Would democratic theory in its empirical and normative guises be in a better position without the theory of the deliberative public sphere? In this paper I explore recent theories of agonistic democracy that have answered this question in the affirmative. I question their assertionthat the theory of the public sphere should be abandoned in favor of a model of democratic politics based on political contestation. Furthermore, I explore one of the fundamental assumptionsat work in the debate about the theory of (...) the public sphere’s status, namely the assumed opposition between consensus and contestation. Questioning the rigid nature of the opposition, I go on to argue that the deliberative theory of the public sphere actually facilitates the development of the agonistic approach to democratic theory and practice. Key Words: agonistic democracy • deliberative democracy • democratic theory • Habermas • theory of the public sphere. (shrink)

This article explores John's Muir's writings in order to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. To this end, I draw out three key features. First is the aesthetic category of sublimity as it emerges in his explorations of Yosemite. Second, a distinctive, pluralistic environmental aesthetics is found through his interweaving of aesthetic, religious, and scientific ideas. Third, his journals from the Thousand‐Mile Walk reveal an active and situated aesthetics, shaped by his practice of exploring and communing with nature. Together, these (...) features support a perspective that is quite contemporary, in tune with environmental and everyday aesthetics, as well as with recent work in environmental ethics. (shrink)

This review considers Michael Brady's account of the positive epistemic role of emotions. Brady claims that emotions can facilitate evaluative understanding because they "capture and consume" a person's attention. This review claims that there is a difference between emotions that are intrinsically productive of evaluative understanding and those are productive of evaluative understanding only because of the contribution of other, non-emotional states. Accordingly, Brady has not yet established that emotions fall in the former category, rather than the (...) latter, and thus leaves open that emotions may have a neutral or negative epistemic role on their own. (shrink)

Hanna proposes a version of non-conceptualism he closely associates with Kant. This paper takes issue with his proposal on two fronts. First, there are reasons to dispute whether any version of non-conceptualism can be rightly attributed to Kant. In addition to pointing out passages that conflict with Hanna's interpretation, I also suggest ways in which the Kant of the Opus Postumum could integrate key insights of non-conceptualism into a basically conceptualist framework. In Part Two of the paper, I turn to (...) a more systematically oriented critique of Hanna's nonconceptualism. Drawing on work by Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Sonia Sedivy, and Alva Noë, I argue that conceptualism is in a position to integrate the points which are taken by Hanna to speak most strongly in favor of non-conceptualism. In particular, I argue for the deep compatibility of conceptualism and direct realism. At the same time, I point to what I see as weaknesses in Hanna's defence of non-conceptualism. (shrink)

John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education emphasizes the need to develop the habit of rationally judging which desires should be fulfilled. While nurture plays an essential role in this development, nature provides the fundamental desire for self-preservation, the end in light of which reason makes its judgments. The significance of this natural element in Lockean virtue has generally been overlooked, but it becomes clear through a comparison to Aristotelian virtue. Locke rejects any virtue that would require changing our most (...) basic desires, and he does so as part of his rejection of a political order designed for such education. Locke’s account of education is not purely transformative; rather, it is intended to prevent the transformation that would be part of an Aristotelian moral education. (shrink)

This paper assesses Michael Brady’s claim that the ‘capture and consumption of attention’ in an emotion facilitates evaluative understanding. It argues that emotional attention is epistemically deleterious on its own, even though it can be beneficial in conjunction with the right epistemic skills and motivations. The paper considers Sartre’s and Solomon’s claim that emotions have purposes, respectively, to circumvent difficulty or maximize self-esteem. While this appeal to purposes is problematic, it suggests a promising alternative conception of how emotions can (...) be teleological. The fact that emotional attention manifests dispositions, which have been habituated by repeated association with pleasure or relief, explains how the emotion can acquire the function of producing pleasure or relief. Hence, the emotion can have ‘non-cognitive function,’ in which its patterns of attention reliably produce beliefs that disregard or distort the truth. Not only is non-cognitive function the default condition of emotion prior to any training, but even those who have successfully trained their emotions often revert back to non-cognitive function when faced with trauma or stress. (shrink)

