Famously, in the second Critique, Kant claims that our consciousness of the moral law provides us with sufficient grounds for the attribution of freedom to ourselves as noumena or things-in-themselves. In this way, while Kant insists that we have no rational basis to make substantive assertions about things-in-themselves from a theoretical point of view, it is rational for us to assert that we are noumenally free from a practical one. This much is uncontroversial. What is controversial is the cognitive relation (...) to things-in-themselves that is possible from a practical point of view. Interpreters have tended to regard such “practical cognition” of things-in-themselves as a poor step-cousin of its theoretical counterpart — as a sort of mere “rational faith” unworthy of comparison with genuine theoretical knowledge or cognition. Recent work on these issues has begun to shift this picture. But this reassessment is in its early stages and remains highly controversial. My aim here is to take this tendency and push it farther than most have generally been willing to go - at least with respect to our practical self-understanding as noumenally free agents. Indeed, I believe that, far from representing an impoverished cousin of theoretical cognition and knowledge, our practical awareness of ourselves as free possesses the central marks of cognition and knowledge in Kant’s sense of these terms, albeit on practical grounds. Thus, it is no surprise that Kant is willing to speak of our consciousness of the moral law as enabling genuine cognition of noumenal freedom. (shrink)

This article argues the following points. The Hobbesian hypothesis, which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it, is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. It is an essential premise in most contractarian justifications of government sovereignty. Many small-scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from them provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject it entirely. Therefore, contractarian theory has not (...) done what it claims to do: it has not justified state sovereignty to each person subject to it by demonstrating that they benefit from that authority. To be justified in contractarian terms, states have to do something to improve the living standards of disadvantaged people under their rule. (shrink)

This seminal contribution to Kant studies, originally published in 1982, was the first to present a thorough survey and evaluation of Kant's theory of mind. Ameriks focuses on Kant's discussion of the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason, and examines how the themes raised there are treated in the rest of Kant's writings. Ameriks demonstrates that Kant developed a theory of mind that is much more rationalistic and defensible than most interpreters have allowed.

Major recent interpretations of Kant's first "critique" (wolff, Strawson, Bennett) have taken his transcendental deduction to be an argument from the fact of consciousness to the existence of an objective world. I argue that it is unclear such an argument can succeed and there are overwhelming reasons to believe kant understood his deduction as having a very different form, namely as moving from the premise that there is empirical knowledge to the conclusion that there are universally valid pure categories. Detailed (...) support for this contention is offered in an analysis of the second edition version of the deduction. (shrink)

Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research presents a compilation of six decades of Basic Income literature. It includes the most influential empirical research and theoretical arguments on all aspects of the Basic Income proposal. -/- Includes six decades of the most influential literature on Basic Income Includes unpublished and hard-to-find articles The first major compendium on one of the most innovative political reform proposals of our age Explores multidisciplinary views of Basic Income, with philosophical, economic, political, and sociological views (...) Features contributions from key and well-known philosophers and economists, including Atkinson, Simon, Friedman, Fromm, Gorz, Offe, Rawls, Pettit, Van Parijs, and more Presents the best theoretical and empirical arguments for and against Basic Income -/- . (shrink)

Johannes Daubert he was an acknowledged leader, and in some respects the founder, of the early phenomenological movement, and was considered – as much by its members as by Husserl himself – the most brilliant member of the group. In Daubert’s unpublished writings we find a series of reflections on Lask, and on Neo-Kantianism, which form the subject-matter of this paper. They range over topics such as the ontology of the ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, truthvalues (Wahrheitswerte) and the value (...) of truth, negative judgments and the copula, and the relation between perception and judgment. (shrink)

1. Definition und Reduktion.--2. Theorie und Erfahrung.

This paper argues that a guaranteed income is not only consistent with the principle of reciprocity but is required for reciprocity. This conclusion follows from a three-part argument. First, if a guaranteed income is in place, all individuals have the same opportunity to live without working. Therefore, those who choose not to work do not take advantage of a privilege that is unavailable to everyone else. Second, in the absence of an unconditional income, society is, in effect, applying the principle, (...) “(S)he who does not work, will not eat.” If the application of this principle is to be consistent with reciprocity, it must be applied to everyone. Most modern industrial societies exempt many citizens from that choice. For example, the owners of external assets do not face the work-or-starve choice and do take advantage of a privilege that is not available to others. An unconditional guaranteed income is one way to eliminate that violation of reciprocity. Third, this paper addresses the criticism that the guaranteed income exploits middle-class workers by demonstrating that a basic income will have a positive effect on wages, which will at least partially counteract the effect of the taxes needed to pay for it. (shrink)

