La diminution du poids institutionnel des religions dans notre société ne signifie pas pour autant que les hommes se détournent d'interrogations fondamentales touchant à leur identité profonde, à leur origine et à leur destination, au sens de leur vie ici-bas, à l'éventualité d'une vie après la mort. Que ces questions continuent d'occuper la pensée humaine, chacun est à même d'en faire le constat, et la science elle-même les a investies avec des moyens renouvelés. Ce qui a changé dans les dernières (...) décennies, c'est peut-être la manière d'appréhender ces interrogations fondamentales : on recueillait autrefois les réponses en se référant à sa religion d'appartenance ou en puisant dans un ensemble de discours et de pratiques proprement ésotériques ; aujourd'hui, la recherche de principes directeurs qui soient à même de donner un sens à l'existence n'échappe pas au mouvement général de sécularisation et de globalisation qui a radicalement transformé nos cultures. Anticipant cette tendance, Ostad Elahi s'était interrogé, il y a plus de cinquante ans, sur les conditions d'une sagesse contemporaine partagée, capable d'intégrer la dimension spirituelle, et fondée sur les principes fondamentaux communs aux différentes religions. Sous le titre Quelle sagesse pour notre temps?, cet ouvrage entend ouvrir une réflexion sur les modalités que peut prendre la recherche d'une telle sagesse adaptée à notre époque, à la fois conforme à l'idéal d'autonomie de l'individu moderne et ouverte à ses aspirations les plus profondes. Quels en seraient les principes? Parviendra-t-on à les dégager en s'accordant sur des valeurs éthiques et spirituelles universelles? Et si oui, comment est-il possible de les mettre en oeuvre? Une recherche de ce genre relève-t-elle d'une démarche strictement individuelle, ou peut-elle être également conduite de manière collective, à un niveau académique et plus généralement institutionnel? (shrink)

Explains the intersubjective nature of the self and the function of role taking in the development of the personal level of intersubjectivity out of primordial, pre-personal sociality or corporeal intersubjectivity of the lived body. Pragmatic philosophy of George Herbert Mead; Existential-phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Fundamental and pervasive rapport; More.

Textes de philosophes français et britanniques issus du colloque tenu à l'Université de Nantes en 1998. Ils sont consacrés à la philosophie analytique de la religion et abordent des sujets tels que la nature et la justification des croyances religieuses, la question du mal, celles des preuves de l'existence de Dieu, de la théodicée, du langage religieux, du miracle, de la prière, etc.

BackgroundAlthough patient advocates have developed templates for standard consent forms, evaluating patient preferences for first in human (FIH) and window of opportunity (Window) trial consent forms is critical due to their unique risks. FIH trials are the initial use of a novel compound in study participants. In contrast, Window trials give an investigational agent over a fixed duration to treatment naïve patients in the time between diagnosis and standard of care (SOC) surgery. Our goal was to determine the patient-preferred presentation (...) of important information in consent forms for these trials.MethodsThe study consisted of two phases: (1) analyses of oncology FIH and Window consents; (2) interviews of trial participants. FIH consent forms were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating that the study drug has not been tested in humans (FIH information); Window consents were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating the trial may delay SOC surgery (delay information). Participants were asked about their preferred placement of the information in their own trial’s consent form. The location of information in the consent forms was compared to the participants’ suggestions for placement. Results34 [17 FIH; 17 Window] of 42(81%) cancer patients approached participated. 25 consents [20 FIH; 5 Window] were analyzed. 19/20 FIH consent forms included FIH information, and 4/5 Window consent forms included delay information. 19/20(95%) FIH consent forms contained FIH information in the risks section 12/17(71%) patients preferred the same. Fourteen (82%) patients wanted FIH information in the purpose, but only 5(25%) consents mentioned it there. 9/17(53%) Window patients preferred delay information to be located early in the consent, before the “Risks” section. 3/5(60%) consents did this.ConclusionsDesigning consents that reflect patient preferences more accurately is essential for ethical informed consent; however, a one-size fits all approach will not accurately capture patient preferences. We found that preferences differed for FIH and Window trial consents, though for both, patients preferred key risk information early in the consent. Next steps include determining if FIH and Window consent templates improve understanding. (shrink)

