Anorexia nervosa remains an enigma among Western cultures. Various causal explanations have been offered, encompassing biological, psychological, and sociocultural models. These explanations, however, focus on the immediate or proximal mechanisms of causation. A more thorough understanding of anorexia nervosa can be achieved by understanding the relationship between these factors and ultimate causation, the level of explanation which deals with individual reproductive fitness. This paper reviews the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary models and indicates a necessary synthesis between proximate and ultimate (...) levels of causation in examining the anorexia nervosa puzzle. (shrink)

Insights into the problem of our relation to language Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: A Rhetoric in Transition reflects the present transitional nature of rhetoric and society. Its purpose is to relate the rhetorical theory of Burke to the theories of four major European philosophers--Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Grassi, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida--as they discuss the nature of language and its central role in society. This book describes a rhetorical world in transition but not a world in chaos. (...) It points to the centrality of symbolism in theories of language and rhetoric and illustrates Burke's influence as a pivotal things and theorist in the communication arts and sciences, suggesting that the observations regarding shifting paradigms and perspectives made by other scholars are indeed emergent in the realm of rhetoric. It also regards the powerful impact of language and symbolic action in both the critique and construction of human knowledge and augurs a central role for rhetoric in the intellectual and social transformations of this and the next century. (shrink)

State of nature or Eden? -- Hobbes' state of nature as an account of the fall? -- Hobbes' own belief or unbelief -- The contemporary reaction to Leviathan -- Hobbes and commentaries on Genesis -- A note on method and chapter order -- Good and evil -- Hobbes on good and evil -- The 'seditious doctrines' of the schoolmen -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- The state of nature as an account of the fall? (...) -- Equality and unsociability -- Hobbes and natural equality -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- Hobbes on natural unsociability -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- State of nature as Eden? -- The war of all against all -- Hobbes' war of all against all -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- State of nature as fallen condition? -- The right and law of nature -- Hobbes and natural right -- The contemporary reaction -- Hobbes and natural law -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- Hobbes as reformed theologian? -- The creation of society -- Hobbes on the escape from the state of nature -- The contemporary reaction : Hobbes versus divine right -- The scriptural account of Cain building a city -- Hobbes on the creation of the commonwealth -- The contemporary reaction : Hobbes versus the patriarchalists -- The scriptural account of the relationship between Adam and Eve -- State of nature as Eden, the process of the fall, and the fallen condition? -- Reading Hobbes' state of nature -- Anti-aristotelianism -- Hobbes' Protestantism. (shrink)

The core idea of 'becoming major', as it can be found in Kant's famous essay about the Enlightenment, is the concept of self-legislation or self-governance. Minority is described as a state of dependency on some heteronomous guidance (i.e. church, doctor, or the state), whereas majority is defined by Kant as the ability to guide oneself, using one's own understanding ('Verstand'). These definitions display a deep affinity to central concepts of Kant's philosophy: the autonomy of rational ethics, as it is defended (...) in the second Critique, and the copernican revolution in epistemology, which is the topic of the first Critique. Picking up on these similarities, the text isolates some of the essential conditions for Kant's understanding of an enlightened state of majority. Kant's theoretical works spell out conceptual preconditions for his radical account of self-guidance and gives it a more detailed form. This allows to articulate some of the historical assumptions and theoretical implications of majority which we might have lost out of sight in a time where 'self-management' is a ubiquitous demand. (shrink)

Excerpt from Conditions of National Success Not the centre of the universe, must on moral grounds be made the centre of any investigation into his position in that universe. Indeed, the idea Of society dominating the individual is SO Offensive to some people that the very term social organism arouses in them a strong antipathy. Societies exist because individuals have found them useful. Further more, since societies are thus a mere matter of individual arrangement it is advisable on scientific (...) as well as on moral grounds that our attention should be concentrated upon the individual. Society and the state are supposed to be without meaning except in SO far as they help the individual and increase the fullness of individual life, and study of the individual is under these circumstances much better calculated to throw a light upon the nature of society than the study of society upon the nature of the individual. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. (...) Hence I believe that there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were not other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world. (shrink)

We critically analyse the point of view for which laws of nature are just a mean to compress data. Discussing some basic notions of dynamical systems and information theory, we show that the idea that the analysis of large amount of data by means of an algorithm of compression is equivalent to the knowledge one can have from scientific laws, is rather naive. In particular we discuss the subtle conceptual topic of the initial conditions of phenomena which are (...) generally incompressible. Starting from this point, we argue that laws of nature represent more than a pure compression of data, and that the availability of large amount of data, in general, is not particularly useful to understand the behaviour of complex phenomena. (shrink)