We describe new results in parametrized complexity theory. In particular, we prove a number of concrete hardness results for W[P], the top level of the hardness hierarchy introduced by Downey and Fellows in a series of earlier papers. We also study the parametrized complexity of analogues of PSPACE via certain natural problems concerning k-move games. Finally, we examine several aspects of the structural complexity of W [P] and related classes. For instance, we show that W[P] can be characterized in terms (...) of the DTIME ) and NP. (shrink)

We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone® foreign-language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects a (...) latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance. (shrink)

Like many other recent Hegelian accounts, Stephen Houlgate's severe critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy contends that, in contrast to Hegel, Kant's Critical system, especially because of its doctrine of transcendental idealism, presupposes a subjectivist and therefore inadequate position. On the basis of a moderate interpretation of Kant's idealism and his general Critical procedure, I defend Kant from the charge of subjectivism, and also give an account of how subjectivist interpretations in general can arise from a series of understandable misunderstandings of (...) difficult passages in Kant's first Critique. (shrink)

Durante los años 1853 y 1854 surgió una ola de huelgas en varios distritos industriales de Inglaterra, especialmente en los sectores textiles de Lancashire y Manchester. Este ciclo de luchas, que pugnaba principalmente por un aumento de los salarios, fue visto por Ernest Jones y el movimiento Cartista como una oportunidad para organizar una asociación obrera a escala nacional. Karl Marx, que compartía la visión de los cartistas, analizó el movimiento desde el New York Tribune, brindando apoyo a la (...) iniciativa a la que dio lugar: el Parlamento Obrero. A continuación, se ofrece la traducción de cuatro textos periodísticos que Marx publicó en apoyo a la institución obrera –la mayoría inéditos en español–, seguidos de «Las luchas por la organización obrera en la época victoriana (1853-1854)», un estudio crítico sobre el ciclo de huelgas y las expectativas de organización obrera durante aquellos años, donde se defiende que este fallido intento de organización constituye un precedente de la sección británica de la Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores. La traducción y edición de los textos de Marx, y el estudio crítico que los acompaña, han sido realizados por Mario Espinoza Pino (Universidad de Granada). (shrink)

The introduction (pp. 7-29) discusses Nazi denigration of "Jewish philosophy, " from Spinoza to Bergson and Husserl, and the elevation of "German" philosophers, particularly Eckhart and Nietzsche, to the role of forerunners of Nazism. The chapters on the work of the four Jewish philosophers mention briefly their murder by the Nazis (in the case of Benjamin, his death while fleeing the Nazis).

In this article the author tries to give an answer - from the point of view of the transcendental pragmatic foundation of discourse ethics - to the title question, which was raised by the Unesco conferences entitled `Universal Ethics' in Paris (27 March 1997) and Naples (December 1997). The article should be understood as a supplement to the empiristic-comparative responses of S. Bok and H. Küng, and especially to the communitarian approach of M. Walzer, proposed at the first conference. Unlike (...) traditional rationalism, this approach does not try to deduce concrete moral norms from axiomatic first principles; it begins with transcendental reflection on the undeniable moral presuppositions of argumentative discourse (which is not circumventable in philosophy). The approach first deduces from these presuppositions only the ideal procedures for the moral discourses through which all concrete moral problems ought to be solved, if possible. The second step provides a strategic-counter-strategic supplementation principle for those cases where undistorted moral discourses are not possible. (shrink)

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds (...) to these essays. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on the sociological model of man (also denoted as homo sociologicus or normative paradigm). It is discussed to what extent three problems limit its explanatory value: (1) behavior which is not normatively regulated and (2) behavior deviating from norms cannot be explained. (3) In case of norm conflicts it cannot be explained which of the normative expectations is followed. It is further discussed to what extent another model of man - which is called the “utilitarian”, “economic” (...) or rational choice model - is able to solve these problems. It is shown that the sociological model in fact consists of two different “utilitarian” models with very restrictive assumptions. Some of the problems of the sociological model are demonstrated by applying it to a well-known theory of role conflict. In the final section we discuss some consequences of the sociological model for the utilitarian approach. (shrink)