One of the major problems in the implementation of the precautionary principle in environmental cases is the estimation of the weight of evidence. In this paper we propose a formal method that determines the weight of evidence based on the specific parameters of a given case. The proposed method is based on an artificial intelligence approach called fuzzy logic, which is commonly used as an interface between logic and human perception, and often applied to computer-based complex decision making. We use (...) one fuzzy expert system that provides a quantification of the estimated environmental damage, and a second fuzzy expert system that computes the weight of evidence in a given case. The proposed expert system can be easily defined and adjusted by regulators and environmental science and policy experts. (shrink)

In this book, Tal S. Shamir sets out to identify cinema as a novel medium for philosophy and an important way of manifesting and developing philosophical thought. The volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the nature of philosophy's potential-or, more strongly put, its need-to be manifested cinematically. Drawing on the fields of cinema, philosophy, and media studies, Cinematic Philosophy adds film to the traditional list of ways through which philosophy can be created, concentrating on the unique potential of the (...) cinematic medium to effectively put forward and create philosophy. In the process, the book opens up innovative horizons for new types of knowledge and wisdom grounded in contemporary contexts and philosophical thought. Philosophy, best characterized as the love of wisdom, is not dependent on a specific medium nor solely situated within written text or oral lectures. Shamir asserts that philosophy can, should, and must be manifested and identified in a range of different platforms. (shrink)

This book examines the unique views of philosopher Jacob Sigismund Beck, a student of Immanuel Kant who devoted himself to an exploration of his teacher's doctrine and to showing that Kant's transcendental idealism is, contra to the common view, both internally consistent and is not a form of subjective idealism. In his attempt to explain away certain apparent contradictions found in Kant's system, Beck put forward a new reading of Kant's critical theory, a view, which came to be known as (...) the Standpunctslehre, the Doctrine of the Standpoint. Author Lior Nitzan reconstructs, step by step, the historical development of Beck's doctrine. He shows how Beck's unique view is drastically different from that of his contemporaries and presents the relevance of Beck to contemporary debates about the proper interpretation of Kant's notion of objectivity, the refutation of idealism and the role of the thing in itself in Kant's transcendental idealism. In doing so, Nitzan presents a defense of Beck's radical perspective of Kant's theory and claims that some of Kant's negative responses to it may in fact be due more to the adversary academic environment at the time than to Kant's true, well considered, opinion. Jacob Sigismund Beck's Standpunctslehre challenges the two dominant schools in the interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism-the "two world" and the "two aspect" view. It presents a new way of understanding Kant's transcendental idealism, according to which the thing in itself plays no positive role in relation to the possibility of experience. Moreover, it claims that eliminating the thing in itself as the ultimate object of knowledge is not to admit idealism but in fact is the only way to consistently uphold realism. In addition, the book also addresses the question why, assuming that the proposed interpretation is correct, Kant had chosen not to make his true intentions clear. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR), cultural evolution and the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and (...) cultural evolution. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signalling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modelling. This is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology, the Handbook will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Offers three Neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 480-495, December 2021.

In the last few decades, residency in some of the world’s desired destination cities has become a privilege, as housing supply has not kept pace with population growth. This has led to a significant rise in housing prices and consequently to the exclusion of middle- and low-income populations on a large scale. These developments have received only scant attention in political theory despite their prominence in local policymaking and their contribution to processes of redrawing the boundaries of inclusion into local (...) political communities. My focus in this article is on the question ‘is it morally permissible for cities to sort members by economic means, and grant the better-off privileged access to residency?’ I explore this question by examining the main arguments used to support the city’s right to selectively admit would-be members. This allows me to delineate the limitations of the city’s general duty to be accessible to all segments of society and to present particular cases where the city has special obligations to incorporate nonmembers. (shrink)

As even those who endorse it concede, cosmopolitanism has a motivational problem. There is a need for strategies to generate support of global norms conducive to cosmopolitanism, but which do not rely primarily on the motivating force of the moral argument. This article makes the case for civic vigilance as an answer to this problem. It argues that support for cosmopolitan norms could be advanced by encouraging a recognition of the ‘boomerang effect’: the ways in which global injustice undermines the (...) freedom of one’s own political community. The article offers evaluative criteria for different motivational strategies, assesses prominent alternatives to moral motivation, and finally defends the appeal to civic vigilance. (shrink)