Criticisms of John Locke as a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘possessive individualist’ have been hotly contested since their appearance in the 1950s and 1960s. Locke's defenders have countered that his economic thought was governed by doctrines of charity, community and the public good. This project of recovering a kinder, gentler Locke has brought with it an emphasis on the centrality of Grotius and Pufendorf to seventeenth-century discussions of natural law. Still, the emergence of the ‘Grotius-Pufendorf thesis’ may have eclipsed other sources (...) of Locke's political economy. I will suggest that Locke's writings on trade and economic accumulation are better understood in light of a seventeenth-century economic discourse of pamphlets, tracts and sermons rooted in the practical theology of Calvinism. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity (...) is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem (...) addressed in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

A free and lucid translation of Scheler's first mature work on social and ethical theory. It represents an imaginative reinterpretation of Nietzsche's concept of "ressentiment," the structural key to the phenomenon of "slave morality." Generously sprinkled with apt illustrations, Ressentiment is a sustained attack on the notions of "work" and the "universal love of mankind" as ultimate sources of value. Such ressentiment-laden social tendencies are seen to form the faulty cornerstone of modern morality, both bourgeois and socialist.--K. R. D.

According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. That is a serious misrepresentation of Gramsci’s works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks shows that Marx’s great and unfinished project of the critique of political economy (...) plays a crucial rôle for Gramsci’s efforts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the aspirations of a ‘scientific socialism’. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a ‘critical’ and ‘scientific’ political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order to fight the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony - the ideas of vulgar economics in everybody’s heads. (shrink)

Described in the blurb as "the first systematic account of Sartre’s phenomenology of religion," King’s work also locates Sartre’s observations in the tradition of religious mysticism which Sartre is said to have studied in the early ‘30s. In fact, one of King’s most telling criticisms throughout the exposition is that Sartre was not faithful enough to the phenomena of mysticism, sacrificing phenomenology to his ontological commitments whenever the two seemed to conflict. The opening chapter sets the theme by treating the (...) "theological complex" ascribed to each man in virtue of his futile passion to be the conscious foundation of his own being, that is, to be in-itself-for-itself or God. This complex, developed by the child’s likening of its parents to divinities beneath whose gaze it secures an object-like being, generates what King in his final chapter terms the bourgeois "ideal of being," viz., the flight from subjectivity and freedom to absolute objectivity. He distinguishes this ideal from the artist’s ideal of nothingness and the worker’s ideal of doing. What has this to do with the sacred? Basically, these ideals mark the termini a quo and ad quem of Sartre’s evolving notion of God, perhaps the major claim of King’s study. (shrink)

Praxis is the identifying signature of the most prevalent contemporary versions of the reception and interpretation of Marx and of the movements of thought inspired or provoked by him. This view seems to accord well with the early “Theses on Feuerbach” and is frequently mobilized in support of the further claim that the “mature” or “scientific” Marx, the Marx of Das Kapital, above all had left behind his former preoccupations with philosophy in anything like a traditional sense, in order to (...) pursue single-mindedly and whole-heartedly his critical diagnosis of bourgeois political economy, the opening wedge in his “practical” campaign to establish first socialism and then communism. In this essay, I want to call into question some of the central commitments of this consensus. In particular, I shall suggest that Marx’s understanding of praxis, of human activity and interaction, is pervasively shaped by his conception of poiesis, the production of hitherto non-existing objects and, therewith, the ongoing transformation of external Nature. Accordingly, appreciations of Marx’s supposedly revolutionary transfiguration of the relation between theoria and praxis need to be recast and reconstrued in light of his reduction of praxis to technical production. Poiesis is the cardinal, indeed the unique, category in the ontological vocabulary Marx adopted in his earliest works and never abandoned afterwards, even when he went on to treat ontological issues much more economically. This monochromatic vocabulary so colored Marx’s analysis of the nature and civic places of labor and human interrelations, that both tended to lose the variegated contours by which pre-modern, if not all pre-Marxist, thinkers recognized them. Marx’s elliptical, not to say sibylline, allusions to the condition and the telos of “socialized humanity” in the Grundrisse and in the final volume of Das Kapital prove so perplexing exactly because ‘labor’ itself has become paradoxical—does it figure with equal prominence in both the ‘realm of necessity’ and the ‘realm of freedom’?—while praxis, once it seems finally set free from the spell cast on it by the presumptive ultimacy of poiesis, appears to lose its bearings, its pre-modern orientation to a goal such as achieved and mutually-acknowledged human excellence. The claims and promises of praxis turn out to be deeply enigmatic. (shrink)

