physically impossible to deduce how components, in a specific relation, would combine to produce a whole with p. Almost always, that is impossible. Strong Emergence is ubiquitous. Word counts. (shrink)

Using Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, this article argues that interpretations which assert that Hegel’s philosophy, or some portion of it, develops inan entirely a priori manner are incoherent. An alternative reading is then articulated.

This article argues that Hegel read Lacan. Put less paradoxically, it claims that situating Hegel within a Lacanian paradigm results in an understanding of the future as still open and of history as not ended. Absolute knowing, on this model, is the recognition of the way in which history has developed, not a claim that it can advance no further. The article aims to persuade those who might otherwise dismiss Hegel – for example, persons au courant with poststructuralism – that (...) he still can make a decisive contribution to current debates. (shrink)

This article presents Schelling’s claim that nature has an evolutionary process and Hegel’s response that nature is the development of the concept. It then examines whether evolution is progressive. While many evolutionary biologists explicitly repudiate the suggestion that there is progress in evolution, they often implicitly presuppose this. Moreover, such a notion seems required insofar as the shape of life’s history consists in a directional trend. This article argues that, insofar as a notion of progress is indeed conceptually ineliminatable from (...) evolutionary biology or needed to articulate the shape of life’s history, progress should be viewed as constitutive. The section on “Why Schelling and .. (shrink)