Visual representations of the whole earth permeate modern cultures, shaping how societies imagine globalization and planetary ecological derangement. To explore the complex ways in which these images configure human attitudes toward environments, this essay attends to a series of hegemonic representations of the earth from diverse situations and stages of modernity in conjunction with ideas drawn from Martin Heidegger’s ontological philosophy. I proceed from the insight that for Heidegger modernity is not a singular condition, but entails two contrary determinations of (...) being: “machination,” in which detached subjects reshape an objectified world, and “enordering,” in which fungible and flexible resources circulate endlessly around a closed global space. Taking up these divergent concepts, my argument accentuates basic differences in how the earth has been disclosed in representation over the course of modern history. Through close analyses of world maps from the early modern Netherlands; chalkboard globes from nineteenth-century schoolrooms; and the contemporary geospatial application Google Earth, I show how global visions both articulate and complicate Heidegger’s thinking of machination and enordering. Far from being the culmination of a singular modernity, images of the earth reveal and reinforce a discordant global condition, riven by clashing, equally total disclosures of the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon FerdinandDavid TooheyMapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity BY SIMON FERDINAND Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019Mapping Beyond Measure is a geographical and theoretical critique of map art and the tradition of modern mapmaking. The book focuses in depth on a few related examples of map art and (...) departs from critical theory and post-Marxist readings of space. Simon Ferdinand emphasizes fine art and art-film as appropriate counterweights to the authoritarian calculation in modern cartography and, unexpectedly, map art’s critique of mapmaking.Mapping Beyond Measure follows the well-trodden path of critiquing a medium, mapping, and map art as irredeemably authoritarian.1 Situated in this approach, Ferdinand argues that map art reproduces modernist cartography’s assumptions even while critiquing mapping. Aiming to subvert this shortcoming, Ferdinand explores Peter Greenway’s semi-abstract map art films that do not prioritize science over artists. Greenway’s films, especially A Walk Through H, are shown as being as close to an idea of mapping beyond calculation as possible. Indeed, for Ferdinand, Greenway’s map art films are an improvement on “postmodern” theorists.Mapping Beyond Measure explores a small, though logically (and practically) related group of map artists. The first three chapters explore differing approaches to map art, from Soviet painting that unintentionally [End Page 126] heralds globalization and map art’s latent desires to dominate the world, to more contemporary map art about looming societal collapse through the death of nature and mass casualties from aerial bombardment of cities. The following two chapters focus on how mapping creates nation-states. These chapters elucidate the tragic inability of map artists to escape globalization and calculation, the latter exasperated by G.I.S. techniques. These map artists serve as an ensemble that spotlights what, to Ferdinand, are inevitable difficulties that ethical practitioners of map art face in escaping the pitfalls of calculation in mainstream mapping.In chapter 6 Ferdinand explains how Greenway’s film A Walk Through H gets as close as possible to challenging map art through semi-abstract, two-dimensional additions to maps and using movie cameras to create an illusion of movement. Thus, the hierarchy of scientists over artists is partially dismantled. Indeed, Ferdinand lauds Greenway for creating alternatives to established political theorists. Interestingly, Ferdinand replaces ontology with the concept of “chorein” suggesting a more fluid conception of mapping that is not available in theories of space or cartographic practices of calculation. Nonetheless, compared to one of the articles referenced, Ferdinand downplays the destructive nature of chorein as a militaristic, colonial use of maritime space to emphasize its creative potential.2Ferdinand’s examples are primarily Eurocentric, even, surprisingly, in the exception: his focus on Japanese map artist Satomi Matoba. Here Ferdinand departs from Eurocentric examples only to focus on Japan—the most privileged nation-state in Asia. Even in this focus on Japan, which also includes Hawai‘i, Ferdinand does not depart from a frame familiar to Europe: World War II. Indeed, the discussion of Pearl Harbor (a U.S. military base) focuses on U.S. foreign policy, not on Hawai‘i. This thematic choice is relevant to other map artists in Ferdinand’s book. Ferdinand’s critique of calculability is based mainly on the consequences of Nazism, as theorized by Stuart Elden. However, Ferdinand’s theoretical interventions on uneven development in maps and map art would have been more substantial with the addition of detailed, localized, narrative accounts of violence suffered by non-white populations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and various European cities. Instead, we get an anonymous logic of maps that uses the idea of the past and potential [End Page 127] future destruction of cities to assume that everyone suffered to the same extent in World War II.While I am reluctant to criticize a book for not offering a solution to what it critiques, to a certain extent, the solution offered by Ferdinand contradicts his normative critique of calculability. In exploring Alison Hildreth’s map art, Ferdinand praises nuanced, temporally layered artistic explorations of ecological destruction and extinction. Likewise, A Walk Through H, is... (shrink)

