The theological program of Archpriest Georges Florovsky is understood as a conception of the neopatristic synthesis that he developed. From the beginning, its appearance was associated with the participation of its creator in a public discussion about the historical ways of Russia within the framework of the Eurasian movement, then, with his scientific investigations into the history of Russian Orthodoxy and ancient Christian thought and later with his activity in the ecumenical movement. It is noteworthy that the positive content of (...) the program for modern Orthodox theology turned out to be an indirect response to broader challenges of historical and social order. The focus of attention in this case are some peculiarities in the reception of the program in international and Russian contexts, which in turn requires the clarification of the content of its main points, such as a question about a true fatherland or the sense and meaning of Christian Hellenism. The conclusion notes the significant relevance and openness of Florovsky’s ideas for modern Orthodox theology. (shrink)

Le devenir-autre de l'existence est une étude phénoménologique à la fois systématique et historique. En prenant pour fil conducteur un problème systématique, celui de l'événementialité de l'apparaître et de la subjectivité, elle confronte cinq représentants majeurs de la phénoménologie contemporaine française : Maldiney, Romano, Marion, Barbaras et Richir. L'étude entre dans la phénoménologie avec Husserl avant de présenter plusieurs concepts-clés forgés par les deux générations de philosophes qui jalonnent la voie menant à la phénoménologie contemporaine (Heidegger, Sartre, Straus, Merleau-Ponty, Patocka, (...) Lévinas). Puis elle se focalise sur la phénoménologie de l'événement de Maldiney et de Romano qui envisagent l'existant et le monde dans leur coappartenance : l'événement est considéré avant tout comme co-naissance du sujet et du monde. Or, puisque l'existence qui devient-autre est nécessairement une existence finie radicalement séparée de la transcendance métaphysique du monde, on est conduit à intégrer à la discussion trois autres philosophes : d'abord Marion dont l'adonné est conçu comme limite de la donation, puis Barbaras et Richir qui thématisent la subjectivité au sein d'une métaphysique"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article contends that decommodification is an appropriate concept for understanding diverse initiatives such as fair trade, microfinance, open source, social enterprises, and the environmental commons as component features of a common process. Decommodification is conceived as any political, social, or cultural process that reduces the scope and influence of the market in everyday life. Given recent transformations in market societies, a more expansive framework for decommodification is urgently required. Decommodification would insulate non-market spheres from market encroachments; increase the provision (...) of public goods and expand social protection; promote democratic control over the market by creating economic circuits grounded in a logic predicated on social needs rather than profit; and undermine market hegemony by revealing the market’s true social costs and consequences. By ensuring basic needs, enhancing individual capacities and capabilities, and promoting social cooperation and collaboration, decommodification constitutes a central feature of an egalitarian agenda. (shrink)

The authors of the "Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads", manuals of ascetic lifestyle and practice, recommend that wanderers renounce behavioral standards of their formerly Brahmin householder life, including ritual purity and familial duties. Patrick Olivelle argues that these ascetics are thereafter considered impure and corpse- or ghoul-like, clearly lacking in dharma. However, these Upanisads counsel pursuing mental purity and moral behavior, and modeling oneself after the perfection of the Absolute. This essay investigates ascetic notions of purity and identity, and virtues such as non-violence (...) and kindness cultivated in forest isolation. Is ascetic dharma universal in intent, and is it conceptually opposed to householder dharma? What type of ethics is admired by the authors, what type deprecated? Olivelle's position is reevaluated, as is Jeffrey Kripal's notion that monistic mysticism does not support ethics adequately. (shrink)

The authors of the Samnyāsa Upanisads, manuals of ascetic lifestyle and practice, recommend that wanderers renounce behavioral standards of their formerly Brahmin householder life, including ritual purity and familial duties. Patrick Olivelle argues that these ascetics are thereafter considered impure and corpse– or ghoul–like, clearly lacking in dharma. However, these Upanisads counsel pursuing mental purity and moral behavior, and modeling oneself after the perfection of the Absolute. This essay investigates ascetic notions of purity and identity, and virtues such as non–violence (...) and kindness cultivated in forest isolation. Is ascetic dharma universal in intent, and is it conceptually opposed to householder dharma? What type of ethics is admired by the authors, what type deprecated? Olivelle’s position is reevaluated, as is Jeffrey Kripal’s notion that monistic mysticism does not support ethics adequately. (shrink)

Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we can (...) know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central individuals in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in agricultural and food systems. I analyse the outcomes of an intervention (that encouraged Sulawesi smallholder farmers to take a specific action toward improving the health of their cocoa trees) to assess the impact of engaging opinion leaders in agricultural programs that aim to change farmers’ practices. The intervention has been implemented through (...) (a) 18 opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers; and (b) 18 randomly selected farmers who were not central in local social networks. The obtained social networks and statistical data were quantitatively analysed and the results were interpreted with input from the field staff. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central opinion leaders were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take the recommended action as compared to the identified opinion leaders (17.1 versus 8.6) but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, while the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in local social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications of the conventional selection of perceived opinion leaders as model farmers for achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale in agriculture and propose practical alternatives. (shrink)

In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes defines moral philosophy as 'the science of Virtue and Vice', yet few modern readers take this description seriously. Moreover, it is typically assumed that Hobbes' ethical views are unrelated to his views of science. Influential modern interpreters have portrayed Hobbes as either an amoralist, or a moral contractarian, or a rule egoist, or a divine command theorist. David Boonin-Vail challenges all these assumptions and presents a new, and very unorthodox, interpretation of Hobbes's ethics. He shows (...) that Hobbes is best understood as embracing a theory of virtue concerned with the development of good character traits rather than with rules of behaviour. In focusing in a quite new way on Hobbes's moral theory this book is likely to attract considerable attention amongst both philosophers and intellectual historians. (shrink)

