Sanitizing Justice Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9174-y Authors Oliver Dowlen, 62 Brockswood Lane, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire AL8 7BQ, UK Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765.

Introducing part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this essay summarizes the “untold story” of the random recruitment of citizens for political office in Western Europe. Although sortition was used extensively in ancient Athens and in late medieval Europe, it is now (except for the randomly selected jury) a largely discontinued practice. While a good deal is known about when and where this procedure was used, there is little surviving documentation of exactly why it was used and of what (...) it was thought to contribute to the political systems in which it was deployed. This untold story, therefore, is not simply about historical instances of use but must also be an analysis and critique of its use. Key points that emerge are that (1) a lottery takes the decision to appoint or elect away from partisan protagonists, so it therefore acts as a mechanism that can break up and disperse power; and (2) a lottery can serve as a trusted mediation or agreement between parties, because the resultant decision is anonymous. (shrink)

A systematic treatment of Hume's conception of imagination in all the main topics of his philosophy.

Immanuel Kant is often considered to be the source of the contemporary idea of human dignity, but his conception of human dignity and its relation to human value and to the requirement to respect others have not been widely understood. Kant on Human Dignity offers the first in-depth study in English of this subject. Based on a comprehensive analysis of all the passages in which Kant uses the term ;dignity, as well as an analysis of the most prominent arguments for (...) a value of human beings in the Kant literature, the book carefully examines different ways of construing the relationship between dignity, value and respect for others. It takes seriously Kant s Copernican Revolution in moral philosophy: Kant argues that moral imperatives cannot be based on any values without yielding heteronomy. Instead it is imperatives of reason that determine what is valuable. The requirement to respect all human beings is one such imperative. Respect for human beings does not follow from human dignity for this would violate autonomy but is an unconditional command of reason. Following this train of thought yields a unified account of Kant s moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I examine what Kant’s Formula of Universal Law requires of an individual agent in situations of great need, e.g.: if you can easily help a drowning child, or if you know of a famine situation in another country. I first explain why I do not simply apply the standard interpretation of how one can derive concrete duties from Kant’s Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative. I then glean an alternative procedure from Kant’s texts and give the (...) reasons for using that interpretation. Finally, I apply the alternative procedure to situations of great need. – According to the interpretation I glean from Kant’s texts, one (i) should not make an exception to (ii) laws that we believe to be objectively necessary, whereby we derive these rules from (iii) universal ends of humankind. Since we take survival as one of the universal ends of mankind, we deem helping someone whose life is in danger as objectively necessary (to achieve the end). The formal Categorical Imperative demands that one does not make an exception to this rule. Applying this interpretation to cases of great need depends on at least three factors: (i) how urgent the need is, (ii) how great the costs are to the one who helps, and (iii) how many people can help. But at one extreme, where you are the only one who can easily save an innocent person’s life, the Kantian procedure generates a strict duty to help the other in need. (shrink)

If it is ethically wrong to hold some beliefs, there may be a conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of rationality. A recent theory holds that no such conflict exists: any morally wrong belief is also irrational to hold, made irrational through a phenomenon of radical moral encroachment. In this paper, I argue that radical moral encroachment fails to coordinate ethical and epistemic norms, given plausible epistemological principles and various substantive accounts of which beliefs are morally wrong, (...) including those endorsed by radical moral encroachment theorists themselves. (shrink)

The concept of vocal charisma has changed in the past decades from something that people have to something that people do, thereby stimulating research on how vocal charisma can be created and improved. Broadening the perspective on vocal charisma beyond the speaker’s performance itself to the context of the speech, we conducted acoustic-prosodic analyses of public speeches of two prominent Israelian politicians – Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. The speech material consisted of 311–516 prosodic phrases per politician from the election (...) campaigns 2019–2020 and, crucially, was balanced so as to include an equal number of pre- and post-election speeches. Results show a superiority of Netanyahu over Gantz in almost all facets of vocal charisma, although Gantz caught up over time. Moreover, unlike Gantz, Netanyahu showed a strong adaptation of his vocal charisma patterns to before- and after-election contexts. Scrutinizing this versatility difference, an additional perception experiment with 42 listeners and excerpts from the two politicians’ speeches was carried out. Results show that Netanyahu’s speech excerpts were, unlike those of Gantz, mainly rated as more charismatic in those contexts in which they were performed. Gantz’ post-election speech excerpts, by contrast, were primarily rated as not fitting into that context, i.e., as unfolding their charisma better in a pre-election context. Moreover, listeners also rated Netanyahu as overall more charismatic than Gantz. The combined production and perception evidence suggests the relevance of context in the evaluation and interpretation of vocal charisma signals. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy is a unique and fascinating form of thought, and particular interest lies in its classical period, when many of the ideas of Greek philosophy were used to explore the issues and theoretical problems which arise in trying to understand the Qur'an and Islamic practice. In this revised and expanded 2001 edition of his classic introductory work, Oliver Leaman examines the distinctive features of Classical Islamic philosophy and offers detailed accounts of major individual thinkers. In contrast to many (...) previous studies that have treated this subject as only of historical interest, he offers analysis of the key arguments within Islamic philosophy so that the reader can engage with them and assess their strengths and weaknesses. His book will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, religious studies and Islamic studies. (shrink)