I develop a challenge for a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief that turns, primarily, on unknowable propositions. I consider and reject several responses to my challenge and sketch a new knowledge-first account of belief that avoids it.

In poem 40, through a series of rhetorical questions, Catullus confronts Ravidus about what made him commit such a foolish action as to fall in love with Catullus’ own lover. The poem ends with the lines: eris, quandoquidem meos amores | cum longa uoluisti amare poena, ‘You will be, since you have chosen to love my lover at the risk of receiving a long punishment’. There is a long-standing tradition of scholarship which testifies to the frequency with which Catullus incorporates (...) wordplay in his poems, including bilingual puns. This essay proposes another such pun by arguing that Catullus is making a play on words through the homophony of the Latin verb eris and the Greek noun ἔρις. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.1 (2004) 3-17 [Access article in PDF] Universal Shylockery Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice Simon Critchley Tom McCarthy What if Nietzsche were a Jew, and a mean-minded Venetian Jew at that? We'd like to begin with the thought experiment of imagining The Merchant of Venice as a genealogy of morality and imagining Shylock as Nietzsche. What is The Merchant of Venice about? What is (...) at stake in this oddly inside-out drama, where a piece of good old Elizabethan comic Jew-baiting rotates 180 degrees into a devastating study of Christian anti-Semitism only to flip back into what it seemed to deny? Our initial hypothesis is that it is nothing less than an inquiry into the origin of our moral concepts of justice, good and bad, and more particularly guilt, law, mercy, and love. It is here that a link with Nietzsche suggests itself, particularly with the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals.* * *How do we breed an animal with the right to make promises? For Nietzsche, the human being is an originally forgetful creature, like a young child. To make this originally forgetful creature remember requires physical discipline; it behooves punishment. The teaching of morality is never gentle; it never droppeth from heaven like gentle rain. On the contrary, if something is to be retained in memory, it must be burned in. The origin of memory lies in pain and cruelty: "Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself" [GM 61]. Nietzsche's first, astonishing hypothesis in the Second Essay is that the origin of concepts like responsibility and conscience lies in cruelty—cruelty administered and maintained through a corporal and corporeal regime. Further, as religions are systems of cruelty, all forms of asceticism originate in the same painful place. "Consider the German punishments," Nietzsche proposes—and we all know that there's nothing quite like the German punishments: stoning, breaking on the wheel, piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling with horses, boiling in oil, flaying alive, cutting straps from the flesh, smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him to the flies in the blazing sun. As Nietzsche quips, with magnificent understatement, "With the aid of such images and procedures one finally remembers five or six 'I will not's'" [GM 62]. It is on the basis of this burned-in memory of cruelty that good, decent, upright burghers such as ourselves acquired the habit of moral reasoning:Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over affects, the whole sombre thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all "good things." [GM 62] [End Page 3]"Dearly bought": let's hold onto that trope of purchasing. In another extraordinary passage of the Second Essay, Nietzsche explains the origin of thinking itself in terms of economic activity:Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a sense they are thinking [das Denken ist]. [GM 70] In the beginning was trade. Human activity begins with exchange, with the to and fro of buying and selling, which are forms of life older than all other social alliances and organization. It is from here, Nietzsche insists, that human beings arrive at the first moral canon of justice:"Everything has its price; all things can be paid for"—the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice, the beginning of all "good-naturedness," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. [GM 70] Which brings us to the origin of das Bewusstsein der Schuld and schlechte Gewissen, the consciousness of guilt and bad conscience. Nietzsche's hypothesis here, and our theme is beginning to come into focus, is that the origin of guilty conscience lies in the relation between a creditor and debtor, Glaubiger und Schuldner. The spiritual concept of guilt, Schuld, originates in the very material concept of Schulden... (shrink)

