Bundel bijdragen over wijsgerige ontwikkelingen in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw.

A. THE TEXT The main importance of these two treatises lies in the insight they provide into Spinoza's conception of the relation between mathematics and certain disciplines not touched upon elsewhere in his major writings. The mathematics they involve are not the as those of the Ethics however, and the precise connection same between the geometrical order of this work and these excursions into optics and probability is by no means obvious. Add to this difficulty the knotty problems presented by (...) their editorial his tory, dating and scientific background, and it is not perhaps surprising that in spite of the fact that they provide such an excellent illustration of Spinoza's reaction to certain important developments in the history of physics and mathematics, they should not, so far, have attracted much attention. They were first published in 1687 by Levyn van Dyck (d. 1695), official printer to the town council in The Hague. Printing anything by Spinoza was not without its risks, and it is probably significant that during the same year van Dyck should also have published a lengthy and elaborate refutation of Spinozism by 1 the pious and eccentric physician ]. F. Helvetius. Spinoza's name was omitted from the title-page, possibly because the editor or publisher thought that his reputation as an atheist might prejudice the sale of the booklet, and it was not until 1860 that the Amsterdam bookseller Frederik Muller (1817-1881) identified him as its author. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill hatte ein außergewöhnliches Leben. Einige biographische Besonderheiten sind weithin bekannt: Seine Erziehung durch den strengen VaterMill, James ist legendär, seine komplizierte Beziehung zu seiner späteren Ehefrau Harriet TaylorTaylor, Harriet schon immer Anlass lebhafter Spekulationen. Etwas überraschend mag bei der ersten Beschäftigung mit Mills Leben sein, dass er weder studiert hat noch einer wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit nachgegangen ist, zumindest nicht als Brotberuf; sein Lebenswerk erschuf er im Privatleben. Bekannt ist auch Mills Autobiography, die 1873 nach seinem Tod veröffentlicht (...) wurde, die er aber bereits ab 1853 zusammen mit seiner Ehefrau Harriet Taylor Mill verfasste. (shrink)

It is well known that John Stuart Mill repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible (...) standards for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page. (This paper is available on an open-access basis at UTILITAS). (shrink)

This chapter discusses (in German) John Stuart Mill's position on paternalism and how it relates to his book 'The Subjection of Women'. It is argued that Mill's claim (in On Liberty) that one should not be allowed to sell oneself into slavery is making reference to the Victorian marriage contract through which women essentially become slaves of their husbands. As argued in Subjection, women do not freely develop the desire to get married, the social circumstances do not leave them (...) any other options. Necessarily unaware of what married life is like, the decision to get married is like crossing an unsafe bridge without knowing it is unsafe. It is not paternalist, as Mill argues, to alert them to the condition of the bridge and put them in the position to decide for themselves whether they want to cross it (or turn back half way, e.g. by divorcing). (shrink)

The conclusion of the paper reads: There is a view compatible with everything Mill says in these passages that can deal with all three problems. It’s a simple act utilitarianism in which the moral value of an action is determined by its actual consequences. On this view, the consequences of an action, what happens, depends on what the agent wants to bring about, that is to say, they depend on the agent’s intentions. Therefore the moral value of an action depends, (...) given that on simple act utilitarianism it entirely depends on the action’s consequences, entirely on the intentions of the agent – at least in the simple cases at issue between Mill and Davies in which people manage to bring about what they want to bring about. In these cases, varying the intention varies the consequences and thus the moral value. The simple act utilitarian nevertheless recognises that motives are also relevant – not necessarily to the consequences of the actions that do get performed but to which actions get performed at all. Hence motives are of paramount importance in theory and practice. However, as actions are individuated by the agent’s intentions and the action’s consequences, without appealing to the motive giving rise to it, any particular action might be brought about by different motives. Mill’s example illustrates this scenario. Hence it is possible to vary the motive due to which an action is performed without varying the action’s consequences, that is, without varying its moral value. In this sense, the moral value of an action does not depend on the motive with which it is done. Hence Davies’s objection is indeed unfounded and Mill’s footnote is rescued. (shrink)