_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Zodiac killer, (...) as well as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

I sin udmærkede kommentar til vores artikel «En etisk diskussion af screening for kræftsygdomme» beskriver Geir Hoff den udtalte mangel på evidens vedrørende nytteværdien af screeningsprogrammer for kræftsygdomme baseret på randomiserede studier. Ydermere fremhæver Geir Hoff misforholdet mellem den manglende evidens ved screening og de strenge krav, der er til evidensen i den farmaceutiske industri. Dette er en velkommen kritik, pga. en udtalt ukritisk og uvidenskabelig tilgang til anvendelse af screening for denne eller hin sygdom eller risikofaktor.

Swedenborg's Principles of Usefulness presents a possibly unsuspected historical undercurrent that further evidences Emanuel Swedenborg's pervasive influence on a whole host of historical figures-from poets and artists to philosophers and statesmen-whose contributions to the evolution of self and society have resonated throughout time and into the present. Besides having an impact on individual thinkers, Swedenborg's ideas worked their way into the various social reform traditions that vitalized the American landscape during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His concept of usefulness, best (...) demonstrated in the competing worldviews of the nation's liberal and conservative traditions, involved a commitment made by Swedenborgians, New Church members, and others to energize the nation and its people by envisaging the possibility of a much-desired Universal Human. (shrink)

The Buddha’s final illness, brought on by his last meal prior to his death, was traditionally seen as one of a set of ailments suffered by him at various points during his lifetime. This paper looks at different Buddhist explications of the causes of these ailments and applies them to the episode of the Buddha’s final illness. In both instances, three explanatory strategies are detected: the first stresses the causative importance of the Buddha’s own negative karmic deeds in past lives; (...) the second looks to the negative deeds and karma of others than the Buddha; the third offers non-karmic explanations. The first two engendered two rather different kinds of j?taka stories; the last did not involve any j?takas but highlighted various kinds of ‘natural’ explanations. (shrink)

Geoffrey Rose’s prevention paradox points to a tension between two prima facie plausible moral principles: that we should save the greater number and that weshould save the most at risk. This paper argues that a novel moral theory, ex-ante contractualism, captures our intuitions in many prevention paradox cases, regardless of our interpretation of probability claims. However, it goes on to show that it might be impossible to square ex-ante contractualism with all of our moral intuitions. It concludes that even if (...) ex-ante contractualism cannot furnish an entire ethics of risk, it does identify important considerations for any such theory. (shrink)

Contending discourses underlie many of the worlds most intractable conflicts, producing misery and violence. This is especially true in the post-9/11 world. However, contending discourses can also open the way to greater dialogue in global civil society and across states and international organizations. This possibility holds even for the most murderous sorts of conflicts in deeply divided societies. In this timely and original book, John Dryzek examines major contemporary conflicts in terms of clashing discourses. Topics covered include the alleged (...) clash of civilizations; societies divided by ethnicity, nationality, or religion; economic globalization versus resistance; plus an in-depth discussion of the 'war on terror'. Dryzek concludes by highlighting the limitations of current neoconservative and cosmopolitan approaches, arguing that only deliberative global politics offers unprecedented new possibilities for democratic engagement in the international system. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, politics, philosophy, and sociology. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy puts communication and talk at the centre of democracy. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance takes a fresh look at the foundations of the field, and develops new applications in areas ranging from citizen participation to the democratization of authoritarian states to the global system.

This is a book about how politics, government - and much else - needs to change in response to the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities.