Triviality results threaten plausible principles governing our credence in epistemic modal claims. This paper develops a new account of modal credence which avoids triviality. On the resulting theory, probabilities are assigned not to sets of worlds, but rather to sets of information state-world pairs. The theory avoids triviality by giving up the principle that rational credence is closed under conditionalization. A rational agent can become irrational by conditionalizing on new evidence. In place of conditionalization, the paper develops a new account (...) of updating: conditionalization with normalization. (shrink)

From the Foreward by Mortimer J. Adler Of all the question or issues concerning human freedom, none is more fundamental in itself and in its consequences than the problem of free choice; and none has been the subject of more persistent and, at the same time, apparently irresolvable controversyThis bookis the perfect antidote for the errors, the misunderstandings or worse, the ignorances that beset the modern discussion of free choice. Even the reader who comes to this book with little or (...) no knowledge of the philosophical literature on the subjects that it treats cannot fail to appreciate its remarkable clarity, its felicitous combination of detailed concreteness with abstract precision, its exploration of common experience and its elucidation of common sense, and, above all, the intelligibility, reasonableness, and fairness of its exposition of free choice. (shrink)

Innerhalb des Gesamtsystems der praktischen Philosophie John Stuart Mills erfüllt der Begriff der Lebenskunst, oder der „art of life“ und der dazugehörigen „theory of life“, eine zentrale systematische Funktion. Die Abschnitte über die Kunst oder das Handwerk des Lebens haben in der Rezeption der Mill’schen Philosophie besondere Bedeutung, weil in ihnen Ansatzpunkte zu finden sind, mit denen sich die mitunter sehr disparaten Positionen Mills innerhalb der praktischen Philosophie in ein kohärentes Gesamtsystem fassen lassen. So werden Grundunterscheidungen innerhalb dieses Theorieelements angeführt, (...) um die Spannung zwischen dem Nutzenprinzip, das die axiologische Grundlage der gesamten praktischen Philosophie Mills darstellt, mit spezifischeren Normen der Gleichheit, Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit aufzulösen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kings and Gods as Ecological Agents:From Reciprocity to Unilateralism in the Management of Natural ResourcesSimon Simonse (bio)1. IntroductionThe questions this article addresses are as follows: do non-Western societies have a qualitatively better, more balanced relationship with nature than modern Western societies? Can the difference between the two be described in terms of an opposition between a reciprocal and an exploitative relationship? What difference does the Judeo-Christian tradition make in (...) shaping the modern relationship with nature?To answer these questions I will give brief descriptions of the way in which three cultural traditions have structured the relationship between man and nature: societies that are ruled by sacred kings, societies where power over nature is attributed to divinities, and the Old Testament tradition. As cases of sacred kinship, I present ethnographic material taken from my anthropological fieldwork among the Lulubo, Lokoya, and Lotuho peoples from the East Bank of the Nile in Southern Sudan. I will use the term "Eastern Nilotic" as shorthand for this complex of peoples. For the societies where divinities play the central role, I take the Western Nilotic Dinka, Nuer, and Atuot living in the flood plains of the Nile north of the kingship societies.In comparing these three traditions my point of departure is René Girard's analysis of culture as a mechanism to resolve conflict by directing the aggression of the members of society onto a victim and so achieving a new consensus. We shall see that in the kingship societies what we call natural phenomena play an integral part in culturally staging the scapegoat mechanism. They are the stage of human rivalries and their resolution. Among the polytheistic Western Nilotes they are the instrument through which the gods make their power felt and demand attention from humans. In the Old Testament, natural phenomena remain the domain of God's power. Humans should not try to interfere. Their mission is to combat human evil as defined