In this paper I take issue with Allison's ‘two aspect’ view of Kant's transcendental distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. Unlike those of Allison's critics, who criticize him, and by implication Kant, based on some form of the ‘two world’ view, I argue that, even Allison's methodological, more moderate interpretation, nevertheless includes an excessive commitment to the role of things-in-themselves in Kant's theoretical philosophy, a commitment which is both unnecessary and incompatible with Kant's text. I offer an alternative interpretation which, in (...) my view, is at once more accurate, and more defensible against the familiar claim that Kant's philosophy is either incompatible with itself or it inevitably leads to idealism. (shrink)

In this paper I take issue with Allison's ‘two aspect’ view of Kant's transcendental distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. Unlike those of Allison's critics, who criticize him, and by implication Kant, based on some form of the ‘two world’ view, I argue that, even Allison's methodological, more moderate interpretation, nevertheless includes an excessive commitment to the role of things-in-themselves in Kant's theoretical philosophy, a commitment which is both unnecessary and incompatible with Kant's text. I offer an alternative interpretation which, in (...) my view, is at once more accurate, and more defensible against the familiar claim that Kant's philosophy is either incompatible with itself or it inevitably leads to idealism. (shrink)

This essay concerns Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” and the irreconcilable tensions that haunt it. I study these tensions—between the desire to blame and punish and the inability to provide moral justification for these practices—and locate their source in Beauvoir's conception of ethics in Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté. According to my reading, her ethics implies that violence violates freedom, the grounding principle of ethical life. Retaliatory and retributive judgments and the punishment they (...) uphold, regardless of whether they are exerted by individuals or by official state powers, are forms of violence and are therefore unjustifiable. The aporias of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” suggest that Beauvoir's ideal of ethics necessitates an abolitionist position regarding punishment. The essay ends with a reflection on the affinity between the position constructed from Beauvoir's work and feminist abolitionist theories that seek to undermine the legal, social, and political institutions that perpetuate, rather than resolve, economic, racial, gender, sex, and class inequality. (shrink)

Este trabajo se enmarca en una investigación en curso sobre la representación de los genocidios en el cine documental. En esta instancia se indagará en torno a las características del testimonio del victimario en el cine documental, efectuando un mapeo por diversas producciones. Se presentará un posible esquema que prestará atención en la matriz narrativa de los testimonios y los modos de responsabilidad que allí se exponen. De este modo, se presentarán dos grandes polos que oscilarán entre la entrevista –más (...) ligada a brindar información “objetiva”– y el trabajo de confesión –ámbito donde el perpetrador medita sobre su subjetividad–. (shrink)

David Axelsen has recently introduced a novel critique of the motivational argument against cosmopolitanism : even if it were the case that lack of motivation could serve as a normative constraint, people’s anti-cosmopolitan motivations cannot be seen as constraints on cosmopolitan duties as they are generated and reinforced by the state. This article argues that Axelsen 's argument misrepresents the nationalist motivational argument against cosmopolitanism : the nationalist motivational argument is best interpreted as an argument about normative feasibility rather than (...) as an argument about the technical feasibility. Nationalists ' objection to cosmopolitanism arises not from the impossibility of cosmopolitan motivation, but from the moral costs of achieving and sustaining it. Given this interpretation, this article argues that Axelsen fails to demonstrate that nationalists would have to accept cosmopolitan conclusions from their own premises. (shrink)