This article considers the engagement of Mario Tronti - one of the leading figures of classical Italian workerism [operaismo] - with the thought of Max Weber. Weber constituted one of Tronti’s most important cattivi maestri. By analysing Weber’s influence upon Tronti’s development, this article aims to show the ways in which this encounter affected his Marxism and political theory in general. In particular, during the period of the debate in Italian Marxism about the thesis of the autonomy of the political, (...) Tronti increasingly adopted Weberian terminology and theoretical points of reference. Ultimately, the article argues that Tronti’s heretical method led him to incorporate and to re-propose theoretical and political problematics that are characteristic of bourgeois political theory: namely, the dyad administration/charisma, and a teleological and anthropological approach to history. Focusing upon this heterodox encounter therefore enables us to understand one of the trajectories of the transformation of Marxism that occurred during its recurrent rendezvous with the ‘Marx of the bourgeoisie’. (shrink)

When the original version of this book appeared in 1953, MacIntyre was one of a very few Anglo-Saxon philosophers who exhibited any depth understanding of Marx and Marxism. The course of scholarship since that time both vindicates and supersedes many of the points that MacIntyre makes. He not only shows how Marx secularized the world view ingredient in Christianity, but how Marx moved from the critique of religion to the critique of philosophy. And he nicely sketches for us the move (...) from philosophy to practice. We now have many detailed studies that fill in the gaps of this movement, but MacIntyre's essay still excels as a brief overview. From a contemporary point of view, his final chapter is the most interesting and challenging. Too many thinkers sympathetic with Marx have lost themselves in Marx scholarship or in sloganizing. While MacIntyre sees Marx as bringing down to earth the metaphysical themes of alienation ingredient in Christianity, he also sees Marx as laying himself open to the very reification and false consciousness in his own theorizing that he so bitterly opposed in others. The only way of showing that it is possible to rescue Marxism from its own errors, is to carry out for our own times the sort of critique that Marx himself carried out for nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois society. The essay still stands as a helpful introduction both to Marx and to the problems posed for contemporaries who desire to take Marxism seriously.--R. J. B. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger launched a great protest against modern liberal individualism, inspired by the virtuous political community of the ancient Greeks. Hegel argued that the progress of history was gradually bringing about greater freedom and restoring our lost sense of community. But his successors Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger rejected Hegel's version of the end of history with its legitimization of the bourgeois nation-state. They sought to replace it with ever more utopian, apocalyptic and illiberal (...) visions of the future: Marx's Socialism, Nietzsche's Overman, and Heidegger's commitment to Nazism. This book combines an exceptionally clear and rich study of these thinkers with a deep dive into the extent to which their views fed the political catastrophes of revolution, tyranny and genocide, including the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Nazis, Khmer Rouge, ISIS and populist nationalism, but argues that the Philosophy of Freedom remains indispensable for understanding today's world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and geographical (...) contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century. (shrink)

This book is a transcription from tapes of a course given by Tillich in the spring quarter of 1963 at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The title is somewhat misleading as Tillich spends a very limited amount of time on the period after Nietzsche--no doubt because of lack of time in the course schedule--and also devotes an entire third of the book to developing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical, theological, and cultural background for nineteenth-century Protestant theology. He is especially (...) good on the Enlightenment and the way in which Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, though undeniably enlightened, prepared the way for the Romantic reaction to the superficial rationalism that had culminated in Deism and the bourgeois ideal of reasonable religion. Romanticism itself is viewed as the attempt to resolve the problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite; and Schleiermacher and Hegel are treated in detail as the ones who picked up the romantic problematic and carried it through to systematic theological and cultural synthesis. Tillich then explores the breakdown of the synthesis as it passed through the historical problem of Christianity, the anthropological problem, the proto-existential criticism of Schelling and Kierkegaard, the sociopolitical criticism of Marx, and the voluntaristic and Lebensphilosophie criticism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From here on Tillich appears to be racing with the school calendar. He gives a rapid review of the neo-Kantian-Ritschlian, Erlangen, and Harnackian schools of liberal theology, and concludes by touching briefly upon Bultmann, Troeltsch, Barth, and his own thought. The course was meant to be a survey, but Tillich's presentation of the material is so deft and unerring, and so gently guided in its historical and conceptual unfolding by his own favored theological and religious categories, that the overall impression is of a theological meditation on homo religiosus.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its focus on American exceptionalism and by ignoring the postnational force of Melville's novels.