in Mosaic law. [End Page 31]2. Kings as Ecological AgentsThe survival of the communities of the Lokoya and Lulubo on the East Bank of the Nile who traditionally live in well-fortified village-polities, counting in the precolonial period between 1500 and 2500 inhabitants, is dependent on forces that are unpredictable (Simonse 1992). As agriculturists they are dependent on regular rains. However, the rains in their area are erratic and localized. As a result there is always a risk that the harvest may fail. The soil is of varying quality, giving varying yields in different places. The birth rate is another major concern. It determines the security of the community in its relationship to neighboring, frequently hostile, communities. There is the concern for epidemics, crop-eating insects and birds, and root-eating worms. Violent winds may destroy the crop, and lions and leopards may kill humans and cattle. A concern of a different order is the extent of the effectiveness of weapons, spears, and bows and arrows, in assuring security.When adversity affects the community, the first question asked by those affected is that regarding its cause. Frequently the cause is a breach of the social rules: an act of violence and a failure to perform or properly perform a ritual of purification necessitated by the violence. It may also be unconscious resentment on the part of a person or group that feels excluded from benefits enjoyed by others. It may be the cry of a neglected relative. It may be incest. It may be an attack by outsiders.Among the Lulubo and Lokoya, responsibility for the various aspects of the natural environment that can be critical for community survival is allocated to the different clans. In the case of a crisis (drought, infertility) the clan associated with the problem is the target of investigations. The main investigation strategy is to check, one by one, the quarrels in which members of that clan have been involved. When a conflict has been identified, a solution is suggested by way of reconciliation or restitution. Of particular interest are attempts to provoke the responsible clan official. If a settlement of the dispute fails to bring the required result, there will be more rounds of investigation... (shrink)

Un commerce intime, tantot exalte, tantot inavouable, entre l'oeuvre de Proust et celles de Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze ou Barthes se joue au coeur des annees 1950-1970, au moment ou sont renouvelees les facons d'envisager la production theorique. Si le romancier les a particulierement captives, c'est que son oeuvre venait amplifier ou heurter non seulement leur pratique reflexive, mais le sens meme de leur existence et de leur engagement dans l'ecriture. Du roman au traite, de la vie de l'un a la (...) vie de l'autre, nait une etrange erotique des pensees, ou se creent des partages sereins, des negociations passionnees, des appariements effrayants. Trafics de Proust opere un enfoncement dans la duree longue de ces echanges, de ces prets sur gages et de ces resiliations. Son enjeu est de rendre compte des strategies qui menent un penseur lisant Proust a construire ou deconstruire ses cadres cognitifs, a s'articuler, dans la fluidite du jeu ou le coincement grincant, a une vie de la pensee ou (de)raison, emotion et fiction consonnent avec individuation. Sont ainsi restituees des pensees sensibles, comme autant de formes de soi traversees par le romanesque. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” (2019) and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part, I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

Positive mental health involves not the absence of mental disorder but rather the presence of certain mental goods. Institutions, practitioners, and theorists often identify positive mental health with well‐being. There are strong reasons, however, to keep the concepts of well‐being and positive mental health separate. Someone with high positive mental health can have low well‐being, someone with high well‐being can have low positive mental health, and well‐being and positive mental health sometimes conflict. But, while positive mental health and well‐being are (...) not identical, there is an informative conceptual connection between them. Positive mental health usually contributes instrumentally to the living of a good human life, where a good human life includes (but is not limited to) well‐being. (shrink)