Ortega y Gasset is known for his philosophy of life and his effort to propose an alternative to both realism and idealism. The goal of this article is to focus on an unfamiliar aspect of his thought. The focus will be given to Ortega’s interpretation of the advancements in modern mathematics in general and Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers in particular. The main argument is that Ortega acknowledged the historical importance of the Cantor’s Set Theory, analyzed it and articulated a (...) response to it. In his writings he referred many times to the advancements in modern mathematics and argued that mathematics should be based on the intuition of counting. In response to Cantor’s mathematics Ortega presented what he defined as an ‘absolute positivism’. In this theory he did not mean to naturalize cognition or to follow the guidelines of the Comte’s positivism, on the contrary. His aim was to present an alternative to Cantor’s mathematics by claiming that mathematicians are allowed to deal only with objects that are immediately present and observable to intuition. Ortega argued that the infinite set cannot be present to the intuition and therefore there is no use to differentiate between cardinals of different infinite sets. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the political motivation argument against cosmopolitanism, according to which the extension of social justice beyond bounded communities would be motivationally unstable, and thus unjustified. It does so through an analysis of the stability problem, and a reconstruction of the three most prominent anti-cosmopolitan arguments—Rawlsian statism, liberal nationalism, and civic republicanism—as solutions to this problem. It then examines, and rejects, three prominent objections, each denying a different level of the argument. The article concludes that the civic republican version (...) of the argument is the most plausible, and implications for cosmopolitanism are considered. (shrink)

The essay proposes that children should not participate in custody proceedings because they lack a place in the public world, a concept which was developed by Arendt and which I elaborate on the basis of her writings. Arendt’s concepts of place in the world and of childhood are correlated, polar ethical concepts. ‘Place in the world’ as described by Arendt combines commitment to worldbuilding as a collaborative enterprise, relations of mutual-recognition among equal co-builders of the public world, an inviolable place (...) in public and private realms, and self-disclosure through the staging of public appearances. We should recognize children as rightful participants in divorce proceedings when we are ready to treat them as occupants of place in the world, split between public and private realms and corresponding public and private voices. Recent practices of children’s participation undermine the intimate realm of childhood as well as the public world. (shrink)

Departing from Durkheim’s assertion of the primacy of public time, I argue that time is manufactured through the legal organization of society in the form of a corporate body. As a corporation, society enjoys fictive immortality, and it is this legal fiction that allows the flow of historical time. The institution of time, and of the corporate structure in general, is made possible through the political triumph over communal aspirations for timelessness, oneness and death: aspirations for an eternal present, to (...) which I refer as the communal body. The passage from a founding, pre-historical experience of timelessness into historical time is accomplished through the construction of a perpetual corporate body in place of a communal body that lacks a temporal dimension. I will argue that the establishment of historical time and of the corporate organization of society necessitates the normative regulation of sexuality. Thus, the relaxation of the traditional structure of historical time and of sexual morality in contemporary society are closely intertwined. (shrink)

It is argued that ideals emerge in the course of the individuation‐separation process, preserving the narcissism of primary Thingness. Ideals form an essential part of social structure, as opposed to communitas, where individuation is suspended. The anthropological distinction between social structure and communitas is reformulated in psychoanalytic terms. Structure and communitas are shown to correspond to two alternative organizations of narcissism. Ideals and myths figure among the manifestations of the narcissism of structure. In the last section, certain explanations of the (...) discourse of ideals are drawn from the preceding account. While the premises of the following reflections are broadly Kleinian, Lacanian concepts are supplemented, not on the basis of any definite synthesis but towards a piecemeal reconciliation. (shrink)

Summary The article deals with the political thought of the young Spanish philosopher and intellectual, José Ortega y Gasset (1883?1955). The main aim is to examine to what extent his political thought was articulated in a systematic manner, and to understand if it was meant to be practically implemented. Ortega's political thought has been described as liberal on the one hand, and anti-democratic and conservative on the other. The disparities regarding Ortega's politics usually arise from his declarations, which aimed to (...) confront the changing social and political situation in Spain. To many researchers, these declarations seem incoherent, evolutionary, or ideas that can be directly deduced from the evolution of his philosophical theory. The extent to which Ortega's political theory was systematic will be understood through focusing on the role designed for the Spanish intellectuals in Ortega's declarations and works. Instead of considering his political thought in relation to either his philosophy or the political events and changing circumstances in Spain, I will attempt to examine how, during the years of his youth, his political declarations were always guided by a consistent feature with a practical political purpose: to challenge the Spanish intellectuals to promote social awareness of and reflection on the country's problems, and to consider potential solutions to these problems. (shrink)