People have always tried to make predictions; they are necessary and useful, but very often they commit obvious errors, which have negative consequences on decision-making. Prediction errors are in some cases, not few, unavoidable, because the world itself is unpredictable, subject to chance (or randomness in mathematics). Chance is a property of nature. The causes of random events are physically determined, but so numerous and complex that they (the events) are unpredictable. Science is not about certainty. Human knowledge itself is (...) not certain. We can only have provisional truths. Therefore, we must manage to reach a state of accommodation with uncertainty and unpredictability. The complexity of natural phenomena generates events that we cannot control through theoretical modeling precisely because of the ignorance of the causal mechanisms, which exist in their privacy but have not (yet) been revealed by the data and observations at our disposal. We have, on the one hand, life experience taken over and assimilated and established in society and, on the other hand, experience gained from real life. Norm and chance follow each other rather chaotically. The duration of validity of a norm and the moment of occurrence of the random event are unpredictable. However, norms and events coexist in our consciousness. Order and predictability are born (formed and exist) from rules; chance and unpredictability are born from the lack of rules. The highest truths, recognized as such by society cannot be transposed into the life of society only by the force of reason. It is imperative that they are reinforced and embedded in the social behavior of all citizens. Rules are needed. Without rules there is no freedom. (shrink)

Humans are remarkably adaptable, and therefore a successful species. There are many speculative answers to the question of why this is so. One of them represents the cultural intelligence hypothesis, which consid-ers cultural learning skills as the key to human success. This work aims to present the hypothesis of cultural intelligence as a viable alternative to more conventional approaches within the debate about the origin of human intelligence, such as the hypothesis of general and improvisational intelligence. Theirmutual comparison shows that (...) cultural intelligence hypothesis must necessarily work with flexible social learning strategies to describe cultural transmission, thus losing part of its explanatory power. As the theory of metacognitive strategies of social learning by cognitive psychologist Cecilia Heyes shows, there is a way to combine the flexibility of human reasoning with the “stupid” process of cultural selection. (shrink)

Under communism, the symbolic potential of the body was multiplied in the mass gymnastic displays in order to portray the society as disciplined, strong, happy and beautiful and thus to legitimize its leadership. These gymnastic rituals followed the volkisch tradition of 19th-century mass gymnastics, which aimed at mobilization and homogenization of the `imagined community' of the nation. Behind the symbolic play of the mass gymnastics, there was, as Kracauer pointed out, a deeper relationship between modernity with its mode of production (...) and gymnastics with its mechanization of the body. The relation, however, was not a direct one, mass gymnastic displays were used to aestheticize the mass production and therefore to deny the very logic of instrumental rationality that both the gymnastics and the production were built upon. (shrink)

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying “xis true” and satisfying the “dequotation schema”for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Łukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...) the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

1 Strategic Sea Power By its very nature as an enabling agent sea power is a strategic force that can make a very positive difference in support of high ...

This essay is a meditation on our shared humanity. By necessity it is a monologue, a statement largely in a single voice, advocating a particular point of view; nevertheless, what is written here humbly is offered as an invitation to enter into a dialogue. The essay begins with an description of the human self in terms of a naturalistic explanation of human nature, as suggested by two different characterizations of humanism. It then continues, moving from potential to informed practice, first (...) by considering the meaning of freedom and equality and then by suggesting how we may transcend the selfishness, fear, and uncer-tainty that are all too common elements of the human condition. The essay concludes by suggesting how we all may enter into meaningful dialogue with one another from the common conceptual ground that is our shared humanity. (shrink)

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

The paper proposes a synthesis between human scientists and artificial representation learning models as a way of augmenting epistemic warrants of realist theories against various anti-realist attempts. Towards this end, the paper fleshes out unconceived alternatives not as a critique of scientific realism but rather a reinforcement, as it rejects the retrospective interpretations of scientific progress, which brought about the problem of alternatives in the first place. By utilising adversarial machine learning, the synthesis explores possibility spaces of available evidence for (...) unconceived alternatives providing modal knowledge of what is possible therein. As a result, the epistemic warrant of synthesised realist theories should emerge bolstered as the underdetermination by available evidence gets reduced. While shifting the realist commitment away from theoretical artefacts towards modalities of the possibility spaces, the synthesis comes out as a kind of perspectival modelling. (shrink)

The article explores novel directions in the phenomenology of economics. It analyzes how the approaches of Till Düppe and Alfred Schütz, both inspired by Edmund Husserl, may shed light on the historical development of economics. I examine the substance and meaning of economics in the context of the forceful criticism of the whole discipline recently raised by Düppe. This examination uncovers important weaknesses and omissions inherent in Düppe’s argument against the economists’ scientific aspirations. The analysis of the social scientific endeavors (...) by Alfred Schütz who develops a phenomenologically informed ‘telescopic’ concept of an ideal type is then shown to be a more fruitful and methodologically rigorous way towards understanding the developments within economics. The Schützian view permits us to see how abstract economic models originate in the experience of the life-world and are continuous with it. Accordingly, the historical development of economic science may be viewed as consisting from two broadly defined phases, where at first the formalism is steadily increasing (the ‘zooming out’ phase) and later the discipline converges back to context-specific empirical examinations (the ‘zooming in’ phase). A case study concentrating on the economic theory of politics illustrates that both the drive towards abstraction that has culminated around 1950s and the more recent ‘zooming in’ is methodologically legitimate from the phenomenological point of view. I conclude that economics has never been completely severed from the paramount reality of the everyday life and for decades the interconnection has been growing stronger by the day. (shrink)

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)