The Tao of Strategy presents an alternative way to stimulate strategic thinking, looking to ancient times and Eastern philosophies to unlock new ways of solving complex problems. It examines Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Baghavad Gita, and the strategic board game Go; studies leaders' obligations and responsibilities via the Gita and the Tao Te Ching; and explores paths to releasing the ego and achieving a state of serenity with Buddha, Ki-Aikido, and mindfulness. The book also offers guidance on cultivating (...) presence of mind, interpreting a wide variety of situational dynamics, and deciding on appropriate action or inaction to most effectively identify and reach strategic goals. (shrink)

Can a person suffer radical change and still be the same person? Are there human beings who are not persons at all? Western philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thinkers, gave the concept of “person” great importance in their discussions. They saw it as crucial to our understanding of our world and our place in it. Prompted by tragedy — a loved one’s descent into dementia — Warren Bourgeois explored Western philosophical ideas to discover what constitutes a “person.” (...) The first edition of Persons — What Philosophers Say About You was the result of his search. This new second edition focuses on making this material easily available and accessible to students, and has been redesigned as an introduction to the philosophy of mind and its history, concentrating on the central concept of “person” in contemporary controversies concerning abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and human rights. Bourgeois has mined Western philosophy for ideas students can apply today as technology challenges their beliefs about what we are. He then uses the concept of person to unite the various subdivisions of philosophy, applying theories of knowledge, reality and value to help students understand what we believe about ourselves. The result is a living philosophy and an “introductory text with a difference.” While the ideas of the great philosophers cannot be meaningfully summarized in one introductory text, this book provides a comparison of what many of them say about the concept of person, and will encourage students to read further. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

The Moral Nexus develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing. The book offers an interpretative argument (...) for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms. The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. The book argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people. (shrink)

The gift of death and the new magic of politics: Hegel and Tolkien on sorcery and secondary worlds -- The political theology of catastrophe: Plato's Athenian Atlantis, Tolkien's Númenoran Atalantë, and the Nazi Reich -- Burglar and bourgeois? Bilbo Baggins' dialectical ethics -- Hobbes, Hobbits, and the modern state of Mordor: myths of power and desire in Leviathan and Tolkien's Legendarium -- Middle-earth and the return of the common good -- Epilogue: from apocalypse to eucatastrophe: "The end of history," (...) happy endings, and the politics of narrative form. (shrink)

A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas (...) a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law. (shrink)

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we (...) investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

Framing effects occur when different descriptions of the same decision problem give rise to divergent decisions. They can be seen as a violation of the decisiontheoretic version of the principle of extensionality (PE). The PE in logic means that two logically equivalent sentences can be substituted salva veritate. We explore what this notion of extensionality becomes in decision contexts. Violations of extensionality may have rational grounds. Based on some ideas proposed by the psychologist Craig McKenzie and colleagues, we contend that (...) framing effects are justified when the selection of one particular frame conveys choice relevant information. We first discuss this idea from a philosophical point of view, and proceed next to formalize it first in the context of the Bolker–Jeffrey decision theory. Finally, we extend the previous analysis to non-expected utility theories using the Biseparable Preference model introduced by Ghirardato and Marinacci (2001) and therefore show that the analysis is independent of the assumptions of Bayesian decision theory. (shrink)

Neuroeconomic studies are liable to fall into the reverse inference fallacy, a form of affirmation of the consequent. More generally neuroeconomics relies on two problematic steps, namely the inference from brain activities to the engagement of cognitive processes in experimental tasks, and the presupposition that such inferred cognitive processes are relevant to economic theorizing. The first step only constitutes the reverse inference fallacy proper and ways to correct it include a better sense of the neural response selectivity of the targeted (...) brain areas and a better definition of relevant cognitive ontologies for neuroeconomics. This second way also allows increased coherence between the cognitive processes actually involved in neuroeconomics experiments and the theoretical constructs of economics. We suggest means of increasing neural response selectivity in neuroeconomic experimental paradigms. We also discuss how the choice of cognitive ontologies can both avoid implicit reductionist strategies (from economic constructs to neural patterns) and irrelevance, as cognitive processes engaged in experimental tasks may lack immediate bearing on the study of economic behavior. With these joint improvements neuroeconomics can be a progressive science. (shrink)

We should approach this topic with great fear and respect. It is not a merely “academic” issue. Human rights are trampled upon in the East as in the West, in the North as in the South of our planet. Granting the part of human greed and sheer evil in this universal transgression, could it not also be that Human Rights are not observed because in their present form they do not represent a universal symbol powerful enough to elicit understanding and (...) agreement? (shrink)