In the conclusion to The Imaginary Jean-Paul Sartre draws attention to the centrality of imagination in human life, describing it as a constitutive structure of consciousness. Imagination, according to him, is not a contingent feature of consciousness, but one of its essential features. This essay re-examines Sartre’s notion of imagination, arguing that current interpretations do not exhaust its meaning. Beginning with a consideration of dichotomies that dominate his theory of imagination—such as those between present, material objects and absent images, or (...) real entities and fictional creations, as well as interpretative responses to them—the essay moves on to explore the possibility of locating a different sense of imagination in his work, one which is irreducible to such oppositions. Focusing on Sartre’s example of the work of an impersonator, this essay advances the idea that the playful activity of impersonators and actors enables the spectators who are watching them to explore novel and often unfamiliar connections between objects in the world. Imagination, according to this interpretation, enriches and augments perception, rather than suspends or replaces it with mental images. This new interpretation of Sartre’s notion of imagination places him in proximity to Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘aspect-seeing’ in Philosophical Investigations. However, whereas Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘aspect-seeing’ can lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to draw a line between perceiving and imagining, the notion of imagination operative in Sartre’s example enables us to maintain and explain the differences between ordinary and ‘imaginative’ perception. (shrink)

הייתכן לדבר על השתיקה כשפה? במסע ארוך המשתרע על שבעה עשר פרקים מנסה המחבר להתמודד עם התפיסה המקובלת בימינו, לפיה השתיקה האנושית היא שפה פרטית, פנימית ואינטימית, כזו הנגישה רק לאדם כיחיד. תחילת המסע להתגברות על תפיסה זו מצוי בבחינה מחודשת של הרציונאליזם ואידיאל האינדיבידואליות המודרני בזיקה עם הגישה שלנו אל השתיקה האנושית. בעוד ששפת המילים מוגדרת כשפה המשקפת את העולם, המהווה תמונה של המציאות, שפת השתיקה מתוארת כשיקוף של הפרטי שרק היחיד ככזה יכול לגשת אליו. האומנם השתיקה היא שפה (...) פרטית? רגעים של שתיקה נחשפים במהלך הספר כחלק מהדיאלוג של האדם עם עצמו, עם הזולת ועם מכלול המציאות שמסביבו. ניתוח היחסים בין התחזקות האמונה המודרנית בפוטנציאל הרציונאליזם ו/או מדע האדם לבין תהליך הגדרת השתיקה כשפה פרטית עומד במרכז הדיון. האמונה בכוחן של המילים לשקף ולשלוט על המציאות כמו גם האמונה בכוחו של מדע האדם לתאר באופן אובייקטיבי/מדעי את האדם כסובייקט אנושי ניצבים למבחן מחודש. מטרת הדיון לאפשר לשפת השתיקה לחשוף עצמה כשפה שאיננה פרטית, כשפה של דיאלוג של האדם עם עולם החיים ו/או המציאות האנושית שהוא חלק בלתי נפרד ממנו. היחס של החברה לשפת השתיקה כמו גם יחסה לשפת המילים הוא שיקוף של יחסה לתפקידו של האדם החי בה. הגדרת השתיקה כשפה פרטית מהווה חלק מתהליך ההתעצמות ההיסטורי של ניכור האדם מעצמו ומעולם החיים שהוא חלק ממנו. שתי סוגיות מרכזיות השזורות זו בזו ושמופיעות לאורך כל פרקי הספר: סוגיית הניכור החברתי ובחינה מחדש של החלק של הרציונאליזם בהתעצמות תחושת הניכור של האדם המודרני. (shrink)

Commenting on Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. According to Ricoeur, Sartre's examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms, neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues, manifests itself most clearly in fiction, wherein new meaning is created. By using fiction as the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that the essence of imagination lies not in its ability (...) to reproduce absent objects, but rather in the ability to transform reality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartre the writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination, I examine Sartre's philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does he develop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work by articulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation, well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative-identity theory. I argue that Sartre, like Ricoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative-theory whose criticism of Sartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditions for the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self. (shrink)

