Αναμφίβολα, όσοι γνώρισαν προσωπικά και όχι μόνο μέσα από τα κείμενά του τον Ευθύμη Παπαδημητρίου, θα θυμούνται ότι ο ίδιος κατέφευγε συχνά σε αυτήν την έκφραση, όταν αναφερόταν σε κάτι αυτονόητο ή σε κάτι δύσκολο στην πραγμάτωση του και άρα δεν σχετίζεται άμεσα με τη συνήθη χρήση της ως έκφραση στην αγγλική γλώσσα. Επιπλέον, οι ίδιοι μάλλον θα συμφωνήσουν μαζί μου, ότι οι παρελθοντικοί χρόνοι που θα ακουστούν/θα χρησιμοποιηθούν σήμερα εδώ και θα τον αφορούν, θα δημιουργήσουν, μάλλον, αμηχανία, αφού, αν (...) θέλουμε να είμαστε ακριβείς στην περιγραφή μας οφείλουμε να προκρίνουμε στις αναφορές μας για εκείνον, ως πιο ενδεδειγμένο χρόνο έναν Εξακολουθητικό Ενεστώτα, ο οποίος στην περίπτωση του Παπαδημητρίου μπορεί αβίαστα να συμπαρουσιάζεται με έναν Οραματικό Μέλλοντα…. (shrink)

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive fairness (...) (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in (...) the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

Every attempt to examine our consciousness’s passive life and its dynamic in its various forms inevitably intersects with our primal awareness of the future. Even though Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness enjoys a certain fame, his conception of our primordial relation to the future has not been adequately accounted for. The book at hand aims to offer a close study of Husserl’s view of protentional consciousness and to trace its unique contribution to our overall awareness of time. It offers an extensive (...) analysis of various aspects of protention by investigating its connection to different fields and levels of experience. To achieve such a task, the book stresses the need to enrich the familiar formal account of protention with a material one. Thus, alongside issues pertaining exclusively to the form of protention, such as its relation to fulfillment as well as its double-intentional structure, various other dimensions are discussed, such as the phenomena of disappointment and correction as well as the role hyle plays in both of them. In the same vein, special attention is given to the relation between protentional consciousness and affectivity, thus shedding light on the dynamic unity of our living-present. What this study purports to show is that Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped to offer a solid account of the thinnest and subtlest ways in which we are aware of the future in our experiential life. (shrink)

Promising is clearly a social practice or convention. By uttering the formula, “I hereby promise to do X,” we can raise in others the expectation that we will in fact do X. But this succeeds only because there is a social practice that consists (inter alia) in a disposition on the part of promisers to do what they promise, and an expectation on the part of promisees that promisers will so behave. It is equally clear that, barring special circumstances of (...) some kind, it is morally wrong for promisers to fail to do what they have promised to do. What is perhaps less clear is how the moral wrongness that is involved when promises are broken is related to the social practice that makes promising possible in the first place. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation. But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

In this paper we will try to find resemblances of the operation of human consciousness with systems with the intention to simulate it mathematically. Also we will try to do the same for the non-conscious operations and try to synthesize the human mind in form of system with subsystems.

Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to (...) the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts. (shrink)

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

The hyletic component of kinaesthetic sensation has generally been treated with suspicion. It is usually set aside in favour of Husserl’s later analysis of kinaesthetic experience which emphasizes its practical dimension. I try to show that a nuanced understanding of the hyletic component allows us to consider its deeper temporal function. From a rather neglected passage in his Ding und Raum I show that Husserl was aware of the temporal peculiarity of kinaesthetic sensation: it is characterized by a unique kind (...) of “sameness”. I then try to explain how the hyletic dimension of kinaesthetic sensation is responsible for this peculiarity. By escaping the contingencies of protentional fulfilment kinaesthetic hyle merely unifies in an actual “belonging-together” our sensing of position and the motivation of the correlative appearances. It is on this basis that it fundamentally shapes at a passive-hyletic level the complex temporal dynamic of the practical dimension of kinaesthetic experience. (shrink)