Schools of economic ethics inspired by Buchanan propose viewing ethical conflicts as prisoners’ dilemmas to facilitate solutions based on Pareto-improving institutional changes. Given that healthcare is determined by complex institutional arrangements, it has been claimed that this approach is also suitable for business ethics in healthcare. To scrutinize this claim, this research systematically searched for studies reporting PD structures in healthcare. PubMed, EconLit, and EconBiz were searched to find articles in German and English. Study type, characteristics of the game, and (...) the proposed means to overcome the dilemma were extracted and analyzed for aspects supporting or challenging the claim. Across 53 studies, 68 descriptions of various dilemmas in healthcare and public health were identified. Many authors successfully developed proposals for institutional change to overcome these dilemmas. However, many of these analyses exhibited limitations such as oversimplifications or inconsistencies. Also, the quality of evidence on both the characteristics of dilemmas and the effectiveness of proposed solutions was very poor. The subsamples of studies that explicitly cited the ethical approach were disjunct from those that applied empirical methods to analyze the dilemmas. The large number of identified PDs indicates that economic ethics is relevant to healthcare. However, there is a need for further evidence to substantiate both the descriptive and prescriptive claims of this ethical theory. It should thus be seen as a complement that needs justification, rather than a substitute superior to other ethical frameworks. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 1 Seiten: 107-129.

What, if anything, gives us the right to ask the victim of our wrongdoing for forgiveness? After some conceptual clarifications, I attempt to lay open a paradoxical structure in apologies. Apologies are made in a spirit of humility: if the offender recognizes his guilt, he will see the victim᾽s negative emotions towards him as proper and justified. Nevertheless, by begging for forgiveness, he tries to change the victim᾽s negative feelings towards him. Thus, by apologizing, the offender tries to bring about (...) a state of affairs which, if genuinely repentant and remorseful, he has no reason to want to bring about. In what follows, I examine various attempts to dissolve this paradox. These include offering reasons for apologies that are independent of our wish to alter the victim᾽s feeling of resentment and construing apologies as expressive or as mixed speech acts. All of these attempts, or so I argue, fail. Some of them fail to provide justificatory reasons for asking for forgiveness, others fall short of explaining why apologies can be accepted or rejected, still others cannot give a convincing account of the relation between remorse and asking for forgiveness or fail to distinguish between redressing a harm and redressing a moral wrong. The upshot of the argument is that an offender who recognizes his own guilt has no rational reason for asking for forgiveness. In many cases, not offering one᾽s apologies is a sign of taking guilt seriously. (shrink)

The concept of autonomy is one of Kant's central legacies for contemporary moral thought. We often invoke autonomy as both a moral ideal and a human right, especially a right to determine oneself independently of foreign determinants; indeed, to violate a person's autonomy is considered to be a serious moral offence. Yet while contemporary philosophy claims Kant as the originator of its notion of autonomy, Kant's own conception of the term seems to differ in important respects from our present-day interpretation. (...) Kant on Moral Autonomy brings together a distinguished group of scholars who explore the following questions: what is Kant's conception of autonomy? What is its history and its influence on contemporary conceptions? And what is its moral significance? Their essays will be of interest both to scholars and students working on Kantian moral philosophy and to anyone interested in the subject of autonomy. (shrink)

I argue, through appeal to the distinction between analysis and decomposition described by Dummett, that Wittgenstein employs both of those notions in the Tractatus. I then bring this interpretation to bear upon the issue of propositional unity, where I formulate an objection to the views of both Leonard Linksy and José Zalabardo. I show that both Linsky and Zalabardo fail to acknowledge the distinction between analysis and decomposition present in the Tractatus, and that they consequently mischaracterise Wittgenstein’s position with respect (...) to propositional unity. (shrink)

Die Schlusssatze von Darwins Entstehung der Arten formulieren ein Prinzip, das weit uber die Biologie hinaus einflussreich wurde: "Es ist wahrlich eine grossartige Ansicht, dass der Schopfer den Keim allen Lebens, das uns umgibt, nur wenigen oder nur einer einzigen Form eingehaucht habe, und dass... aus so einfachem Anfang sich eine endlose Reihe immer schonerer und vollkommenerer Wesen entwickelt hat und noch fort entwickelt." Die Autoren dieses Bandes beschaftigen sich mit dem Evolutionsgedanken im Christentum und Islam, gehen dem Zusammenhang von (...) Religion und der Entwicklung des Bewusstseins nach und setzen sich mit dem Prinzip Evolution in Philosophie und Religionstheorie auseinander. (shrink)