The distinction between activity and passivity has a deep and fundamental role in scientific and philosophical conceptual frameworks, going back to ancient Greek thinking about society and nature. I briefly indicate the importance of the activity-passivity distinction in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, in relation to Husserl. I then advance a transcendental phenomenological argument that the distinction is, however, not as simple or obvious as it might appear, specifically that it cannot be wholly and determinately defined via a purely abstract, (...) conceptual-discursive procedure, since specifying which of two interacting terms is the active one entails (I argue) an implicit reference to pre scientific, affective experience. But, as I argue, specifying this distinction is nonetheless conceptually fundamental for scientific thinking about nature, especially in biology, despite scientific efforts to abstract from it. Together these arguments amplify, within science itself, Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s point that life, as intrinsically involving affect, is a transcendental condition of science. (shrink)

Though rousseau rejects traditional versions he believes in a natural law which man can grasp independently of any knowledge of god. It is natural in the sense that in a given set of circumstances man by a combination of simple reason and conscience can know what is right and wrong, Just and unjust. However, Its obligatory character is conditional. In the one case it depends on the ascertainable fact of human enforcement, And in the other, On a strong inner faith (...) in the existence of god. If both of these faiths are in vain, The whole question of natural law becomes at best academic, And the ideal of moral freedom, Quixotic. (shrink)

(Early) Modern social contract theories reject the idea that legal and political institutions are grounded in an alleged natural ordering or hierarchy of human beings, and instead argue that only government by a public (and not private) authority can fulfil the idea of justice as freedom and equality for all. To be authoritative and not just powerful, governing institutions must be shared as ours in this irreducible sense. I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful freedom brilliantly transforms this (...) tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory—his accounts of human nature (“moral anthropology”) and historical societies (“the principle of politics”)—as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception not only of rightful external freedom but of rightful human freedom in particular societies—with their histories—on planet Earth. With these arguments at hand, we can also better appreciate the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant—anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic—are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies we are not either in the state of nature or in civil society. In addition, in historical societies founded on principles of freedom, there are pockets of injustice or pockets that are devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework. Kant’s four ideas therefore give us more tools with which to capture the nature of different political forces and challenges facing us in our historical societies. (shrink)

In the opening sections of his Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte argues that mutual recognition is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. However, the argument turns on the apparently unconvincing claim that, in the context of transcendental philosophy, conceptions of the subject as an isolated individual give rise to a vicious circle the resolution of which requires the introduction of a second rational being to ‘summon’ the first. In this essay, my aim is to present a revised account of (...) the opening arguments on which they are more convincing. In particular, I argue that the problem of a circle is genuine and may be seen to result from a relation of mutual dependence between agency and cognition which ensures that for an exercise of either capacity to take place, an exercise of the other would have already had to have taken place with the result that neither can occur. Moreover, the solution is successful. The summons prevents us from being driven around the circle once more because it is a ‘synthesis’ that reconciles the constraint to which I am subject as a cognizer of independently given objects and my freedom as a self-determining subject. (shrink)

It is an underappreciated fact within the philosophical literature on laws of nature that many scientific laws require the aid of a supporting cast of additional modelling ingredients (such as boundary conditions, material parameters, interfacial stipulations, rigidity constraints, and so on) in order to perform their traditional role in scientific inquiry. In this paper, I suggest that this underappreciated fact spells trouble for some recent reformulations of David Lewis's Best Systems Account (BSA) of laws of nature. Under (...) the auspices of 'pragmatic Humeanism,' several philosophers have recently argued that the criteria of strength and simplicity that lay at the heart of Lewis's original formulation should be replaced with alternatives that are more sensitive to the role that laws play in scientific practice. Although the criteria that these philosophers put forward differ in a variety of ways, they are primarily concerned with the ability of laws to furnish us with predictions and encode information. This, I suggest, is a problem. If it is true that many scientific laws do not on their own perform some of the roles with which they are traditionally associated, then they are unlikely in isolation to make meaningful contributions to the predictive strength of a system or encode information about particular systems. Such laws are thus unlikely to end up in the best system, and so these accounts will have trouble conferring lawhood upon them. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the notion and structural components of two concepts: the human condition and human nature. Likewise, it is proposed that both concepts should be included in the basic themes not only in the field of Educational Philosophy, but also in all disciplines where the human being occupies a privileged place. Human condition is understood as a state of subjection to everything with which human beings interact and represents the starting point to ascend to three natures that (...) correspond to human beings. Hegel emphasizes two natures of man. The first is characterized by having a biological structure governed by instincts. The second is culture and to ascend to it requires processes of intellection that can be objectified through consciousness. The third human nature proposed in this paper is rooted in Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope. It is materialized by human actions tending to the construction of the future from the discovery of what is not-yet-conscious that, when identified, is achieved through actions. (shrink)