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not attracted much attention in (...) the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Mill’s ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ regarding the human will and action cannot apply on all cases, and that the human mind has potentially the capacity to create freely a will or action that, no matter what kind of knowledge we possess, cannot be predicted. More precisely, I argue against Mill’s attempt of conjunction between the freedom of the will and the ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ while I attempt a comparison with the relevant Kantian approach. (...) I then claim that a will cannot be free and be predicted at the same time, as both the elements of freedom and unpredictability of the will are founded on the very process of its formulation as an outcome of genuine creativity. I, thus, attempt to propose a more substantially free view of free will and action than the ones presented by the prominent conceptions. (shrink)

Cryptomarkets function as self-regulating forms of governance, close to what Hayek would describe as a spontaneous order. At the same time, in cases like the online market Silk Road, they construct an identity that portrays their illegal activities as operating within a framework of individual rights and voluntary transactions. As has already been examined in the wider literature, the political and economic philosophy of libertarianism has been mobilized by participants in such markets in order to provide a moral theoretical background (...) to their activities. This article examines: (1) why libertarianism indeed provides a suitable narrative for such activities and how the theoretical work of Foucault on power and resistance (and, more specifically, his notion of ‘counter-conduct’) can help us understand the contentious relationship between the state and cryptomarkets; and (2) how libertarian practices such as the ones taking place in cryptomarkets are at odds with neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what it (...) entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

Logothetis, N.K.: Single units and conscious vision. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences 353, 1801-1818 (1998) Abstract.

Nikos Panagiotakis, L'évolution archéologique de la Pédiada (Crète centrale) : premier bilan d'une prospection p. 327-430. La présente étude est un résumé de la prospection de surface effectuée dans la Pédiada, en Crète centale. Cette prospection se proposait d'explorer la dynamique de la région qui, géographiquement, constitue l'arrière-pays des grands palais minoens de Cnossos et de Malia. Un grand nombre de sites archéologiques ont été repérés, allant du Néolithique à l'époque vénitienne, avec une intense activité architecturale durant les périodes (...) paléopalatiale, néopalatiale, archaïque, romaine et vénitienne. Les résultats attestent de l'importance diachronique de la Pédiada, essentiellement due à sa position géographique et à ses richesses naturelles. (shrink)

Recently, much attention has been paid to ‘rational requirements’ and, especially, to what I call ‘rational requirements of formal coherence as such’. These requirements are satisfied just when our attitudes are formally coherent: for example, when our beliefs do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, these requirements are puzzling. In particular, it is unclear why we should satisfy them. In light of this, I explore the conjecture that there are no requirements of formal coherence. I do so by trying to construct (...) a theory of error for the idea that there are such requirements. (shrink)

The paper examines a central question in the philosophy of dance from the vantage point of a specific choreographic practice: Movenglish. Movenglish attempts to establish a one-to-one mapping between English words and dance movement equivalents in the body in a way that maximally captures both the connotative and denotative aspects of the words in question. The paper argues that the success of Movenglish has several important consequences for the philosophy of dance as well as our understanding of sign systems more (...) generally. The paper elaborates one of the strongest contributions to the philosophy of dance – the work of Susanne Langer – in order to show how the conclusions drawn from the dance produced through Movenglish both contribute to and depart from Langer’s philosophy. (shrink)

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge and power, normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a (...) systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying knowing, while attending to concerns about symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to tentatively restore the substance of the opening lines of Aeschylus’ Myrmidons; the first play of a lost, thematically connected trilogy, in which the poet adapts the Iliadic story of Achilles. In this restoration, I endeavor to show that Aeschylus closely reads certain pieces of his Homeric model in composing the opening (and also other parts) of the play. I further entertain the possibility that he aimed for this opening to evoke some key elements of (...) his source material - most importantly Achilles’ accursed wrath. (shrink)

It is argued that standard music notation pictures Aristotle’s time (time, as Aristotle conceived of it) in a number of important respects, which concern its micro-structure. It is then argued that this allows us to see some features of Aristotle’s time more clearly. Most importantly, Aristotelian instants can be pictured by bar-lines. This allows us to see as how radically devoid of any content Aristotelian instants should be interpreted. Thus, attention to music notation may show why Aristotle was not a (...) presentist. (shrink)

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. (...) Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and to hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time. This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy. Nikos Passas is Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. (shrink)