The Special Theory of Relativity: Based on a short course of lectures delivered in the late 1930s, this short book presents the theory of Special Relativity by formulating a redefinition of the measurement of length, and thus will appeal to students of physics who wish to think through Einstein's thought without the encumbrance of quasi-scientific concepts and language. Relativity: A Very Elementary Exposition: This brief lecture, delivered in October 1921 and published for the first time in 1925, offers an explanation (...) of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity for the non-scientist, giving a general overview that does justice both to the actual physics involved, and the wider implications of this revolutionary discovery of the 20th century. (shrink)

El narcotráfico no es una realidad nueva en España, pero sí carecía de producciones culturales tales como novelas, series de televisión, películas y piezas musicales tan comunes como populares en América Latina. En la última década la narcocultura comenzó a cimentar en España, con especial énfasis en Galicia. En efecto, al menos a nivel simbólico Galicia ocupa el sitio protagónico como epicentro del narcotráfico. ¿Cómo es representado el narcotráfico en Galicia? ¿Existen diferencias sustanciales entre las narcoficciones gallegas y las latinoamericanas? (...) Este trabajo responde a estas preguntas desde la formulación de tres tesis relacionas con la violencia y el consumo. (shrink)

The relevance of scientific knowledge for science and technology policy and regulation has led to a growing debate about the role of values. This article contributes to the clarification of what specific functions cognitive and noncognitive values adopt in knowledge generation and decisions, and what consequences the operation of values has for policy making and regulation. For our analysis, we differentiate between three different types of decision approaches, each of which shows a particular constellation of cognitive and noncognitive values. Our (...) objectives are to present a structured analysis of the varying functions that different kinds of values can adopt, as well as the value-related tensions and trade-offs they give rise to. We argue that the operation of noncognitive values in scientific knowledge generation, policy, and regulatory decision making can be understood as an enabling factor, rather than a limiting one. (shrink)

Although Peano arithmetic is necessarily incomplete, Isaacson argued that it is in a sense conceptually complete: proving a statement of the language of PA that is independent of PA will require conceptual resources beyond those needed to understand PA. This paper gives a test of Isaacon’s thesis. Understanding PA requires understanding the functions of addition and multiplication. It is argued that grasping these primitive recursive functions involves grasping the double ancestral, a generalized version of the ancestral operator. Thus, we can (...) test Isaacon’s thesis by seeing whether when we phrase arithmetic in a context with the double ancestral operator, the result is conservative over PA. This is a stronger version of the test given by Smith, who argued that understanding the predicate “natural number” requires understanding the ancestral operator, but did not investigate what is required to understand the arithmetic functions. (shrink)

In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and the world (...) can be bridged. In the last decade or so, however, archaeologists have begun to make a more significant challenge to these ideas, and have attempted to offer a critique of our enlightenment heritage that is ontologically, rather than epistemologically, inspired. Drawing on the manner in which assemblages allow for the vibrancy of matter, are non-anthropocentric, multiscalar and more-than-representational, this article argues that Deleuzian thought offers the best chance to rework our understanding of the past in this manner. This is explored through a case study of three scales of analysis of Neolithic Britain. (shrink)

Scalability, efficiency, and security had been a persistent problem over the years in data mining, several techniques had been proposed and implemented but none had been able to solve the problem of scalability, efficiency and security from cloud computing. In this research, we solve the problem scalability, efficiency and security in data mining over cloud computing by using a restful web services and combination of different technologies and tools, our model was trained by using different machine learning algorithm, and finally (...) using different validation and cross-validation methods to compare and validate our results. We build, train, test and deploy our model by restful API services which can be called through an endpoint, and with very high accuracy and huge success. (shrink)

The implicit motivational needs for power, achievement, and affiliation are highly relevant in the context of sports. Sport enables people to experience achievement incentives like mastering challenges as well as social incentives such as recognition by teammates. Further, McClelland’s (1986) hypothesized that implicit motives are particularly associated right-hemisphere functions. Therefore, this preregistered study, conducted online, examines motivational needs using a standard picture-story exercise (PSE) and their associations with indicators of laterality, sports participation, and competition in gymnasts (N = 67). Further (...) it explores how implicit motives interact with suitable motivational incentives in the prediction of sports performance. Results partly confirm a link between indictors of cerebral rightward laterality and implicit motives, showing that the implicit affiliation and achievement motives are positively associated with an indicator of emotional-perceptional laterality (chimeric-faces task), but not with an indicator of motor laterality (turning bias). Moreover, the implicit achievement motive was positively correlated with training hours. The implicit affiliation motive was negatively associated with competition level. The presence of achievement incentives (perceived control, failure) and affiliation incentives (training together or alone) did not interact with corresponding motives to predict sports performance. (shrink)

This paper gives a semantics for schematic logic, proving soundness and completeness. The argument for soundness is carried out in ontologically innocent fashion, relying only on the existence of formulae which are actually written down in the course of a derivation in the logic. This makes the logic available to a nominalist, even a nominalist who does not wish to rely on modal notions, and who accepts the possibility that the universe may in fact be finite.

