O artigo visa analisar, em linhas gerais, a arqueologia do sujeito operada por Alain de Libera, o que será feito pela concentração no estudo de duas teses fundamentais: Descartes chegou ao sujeito menos por reflexão e mais por refração, em seu debate com Hobbes e Regius, ao tentar escapar da redução do indivíduo à vida corporal e, portanto, à passividade; Tomás de Aquino e Pedro de João Olivi teriam sido os responsáveis por dar certo acabamento a uma temática elaborada desde (...) a Patrística, eminentemente por Agostinho de Hipona, que teria formulado um esquema compreensivo do eu como suporte e como agente. This article aims to analyze the fundamentals of Alain de Libera’s archeology of the subject. Two central thesis will be investigated here: Descartes arrived at his theory of the subject in a controversy with Hobbes and Regius, in order to avoid the reduction of the individual to bodily life and passivity; Thomas Aquinas and Peter John Olivi were responsible for a mature approach to the theme of the subject, which had been elaborated by Patristic authors, eminently by Augustine of Hippo, who formulated a comprehensive scheme of the self as support and agent. (shrink)

Este artigo investiga a “Tese” do primado do objeto na obra de Theodor W. Adorno, central ao seu materialismo não dogmático e relativamente pouco estudada. O primado do objeto será apresentado em seus elementos constitutivos, como crítica ao modo essencialmente idealista da dialética que perpassa o conjunto da obra de Adorno, em especial nos textos e discussões que precederam a publicação da Dialektik der Aufklãrung, para se explicitar no período de elaboração da Negative Dialektik. A “Tese” desenvolve momentos apresentados por (...) Lukács, Benjamin e Horkheimer, particularmente quanto ao nexo entre razão e experiência e se fundamenta especialmente no trajeto Kant – Hegel, como crítica ao idealismo, incorporando de modo estruturante as perspectivas de Marx e de Nietzsche. Ao romper a pretensa “simetria” entre sujeito e objeto, a “Tese” do primado do objeto revela como é insustentável a alegação habermasiana do Discurso filosófico da modernidade segundo a qual Adorno e Horkheimer incidiriam num ceticismo total frente à razão e à sua totalização ideológica. Ao contrário: estes autores, ao articularem de um modo original substância material histórica e argumentação teórica, contribuíram de modo fundamental para examinar o problema da reificação mediante sua relação à objetividade – como o não-idêntico – no âmbito da razão. (shrink)

The thesis of the priority of the object, essential to Adorno's non dogmatic materialism, is analyzed in its constitutive elements, as a criticism of idealism which is present mainly at the works Dialectic of enlightenment and Negative dialectic. As a criticism of idealism, particularly on the relationships between reason and experience as first developed from Kant to Hegel, the thesis is based on Lukács, Benjamin, and Horkheimer contributions and is embedded on the perspectives of Marx and Nietzsche. With its disruption (...) of symmetry between subject and object, the thesis of the priority of the object reveals the frailty of Habermas assertion, in his Philosophical discourse of modernity, of Adorno's and Horkheimer's skepticism towards reason. The present author argues that, in opposition to this claim, Adorno and Horkheimer contributed, with their new way of relating historical material and theoretical approach, to the analysis of the problem of reification in its relations to objectivity - as the non-identical - within the realm of reason, and not outside of it.Este artigo investiga a "Tese" do primado do objeto na obra de Theodor W. Adorno, central ao seu materialismo não dogmático e relativamente pouco estudada. O primado do objeto será apresentado em seus elementos constitutivos, como crítica ao modo essencialmente idealista da dialética que perpassa o conjunto da obra de Adorno, em especial nos textos e discussões que precederam a publicação da Dialektik der Aufklãrung, para se explicitar no período de elaboração da Negative Dialektik. A "Tese" desenvolve momentos apresentados por Lukács, Benjamin e Horkheimer, particularmente quanto ao nexo entre razão e experiência e se fundamenta especialmente no trajeto Kant - Hegel, como crítica ao idealismo, incorporando de modo estruturante as perspectivas de Marx e de Nietzsche. Ao romper a pretensa "simetria" entre sujeito e objeto, a "Tese" do primado do objeto revela como é insustentável a alegação habermasiana do Discurso filosófico da modernidade segundo a qual Adorno e Horkheimer incidiriam num ceticismo total frente à razão e à sua totalização ideológica. Ao contrário: estes autores, ao articularem de um modo original substância material histórica e argumentação teórica, contribuíram de modo fundamental para examinar o problema da reificação mediante sua relação à objetividade - como o não-idêntico - no âmbito da razão. (shrink)