This article attacks “open systems” arguments that because constant conjunctions are not generally observed in the real world of open systems we should be highly skeptical that universal laws exist. This work differs from other critiques of open system arguments against laws of nature by not focusing on laws themselves, but rather on the inference from open systems. We argue that open system arguments fail for two related reasons; 1) because they cannot account for the “systems” central to their (...) argument (nor the implied systems labeled “exogenous factors” in relation to the system of interest) and 2) they are nomocentric, fixated on laws while ignoring initial and antecedent conditions that are able to account for systems and exogenous factors within a fundamentalist framework. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that the state of nature is a continuum notion that lies in a segment along a larger continuum of the scope of private judgment, as does the continuum notion of civil authority. Jean Hampton saw Thomas Hobbes's state of nature as a “presocietal” condition of “isolated asocial individuals,” “stripped of their social connections.” There is plentiful evidence against Hampton's interpretation of the state of nature as an “asocial” condition in Hobbes's insistence across all his (...) political writings that men care deeply about their relative social standing and reputations, and that this is a major source of conflict in a state of nature. A potentially more promising way of understanding the state of nature is as a lawless condition. Societies exhibiting a high degree of consensus among private judgments may be able to tolerate incomplete removal from the mere state of nature, without threat to their stability. (shrink)

In §69.b of BT Heidegger attempts an existential genetic analysis of science, i.e. a phenomenology of the conceptual process of the constitution of the logical view of science (science seen as theory) starting from the Dasein. It attempts to do so by examining the special intentional-existential modification of (human) being-in-the-world, which is called the "mathematical projection of nature"; that is, by examining that special modification of our being, which places us in the state of experience that presents the world (...) to us as taught by, e.g., Galileo and Newton. The idea he puts forward is that modern mathematical physics and the corresponding experience of the real is the result of the mathematical projection of nature. Modern science, Heidegger says, stands out because it is mathematical. But we cannot get the answer to what this mathematicality consists in from mathematics, because mathematics is only a special manifestation of mathematicality. Here is what Heidegger means by "mathematicality" and, accordingly by "mathematical projection of nature." If one were to let two bodies of different weights fall simultaneously from the top of the tower of Pisa, Heidegger notes, both Galileo and an Aristotelian would see that the two bodies would reach the ground with as little time difference as possible, and not at exactly the same moment. Galileo, however, does something decisive: he claims that under conditions that would be impossible to ensure (if we removed absolutely all resistance to the motion of the bodies), the two bodies would reach the ground absolutely simultaneously. This is not something that he or the Aristotelian sees happening empirically. How, then, does Galileo insist so firmly on his position? How exactly does it happen that he has before him such a view of things? Heidegger's answer is that Galileo is mathematically projecting nature. In his Dialogues Galileo says "I conceive with my mind" (mente concipio) a body thrown to move on an infinitely extending horizontal plane, having eliminated from its path every possible obstacle. Finally, I argue that from the detailed interpretation of Heidegger's points of the mathematical and of the notion of mathematical projection of nature, we can arrive at the conclusions I had arrived at in my doctoral dissertation (2000) as regards the meaning and function of thought experiments in physics as seen from a Husserlian phenomenological point of view as intentional acts. In a nutshell, in thought experiments physics constitutes the special metaphysics (to use the Kantian term) of the primordial ontological region it investigates as well as attempts to make natural sense of the mathematical formalism in cases it proves necessary. (shrink)

In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Kant speaks of an ethical state of nature and of an ethico-civil condition, with explicit reference to the juridical state of nature and the juridico-civil condition he discusses at length in his legal-political writings. Given that the Religion is the only work where Kant introduces a parallel between these concepts, one might think that this is only a loose analogy, serving a merely illustrative function. The paper provides a first outline (...) of the similarities and the differences between the state of nature and the civil condition in Right and in ethics. The comparison points to a deeper, structural relation between the two pairs of concepts. By doing so, it makes room for developing a unitary conception of the state of nature and of the civil condition, which would underlie both the ethical and the juridical version. (shrink)