We argue that the idea of ECC is more in line with libertarian than liberal thinking. The basic idea of ECC is the dislocation of the provider of citizenship rights from governments to corporations: corporations provide and administrate the same citizenship rights, which governments provided earlier, before the political processes started the privatization of these entitlements . According to John Rawls’ liberal viewpoint, citizens’ relations to the public structures of society are supposed to be fundamentally different from their relations (...) to private associations like business corporations. In libertarian thinking , instead, citizens relations to public institutions do not significantly differ from their relations to business corporations. Both are based on voluntary agreements, bringing forth the idea of a contract-society. Since ECC is backed up by this kind of contractsociety, it brings forth libertarian interpretations of the most central political matters - like the basic structure of society, and the concepts of freedom and democracy. (shrink)

This book explores some of the most important themes in neo-Ricardian economics. It explores the many contributions of Pierangelo Garengnani to modern economics, including his work in capital theory, the theory of effective demand and stability analysis. Contributors include Paul Samuelson, John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, Edward Nell, Alessandro Roncaglia and Ian Steedman.

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original (...) essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction. (shrink)

Linear logic, introduced by Girard, is a refinement of classical logic with a natural, intrinsic accounting of resources. This accounting is made possible by removing the ‘structural’ rules of contraction and weakening, adding a modal operator and adding finer versions of the propositional connectives. Linear logic has fundamental logical interest and applications to computer science, particularly to Petri nets, concurrency, storage allocation, garbage collection and the control structure of logic programs. In addition, there is a direct correspondence between polynomial-time computation (...) and proof normalization in a bounded form of linear logic. In this paper we show that unlike most other propositional logics, full propositional linear logic is undecidable. Further, we prove that without the modal storage operator, which indicates unboundedness of resources, the decision problem becomes PSPACE-complete. We also establish membership in NP for the multiplicative fragment, NP-completeness for the multiplicative fragment extended with unrestricted weakening, and undecidability for fragments of noncommutative propositional linear logic. (shrink)

On Thursday evening, August 30, 1989, in the Combination Room of Trinity College, Cambridge University, Michael Petry of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, opened the conference he had organized on “Hegel and Newtonianism.” Under the sponsorship of the Istituo per gli Studi Filosofici of Naples, Petry invited more than 40 scholars from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to discuss the relation between eighteenth century Newtonian science and Hegel’s philosophy of nature.

Editio princeps of Peter Thomae's De ente. It is generally acknowledged by historians of philosophy that medieval philosophers made key contributions to the discussion of the problem of being and the fundamental issues of metaphysics. The Quaestiones de ente of Peter Thomae, composed at Barcelona ca. 1325, is the longest medieval work devoted to the problem of being as well as the most systematic. The work is divided into three parts: the concept of being, the attributes of being, and the (...) descent of being. Many of the philosophical tools that Peter pioneered in this work, such as the distinction between objective being and subjective being, and various modes of quiddities and abstraction, were adopted by later thinkers and discussed up to the eighteenth century. Apart from defending and further extending Scotistic doctrine, one of Peter's achievements in the De ente is to fully reconcile Scotistic univocity with the traditional doctrine of the analogy of being. In addition to the critical edition, the present volume also contains a detailed introduction and study of the philosophy and the manuscripts of the De ente, with an appendix containing the Question on univocity by Francis Marbres (John the Canon), who copied extensively from the De ente. (shrink)

Petrus Thomae was a fourteenth-century Spanish philosopher who taught in Barcelona. Although he did not hear John Duns Scotus lecture personally, he was familiar with Scotus’ autograph material and thus is a useful source in reconstructing his thought. This article collects and supplements the available information on the life of Petrus Thomae, and presents an inventory of the surviving manuscripts of his works.

In this chapter we examine Moti Mizrahi’s claim that philosophers’ opposition of scientism is founded on their worry that scientism poses “a threat to the soul or essence of philosophy as an a priori discipline”. We find Mizrahi’s methodology for testing this thesis wanting. We offer an alternative hypothesis for the increased resistance of scientism: the antipathy started as a reaction to the New Atheist movement. We also consider two varieties of weak scientism, narrow and broad, and argue that narrow (...) versions of scientism draw unnatural and unfounded distinctions within science. Mizrahi belongs somewhere between these two types, but he commits the same mistakes as proponents of the narrow variety. We demonstrate that Mizrahi’s defence of weak scientism is problematic, once again, due to methodological reasons. As an alternative, we propose that weak scientism should be based on epistemic opportunism. Epistemic opportunism explains the success of science with scientists’ willingness to adopt any methods that demonstrably work. We also show how opportunistic scientism can avoid charges of triviality. (shrink)