Philosophers often claim that forgiveness is a paradoxical phenomenon. I here examine two of the most widespread ways of dealing with the paradoxical nature of forgiveness. One of these ways, emblematized by Aurel Kolnai, seeks to resolve the paradox by appealing to the idea of repentance. Somehow, if a wrongdoer repents, then forgiving her is no longer paradoxical. I argue that this influential position faces more problems than it solves. The other way to approach the paradox, exemplified here by the (...) work of Jacques Derrida, is just too obscure to be by itself helpful. Yet, I argue that what I take to be its spirit is on the right track. I recommend distinguishing between the definition and the justification of forgiveness, and also between forgiveness understood as a mental phenomenon and an overt, communicative act. These distinctions are not given their due in the specialized literature, and I expose the nefarious consequences of this neglect. By focusing on forgiveness as a mental phenomenon I seek to analyze the root of the talk of paradoxes which surrounds the discussion of forgiveness. Finally, I present an analysis of forgiveness as a pure mental phenomenon, and argue that this analysis is the most important step in understanding forgiveness in any other sense. While my analysis reveals interesting aspects of forgiveness, it reveals, too, that forgiveness is not quite as paradoxical after all. (shrink)

En su Religionskritik Spinozas Leo Strauss sostiene que la crítica de la religión de Spinoza se expresa y fundamenta “en la alternativa cruda y desnuda entre la superstición, el prejuicio, la barbarie, la ignorancia, las tinieblas de un lado, y la razón, la libertad, la cultura, las luces, del otro”. La critica spinoziana de la religión aparece entonces, de acuerdo con Strauss, como “la critica…operada por el Iluminismo mas radical”. Un abismo se abre entre la vida del sabio regida por (...) la razón, y aquella de la multitud sujeta a las pasiones, estableciendo con ello una rígida jerarquía entre dos tipos de hombre nítidamente diferenciados. Nos propondremos en este trabajo examinar esta proposición centrándonos en la necesidad de repensar no sólo el rol de la razón y la imaginación en el discurso político spinoziano, sino fundamentalmente la relación entre una y otra; relación determinante en la constitución de la multitud, y por ello, de la forma política. Nuestro argumento será que en primer lugar esa afirmación no es coherente con la complejidad del texto spinoziano, y en segundo lugar, que la misma constituye el corazón de la interpretación straussiana de Spinoza. (shrink)

We performed three experiments to investigate whether adjectives can modulate the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns. In Experiment 1, nouns of graspable objects were used as stimuli. Participants had to decide if each noun referred to a natural or artifact, by performing either a precision or a power reach‐to‐grasp movement. Response grasp could be compatible or incompatible with the grasp typically used to manipulate the objects to which the nouns referred. The results revealed faster reaction times (RTs) in compatible than (...) in incompatible trials. In Experiment 2, the nouns were combined with adjectives expressing either disadvantageous information about object graspability (e.g., sharp) or information about object color (e.g., reddish). No difference in RTs between compatible and incompatible conditions was found when disadvantageous adjectives were used. Conversely, a compatibility effect occurred when color adjectives were combined with nouns referring to natural objects. Finally, in Experiment 3 the nouns were combined with adjectives expressing tactile or shape proprieties of the objects (e.g., long or smooth). Results revealed faster RTs in compatible than in incompatible condition for both noun categories. Taken together, our findings suggest that adjectives can shape the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns of graspable objects, highlighting that language simulation goes beyond the single‐word level. (shrink)

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken (...) into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT's liveliness and relevance to the field's “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories. (shrink)

"-- M. J. Silverthorne,The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of ...