Should facts about motivation play a role in the justification of political ideals? Many theorists argue that political ideals should be tailored to the limitations of human nature—‘taking people as they are’—while others maintain that facts about motivation should be excluded. This article offers a critical intervention in this debate: the important question is not so much whether people can motivate themselves, or whether they are capable of being motivated, but what social mechanisms would be required to motivate them, and (...) whether these mechanisms are legitimate. Reframing the question of motivation as a political question of legitimacy, I argue that if people could only be motivated to act through illegitimate use of power, the ideal in question cannot be fully justified. (shrink)

This article presents a new understanding of the problem of cosmopolitan motivation in war, comparing it to the motivational critique of social justice cosmopolitanism. The problem of cosmopolitanism’s “motivational gap” is best interpreted as a political one, not a meta-ethical or ethical one. That is, the salient issue is not whether an individual soldier is able to be motivated by cosmopolitan concerns, nor is it whether being motivated by cosmopolitanism would be too demanding. Rather, given considerations of legitimacy in the (...) use of political power, a democratic army has to be able to motivate its soldiers to take on the necessary risks without relying on coercion alone. Patriotic identification offers a way to achieve this in wars of national defense, but less so in armed humanitarian interventions (AHIs). Two potential implications are that either AHIs should be privatized or that national armies should be transformed to become more cosmopolitan. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s early phenomenological texts reveal the complexity of his relationship to Edmund Husserl. Deeply indebted to phenomenology’s method as well as its substance, Sartre nonetheless confronted Husserl’s transcendental turn from Ideas onward. Although numerous studies have focused on Sartre’s points of contention with Husserl, drawing attention to his departure from Husserlian phenomenology, scholars have rarely examined the way in which Sartre engaged and responded to the early Husserl, particularly to his discussions of intentionality, consciousness, and self in Logical Investigations. (...) This essay focuses on Sartre’s critical response to Logical Investigations, arguing that Husserl’s understanding of these three notions shapes and informs Sartre’s own approach to them in The Transcendence of the Ego, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, and Being and Nothingness. By carefully reading Sartre side by side with Husserl, this essay arti... (shrink)

This article examines some techno-political aspects of the early years of electrification in British-ruled 1920s Palestine. It emphasizes the importance of local technical, topographical and hydrological forms of knowledge for understanding the dynamics of electrification. Situating the analysis in a general colonial context of electrification, the study shows that British colonial rulers lagged behind both German firms and local entrepreneurs in understanding the specific conditions pertaining to electrification in Palestine. Subsequently, the study shows that the British had limited control of (...) the actual electrification process and its declared/professed developmental purposes, thereby complicating assumptions about electrification as a tool of the Empire/tool of empire. Finding some similarities between the cases of electrifying Palestine and India, the article’s findings may shed further light on the importance of micro-politics of knowledge for understanding the trajectory of electrification in the colonies. (shrink)

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans-border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders. The mobility regime is theorized as premised upon a pervasive “paradigm of suspicion” that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint (...) for the organization of global risk-management strategies. The article draws on multiple examples, singling out some elementary forms of the mobility regime, emphasizing the sociological affinity between guarded borders on the one hand and gated communities on the other. In particular, the article aims at theorizing the translation of the paradigm of suspicion into actual technologies of social screening designed to police the mobility of those social elements that are deemed to belong to suspect social categories. Specifically, the article points at biosocial profiling as an increasingly dominant technology of intervention. Biosocial profiling, in turn, is theorized in juxtaposition to other modalities of power, namely, legal and disciplinary measures. (shrink)

In traditional societies the relationship between the group members was more personal and less individual. Most societies were patriarchal, hierarchical and static and most people understood themselves according to their social position. Only a small minority of the members tried to differentiate themselves from the collective in order to follow their potential of individuality. In modern times the social relations became less personal and more individual and the ideal was to allow every citizen to strive for accomplishing his special vocation. (...) The ideal of the vocation of man was presented in the writings of many philosophers and it reflected social, technological and scientific changes. Kant’s ideal of autonomic reason and Nietzsche’s ideal of authenticity were the two ideals of individuality. The first aim of this paper is to reexamine the limits of these ideals by following the ideas of different writers and to convince that this historical change should be conceived as the burden of individuality. The second aim is to rethink the relation between the imperative of individuality and the status of metaphysics in the writings of modern philosophers. (shrink)