Taking the good (generosity), the true (enquiry), and the beautiful (creativity) as exemplars of what can make a life noticeably meaningful, elsewhere I have advanced a principle that entails and plausibly explains all three. Specifically, I have proffered the view that great meaning in life, at least insofar as it comes from this triad, is a matter of positively orienting one’s rational nature towards fundamental conditions of human existence, conditions of human life responsible for much else about (...) it. Iddo Landau has raised important objections to this principle, arguing in particular that contouring one’s rationality towards fundamentality is neither necessary nor sufficient for great meaning in life. In this article, I reply to Landau’s objections to the fundamentality account of what makes life very meaningful. I thereby aim to enrich reflection about what it is about the lives of Neslon Mandela, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso that made them so significant as well as to indicate how fundamentality implicitly plays a key role in theistic conceptions of meaning in life. (shrink)

In this chapter, I present the first systematic trope nominalist approach to natural kinds of objects. It does not identify natural kinds with the structures of mind-independent entities (objects, universals or tropes). Rather, natural kinds are abstractions from natural kind terms and objects belong to a natural kind if they satisfy their mind-independent application conditions. By relying on the trope theory SNT (Keinänen 2011), I show that the trope parts of a simple object determine the kind to which it (...) belongs. Moreover, I take the first steps to generalize the trope nominalist theory to the natural kinds of complex objects. (shrink)

Scientific essentialism aims to account for the natural laws' special capacity to support counterfactuals. I argue that scientific essentialism can do so only by resorting to devices that are just as ad hoc as those that essentialists accuse Humean regularity theories of employing. I conclude by offering an account of the laws' distinctive relation to counterfactuals that portrays laws as contingent but nevertheless distinct from accidents by virtue of possessing a genuine variety of necessity.

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue for (...) ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they part of the ecologist's nature? The question bothered biologists even before the discipline of ecology was firmly institutionalized.... (shrink)

The worldwide development of the revolution in science and technology is still in its initial stage. However, the characteristics of a qualitatively higher stage are already becoming evident in the area of the development of the system of labor, and therefore systematic philosophical study on the basis of the available data is a pressing task. Theory plays a special role precisely in periods when a phenomenon is not yet evident in final form. It is especially then that an acute need (...) arises for scientifically foreseeing, in its major outlines, the course of its development in the future. Within the bounds of the present article we shall attempt to do this with respect to certain aspects of the process of interaction between man and nature. (shrink)

This paper is about what we may provisionally call “indicative” conditionals. It aims to describe one use of the word ‘if’, by giving the truth conditions of sentences using ‘if’ in the way in question. Here are some sentences that, on their natural interpretations, illustrate the target use.

The conditions of moral responsibility include having the right kind and amount of control over actions, events or states of affairs that are morally significant. Both metaphysical issues and normative concerns are relevant, and these are extensively intertwined. This dissertation proposes a framework for an original theory of moral responsibility. The idea that rational autonomy is required for moral responsibility is developed and defended. I clarify various aspects of rationality and the nature of autonomy in the context of (...) my topic. I also address the important but infrequently discussed relation between views about the nature of morality and one's claims about the conditions for moral responsibility. I describe a form of moral objectivism assumed in my arguments, and argue that this assumption is not a disadvantage. ;Considerations about moral responsibility are often overly influenced by Frankfurt-style examples , and I provide an analysis of FSEs. I defend the position that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, despite a pervasive denial of this claim. I argue that if we carefully specify the events for which agents are morally responsible, we find that FSE-based arguments fail to show that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility. I contrast my theory with two recent theories of moral responsibility that I believe are the most successful: the Guidance Control Theory of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza and the Reason View of Susan Wolf. ;Finally, I evaluate restrictivism, the position that something required for moral responsibility---the ability to do otherwise---is very rare. I argue that the best restrictivist argument is unsound and the most plausible revisions of the argument also fail. I conclude that people often have the ability to do otherwise if they have it at all, and there are no good reasons to adhere to restrictivism. (shrink)

This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. (...) Hence I believe that there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were not other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world. (shrink)

This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. (...) Hence I believe that there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were not other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world. (shrink)

Following the recent recognition that humans are an active force in nature that gave rise to a new geological epoch, this article explores the implications of the shift to the Anthropocene for social theory. The argument assumes that the emerging conditions compel an expansion and deepening of the timescale of the social-theoretical perspective and that such an enhancement has serious repercussions for the concept of human agency. First, the Anthropocene is conceptualized as a nascent cognitively structured cultural model (...) rather than simply a geological epoch. Second, the vast and deep timescale, in the light of which the new time unit and its generative agency alone make sense, is analysed along with the human world's objective, sociocultural and subjective axes. Finally, the elements of the concept of agency are recomposed in their temporal and relational contexts. At the reflexive level throughout, the need for social theory to develop a cognitive-theoretical approach in conjunction with a weak naturalistic ontology is suggested. (shrink)