En su Religionskritik Spinozas Leo Strauss sostiene que la crítica de la religión de Spinoza se expresa y fundamenta “en la alternativa cruda y desnuda entre la superstición, el prejuicio, la barbarie, la ignorancia, las tinieblas de un lado, y la razón, la libertad, la cultura, las luces, del otro”. La critica spinoziana de la religión aparece entonces, de acuerdo con Strauss, como “la critica…operada por el Iluminismo mas radical”. Un abismo se abre entre la vida del sabio regida por (...) la razón, y aquella de la multitud sujeta a las pasiones, estableciendo con ello una rígida jerarquía entre dos tipos de hombre nítidamente diferenciados. Nos propondremos en este trabajo examinar esta proposición centrándonos en la necesidad de repensar no sólo el rol de la razón y la imaginación en el discurso político spinoziano, sino fundamentalmente la relación entre una y otra; relación determinante en la constitución de la multitud, y por ello, de la forma política. Nuestro argumento será que en primer lugar esa afirmación no es coherente con la complejidad del texto spinoziano, y en segundo lugar, que la misma constituye el corazón de la interpretación straussiana de Spinoza. (shrink)

This collection of Leo Abse's last essays are writings that he was working on from 2006 up to and during his final illness.

The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on ...

Offering an innovative approach to critical thinking, Good Reasoning Matters! identifies the essential structure of good arguments in a variety of contexts and also provides guidelines to help students construct their own effective arguments. In addition to examining the most common features of faulty reasoning--slanting, bias, propaganda, vagueness, ambiguity, and a common failure to consider opposing points of view--the book introduces a variety of argument schemes and rhetorical techniques. This edition adds material on visual arguments and more exercises.

This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 347-371, November 2022. We sometimes have to choose between options that are seemingly incomparable insofar as they seem to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. This often happens when the available options are quite different from one another. For instance, consider a choice between prioritizing either criminal justice reform or healthcare reform as a public policy goal. Even after the relevant details of the goals and possible (...) reforms are filled in, it is plausible that neither goal is better than, worse than, nor equal to the other. Such seemingly incomparable options present a problem for rational choice since it is unclear how an agent might rationally choose between them. What we need are some principles to help govern rational choice when faced with seemingly incomparable options. I here present three such principles. While each principle is individually compelling, I show that they are jointly incompatible. I then argue that the correct response to this inconsistent triad is to reject the principle that rationally censures performing a sequence of choices one knows will result in a suboptimal outcome. The upshot is that when seeming incomparability is involved, an agent can money pump themselves without being less rational for it. (shrink)

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart (...) and John Rawls. We show that all three thinkers tend to assume that there is but one type of normativity within the realm of social institutions – roughly, the sort of normativity that is involved in following the results of chess – and that they thereby neglect features that are of crucial significance for an adequate understanding of social reality. (shrink)

The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient (...) attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions. (shrink)

With a view to the theme of church renewal, this article explores the role of a well-known and popular phrase in the Reformed tradition within Protestantism, that is, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda [‘the reformed church should always be reformed’]. Is this a helpful slogan when considering the possibilities and the limitations of church renewal? Firstly, the historical background of this phrase is described: it is rooted in the Dutch Reformed tradition, and only in the 20th century it was widely recognised (...) in Reformed circles. Against this background the hermeneutical problem, linked with the principle of sola Scriptura, is presented, and put into an ecumenical ecclesiological perspective: the church is grounded in the gospel. Finally, the article focuses on church polity as an important field of renewal, taking into account Karl Barth’s interpretation of this phrase. From this perspective, a balanced and ecumenical approach of church renewal is possible. (shrink)

During the last decade, one source of debate in argumentation theory has been the notion that there are different modes of arguing that need to be distinguished when analyzing and evaluating arguments. Visual argument is often cited as a paradigm example. This paper discusses the ways in which it and modes of arguing that invoke non-verbal sounds, smells, tactile sensations, music and other non-verbal entities may be defined and conceptualized. Though some attempts to construct a ‘multimodal’ theory of argument are (...) criticized, it advocates for an argumentation theory that makes room for visual arguing and for other non-verbal modes that have not been explored in depth. In the process, the paper provides a method for identifying the structure of multimodal arguments and argues that adding modes to our theoretical tool box is an important step toward a comprehensive account of argument. (shrink)

' Here is Tolstoy's religion; and non-violence is at its heart. Simon Parke, author of The Beautiful Life.