The Byzantine rite of ordination to the presbyterate culminates in the conferral of a portion of the Eucharist upon the newly-ordained by the bishop. After reviewing the historical roots of this rite, this article examines the philological and biblical background of the term. Parakatathêkê coincides with the notion of paradosis but goes beyond it in personal and eschatological senses. Three simultaneous but distinct acts of personal transmission are highlighted: the personal participation of the newly-ordained in the apostolic ministry of the (...) bishop; the handing over of Christ personally present in the Eucharist to the newly-ordained; and the corresponding personal surrender of the new priest to Christ, to whom he will render an account of his own realization of Christ's priesthood in the service of His Mystical Body, the Church. (shrink)

Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as citizen's panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, and deliberative polls at the center of their hopes for deliberative democratization. In light of experience to date, the authors chart the ways in which such mini-publics may have an impact in the “macro” world of politics. Impact may come in the form of actually making policy, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debates, market-testing of proposals, legitimation of public policies, building confidence and (...) constituencies for policies, popular oversight, and resisting co-option. Exposing problems and failures is all too easy. The authors highlight cases of success on each of these dimensions. (shrink)

A major resource expanding the study of early Chinese philosophy, religion, literature, and politics, this book features the first complete English-language translation of the_ Luxuriant Gems of the "Spring and Autumn"_,_ _one of the key texts of early Confucianism. The work is often ascribed to the Han scholar and court official Dong Zhongshu, but, as this study reveals, the text is in fact a compendium of writings by a variety of authors working within an interpretive tradition that spanned several generations, (...) depicting a utopian vision of a flourishing humanity that they believed to be Confucius's legacy to the world. The Spring and Autumn is a chronicle kept by the dukes of the state of Lu from 722 to 481 B.C.E. _The Luxuriant Gems_ follows the interpretations of the _Gongyang Commentary_, whose transmitters belonged to a tradition that sought to explicate the special language of the _Spring and Autumn_. The Gongyang masters believed that the_ Spring and Autumn_ had been written by Confucius himself, employing subtle and esoteric phrasing to indicate approval or disapproval of important events and personages. The _Luxuriant Gems_ augments Confucian ethical and philosophical teachings with chapters on cosmology, statecraft, and other topics drawn from contemporary non-Confucian traditions, reflecting the brilliance of intellectual life in the Han dynasty during the formative decades of the Chinese imperial state. To elucidate the text, Sarah A. Queen and John S. Major divide their translation into eight thematic sections with extensive introductions that address dating, authorship, authenticity, and the relationship between the original text and the evolving _Gongyang_ approach. (shrink)

A given but otherwise random environmental time series impinging on the input of a certain biological processor passes through with overwhelming probability practically undetected. A very small percentage of environmental stimuli, though, is ‘captured’ by the processor's nonlinear dissipative operator as initial conditions, and is ‘processed’ as solutions of its dynamics. The processor, then, is in such cases instrumental in compressing or abstracting those stimuli, thereby making the external world to collapse from a previous regime of a ‘pure state’ of (...) suspended animation into a set of stable complementary and mutually exclusive eigenfunctions or ‘categories'. The characteristics of this cognitive set depend on the operator involved and the hierarchical level where the abstraction takes place. Depending on the context, the transition from one state to another occurs in such a cognitive operator. The chaotic itinerancy may play a crucial role for this process. In this paper we model the dynamics which may underlie such a cognitive process and the role of the thalamo-cortical pacemaker of the brain. In order to model them, conceptualization by the notion of ‘attractor ruin’ in high-dimensional dynamical systems is necessary. (shrink)

This article is part of a longer term project between the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape and Umea University in Sweden. At both the institutions the teaching of ethics as a module within social science curricula has been an important focus area. The critical investigation of the growth of the ethics modules in the Department of Religion and Theology addresses questions of the growth in the number of students taking ethics as a module (...) that have been escalated in the last few years. This research seeks to explore social justice as a pedagogy to teach ethics. The article investigates the relationship between socially just pedagogies and social justice as a means of knowledge production. The ethics modules and students at the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape are the context of the study, and different socially just pedagogies will be investigated as relevant and significant pedagogies for teaching ethics for social change. Particular attention is given to the interaction between the lecturer, student and non-human phenomena as means of knowledge production. The nature of the interaction determines the effectiveness of pedagogies for a social justice agency. (shrink)