Nebraska University Studies, V25, No. 2-4.

(E. Chuliá. El poder y la palabra. Prensa y poder político en las dictaduras. El régimen de Franco ante la prensa y el periodismo, UNED, Madrid, 2001.

Desde un análisis descriptivo-cualitativo, basado en encuestas de calidad validadas por ANECA (2017-2022), se presenta el proceso de mejora de la asignatura Documentación Informativa, ubicada en 2º del Grado en Publicidad, gracias a la implementación de metodologías centradas en el aprender haciendo. La propuesta formativa se apoyó en que los alumnos participaran en todo el proceso de creación de un podcast. De los resultados se desprenden, como principales conclusiones, que los estudiantes entienden el fenómeno del podcasting como una herramienta que (...) les conecta con su entorno profesional y les motiva a desarrollar todo un mundo creativo y crítico. (shrink)

Naturalistic understandings of the mind face certain hurdles. Many authors believe that some such hurdles are even insurmountable. A frequently used but rarely developed and tested argumentative move claims that, because they are made from the so-called observer perspective, naturalization efforts inevitably fail for reasons connected to our first-person perspective. We are not convinced. However, this article primarily attempts to gain a better understanding of the point and scope of this move by discussing an argument by Holm Tetens from which (...) the basic incompleteness of the observer perspective is supposed to follow. Depending on how one interprets the incompleteness in question, one gets different readings of the argument: ontological, semantic, epistemic, or explanatory. First, we will develop two ontological readings of this argument in more detail ‐ mainly because they are the most obvious challenges to naturalism. We will then systematically explore the prospects of the alternative readings. These considerations lead to a more fundamental discussion about the requirements for naturalistic explanations. As it turns out, to defend such an incompleteness argument, you face some inconvenient hurdles yourself. (shrink)

The increasing use of virtual laboratories in education raises new philosophical—and perhaps especially phenomenological—questions related to how this type of technological mediation affects the user’s sense of situated embodied being: sensory perception. The empirical basis of this phenomenological inquiry is a case study conducted in a Danish school setting. This allows us to compare analog laboratory work with virtual. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we describe how pupils’ bodily and multisensory interactions with laboratory tools differ across physical and virtual settings. Virtual (...) laboratories are complex, sociotechnical, often opaque practices that affect the pupils’ sense of embodiment, thus prompting the need for in situ development of hermeneutical strategies for bridging the gap between the simulated laboratory and the physical world. In the final section, we discuss how these strategies can be considered posthuman learning processes. (shrink)

In his essay “Logical Empiricism”, in the anthologyTwentieth Century Philosophy, Professor Feigl writes: “All forms of empiricism agree in repudiating the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge.”2Schlick makes the same point even more forcibly: “The empiricism which I represent believes itself to be clear on the point that, as a matter of principle, all propositions are either synthetic a posteriori or tautologous; synthetic aprioripropositions seem to it to be a logical impossibility.”3 The denial of synthetic apriorisis a major thesis of (...) the logical empiricist position, being found in the writings of most of the leaders of the movement.4 The reason for its importance is fairly clear. It provides a formula on which the empiricists can base their critique of traditional philosophy. To use Ayer's phrase, denial of the synthetic aprioriresults in “the elimination of metaphysics”. The philosophical tradition to which the empiricists are opposed and whose “metaphysics” they wish to eliminate can be called, somewhat loosely, rationalism. (shrink)

The volumes of the Symposium Aristotelicum have become essential reference works for the study of Aristotle. In this twentieth volume, ten renowned scholars of ancient philosophy offer a running commentary on Aristotle's De motu animalium. It is in this text, one of his most intriguing works, that Aristotle sets out the general principles of animal locomotion. A philological and a philosophical introduction sketch the current state of research on this treatise, situating current thought in the context of three decades of (...) scholarly debates. The nine contributed essays together comment on each chapter of the Aristotelian text, discussing in detail the philosophical issues that are raised across the different sections of the text. Comprehensive analyses of Aristotle's doctrines and arguments, as well as critical discussion of rival interpretations, make this volume a valuable resource for scholars of Aristotle. The present volume also includes a newly reconstructed Greek text with a facing English translation by Benjamin Morison. (shrink)