In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the ...

Most infonnallogic texts and articles assume a verbal account of reasoning which defines "argument" as a set of sentences. The present paper broadens this definition in order to account for "visual arguments" which are communicated with nonverbal visual images. Standard approaches to verbal arguments are extended in a way that allows them to explain and evaluate visual argumentation.

Contextualizing the emergence of history of philosophy within eighteenth-century German Enlightenment, this book discusses the philosophical nature of the historiographical concept ‘system of philosophy’ and the concept’s influence upon the methods of history of philosophy and history of ideas.

Punishment is a phenomenon which occurs in many contexts. Discussions of punishment assume punishment is criminal punishment carried out by the State. This book contains an account of punishment which overcomes the difficulties of competing accounts and treats punishment comprehensibly to better understand how it differs from similar phenomena, discussing its justification fruitfully.

Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning, but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in social and political commentary; in news reports and editorials in (...) the mass media ; in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange. (shrink)

In the paper ‘COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk–benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,’ Bardoshet alargued that college mandates of the COVID-19 booster vaccine are unethical. The authors came to this conclusion by performing three different sets of comparisons of benefits versus risks using referenced data and argued that the harm outweighs the risk in all three cases. In this response article, we argue that the authors frame their arguments by comparing values that are (...) not scientifically or reasonably comparable and that the authors used values that represent grossly different risk profiles and grouped them into a set of figures to create an illusion of fair comparisons. We argue that absent the falsely skewed portrayals of a higher level of risk over benefit in their misrepresented figures, the five ethical arguments they presented completely fall apart. (shrink)

Metaphysics, formerly the queen of science, fell into oblivion under the onslaught of empiricism and positivism and its very possibllity came to be denied. Professor Elders traces the history of this process and shows how St. Thomas innovated in determining both the subject of metaphysics and the manner in which one enters this science, particularly in the framework of his Aristotle commentaries. The work then considers being and its properties, its divisions into being in act and being in potency, into (...) the act of being essence, and into substance and the accidents. Finally the causes of being are considered. The work also introduces and surveys the extensive literature of Thomas interpretation of the past 50 years. (shrink)

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

Leo Corry tells the story behind the idea of number, from the early days of the Pythagoreans, up until the turn of the twentieth century. He presents an overview of how numbers were handled and conceived in classical Greek mathematics, in the mathematics of Islam, in European mathematics of the middle ages and the Renaissance, during the scientific revolution, all the way through to the mathematics of the 18th to the early 20th century.

The present paper elaborates a deductivist account of natural language argu-ment in the context of pragma-dialectics. It reviews earlier debates, criticizes some standard misconceptions in the literature, and argues that the identification and analysis of deductive argument schemes can be the basis of a compelling theory of argumentative discourse.

The ArgumentRecent studies in the philosophy of mathematics have increasingly stressed the social and historical dimensions of mathematical practice. Although this new emphasis has fathered interesting new perspectives, it has also blurred the distinction between mathematics and other scientific fields. This distinction can be clarified by examining the special interaction of thebodyandimagesof mathematics.Mathematics has an objective, ever-expanding hard core, the growth of which is conditioned by socially and historically determined images of mathematics. Mathematics also has reflexive capacities unlike those of (...) any other exact science. In no other exact science can the standard methodological framework usedwithinthe discipline also be used to study the nature of the discipline itself.Although it has always been present in mathematical research, reflexive thinking has become increasingly central to mathematics over the past century. Many of the images of the discipline have been dictated by the increase in reflexive thinking which has also determined a great portion of the contemporary philosophy and historiography of mathematics. (shrink)

Linda Radzick's new book, _The Ethics of Social Punishment_, contains an important discussion of punishment outside the context of the state. By way of celebrating this fine and welcome book, I try to probe some analytical contours concerning punishment seen from the general perspective on which Radzick and I agree. I suggest altogether abandoning the idea that (non-state) punishment needs to be inflicted by an authority. Furthermore, I insist on an account of retributivism that resists the usual accusations of barbarism (...) and bloodthirstiness. (shrink)