An oft-repeated claim is that there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Some of these claims derive from the Central Dogma, population genetics, and the neo-Darwinian program. Others derive from attacks upon evolution, in an attempt to show that “information cannot be created” by natural selection. In this paper I will try to show that the term “information” is a homonym for a range of distinct notions, and that these notions are either of concrete (...) properties, in which case they are little more than a periphrasis for correlation and causation, or of abstract properties, in which case they are observer-dependent. In short, if information is in the concrete world, it is causality. If it is abstract, it is in the head. (shrink)

It is proved that there is a formula$\pi \left$in the first-order language of group theory such that each component and each non-abelian minimal normal subgroup of a finite groupGis definable by$\pi \left$for a suitable elementhofG; in other words, each such subgroup has the form$\left\{ {x|x\pi \left} \right\}$for someh. A number of consequences for infinite models of the theory of finite groups are described.

Struever argues that White's emphasis on language, use of tropology, and adherence to formalism render his theory ahistorical. However, like White, she fails to define either her terms or her rationale for contrasting tropological with topological rhetoric, fails to take responsibility for our times, and fails to delineate clearly her views on the dynamics of history. What is required is further research and elaboration of White's tropal philosophy. A program for this study includes the clarification of a rhetoric for inquiry, (...) of tropes, and of elective affinity. These concepts should then be applied systematically to the disciplines of social science and to philosophy of history. White's concept of irony must also be isolated, sorted, and examined for its resistance to isolation and sorting. Finally, one must address the principles of politics which underlie these concepts, this text, and ultimately texts in general. (shrink)

In Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, democracy is necessary for the reconciliation of plural justice claims. Sen’s treatment of democracy is however incomplete and inadequate: democracy is under-specified, there are unrecognized difficulties in any context featuring deep moral disagreement or deep division and a conceptualization of public reason in the singular erodes his pluralism. These faults undermine Sen’s account of justice. Developments in the theory of deliberative democracy can be deployed to remedy these deficiencies. This deployment points to a (...) deliberative system encompassing those affected by collective decisions, with places for non-partisan forums and discursive representatives, conditionally open to multiple forms of communication, and geared to the production of workable agreements under normative and discursive meta-consensus. Democracy does not guarantee justice, but in a plural world it is essential to the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Clara Zetkin was a socialist activist from 1878, first with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, then with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, and finally with the Communist Party of Germany. During the period of antisocialist laws in Germany 1 she was exiled in Switzerland and France, and she assisted with the organization of the 1889 founding congress of the Second International in Paris. Indeed, she attended every congress of the Second International, acting as translator at them all (...) and speaking at several. In 1890 she returned to Germany and became editor of Die Gleichheit, the.. (shrink)

A three-year project funded by the M. B. Reckitt Trust is aiming to provide a theological critique of the sustainability process. This paper, based on the Reckitt Lecture given at the close of the first year of the work, outlines findings from a case study in the post-industrial landscape of South Yorkshire. Working with statutory and voluntary social, economic and environmental agencies and the Christian faith communities there, it explores how `sustainability' is interpreted, whether a spiritual perspective is represented in (...) the sustainability process and whether notions of `belonging' and `place' figure in the quest to secure the future of the area. The wider significance of the findings is discussed. (shrink)

This paper describes the nature of aesthetic judgments and the justifications that underpin these, with a particular focus on the theory of aesthetics set out by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. It argues that judgments of self often take the form of aesthetic judgments, that such judgments are prevalent in the psychotherapeutic discourse, and that this has major implications for the type of dialogue that is required in therapy. Such a dialogue shares many of the characteristics of art criticism, (...) but may be supported by scientific empiricism. Recent research on the interaction between emotion and cognition is reviewed and implications for therapeutic change are discussed. The paper concludes that aesthetic philosophy provides a common ground for emotion, cognition, ethics, and a sense of the meaningfulness of life. (shrink)