What can reason do for us and what can't it do? This is the question examined by Herbert A. Simon, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering work on decision-making processes in economic organizations." The ability to apply reason to the choice of actions is supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of our species. In the first two chapters, the author explores the nature and limits of human reason, comparing and evaluating the (...) major theoretical frameworks that have been erected to explain reasoning processes. He also discusses the interaction of thinking and emotion in the choice of our actions. In the third and final chapter, the author applies the theory of bounded rationality to social institutions and human behavior, and points out the problems created by limited attention span human inability to deal with more than one difficult problem at a time. He concludes that we must recognize the limitations on our capabilities for rational choice and pursue goals that, in their tentativeness and flexibility, are compatible with those limits. (shrink)

According to hedonistic act utilitarianism, an act is morally right if and only if, and because, it produces at least as much pleasure minus pain as any alternative act available to the agent. This dissertation gives a partial defense of utilitarianism against two types of objections: action guidance objections and intuitive objections. In Chapter 1, the main themes of the dissertation are introduced. The chapter also examines questions of how to understand utilitarianism, including (a) how to best formulate the moral (...) explanatory claim of the theory, (b) how to best interpret the phrase "pleasure minus pain," and (c) how the theory is related to act consequentialism. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with action guidance objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 2 defines two kinds of action guidance: doxastic and evidential guidance. It is argued that utilitarianism is evidentially but not doxastically guiding for us. Chapter 3 evaluates various action guidance objections to utilitarianism. These are the objections that utilitarianism, because it is not doxastically guiding, is a bad moral theory, fails to be a moral theory, is an uninteresting and unimportant moral theory, and is a false moral theory. The second part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) deals with intuitive objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 4 presents three intuitive objections: Experience Machine, Transplant, and Utility Monster. Three defenses of utilitarianism are subsequently evaluated. Chapter 5 and 6 introduces two alternative defenses of utilitarianism against intuitive objections, both of which concern the role that imagination plays in thought experimentation. In Chapter 5, it is argued that we sometimes unknowingly carry out the wrong thought experiment when we direct intuitive objections against utilitarianism. In many such cases, we elicit moral intuitions that we believe give us reason to reject utilitarianism, but that in fact do not. In Chapter 6, it is argued that using the right kind of sensory imagination when we perform thought experiments will positively affect the epistemic trustworthiness of our moral intuitions. Moreover, it is suggested that doing so renders utilitarianism more plausible. In Chapter 7, the contents of the dissertation are summarized. (shrink)

The concept of indistinguishable particles in quantum theory is fundamental to questions of ontology. All ordinary matter is made of electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons and they are all indistinguishable particles. Yet the concept itself has proved elusive, in part because of the interpretational difficulties that afflict quantum theory quite generally, and in part because the concept was so central to the discovery of the quantum itself, by Planck in 1900; it came encumbered with revolution. I offer a deflationary reading (...) of the concept ‘indistinguishable’ that is identical to Gibbs’ concept ‘generic phase’, save that it is defined for state spaces with only finitely-many states of bounded volume and energy. That, and that alone, makes for the difference between the quantum and Gibbs concepts of indistinguishability. This claim is heretical on several counts, but here we consider only the content of the claim itself, and its bearing on the early history of quantum theory rather than in relation to contemporary debates about particle indistinguishability and permutation symmetry. It powerfully illuminates that history. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page W1-W3.

From political scandals at the highest levels to inflated repair bills at the local garage, we are seemingly surrounded with unethical behavior, so why should we behave any differently? Why should we go through life anchored down by rules no one else seems to follow? Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles such questions in this lively look at ethics, highlighting the complications and doubts and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought (...) to live. Blackburn dissects many common reasons why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on all-too-familiar examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. But ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, he assures us, but an intimate part of the nitty gritty issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues, whether we notice it or not. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress. Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor and sparkling prose, and his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior. (shrink)

We situate the well-trodden debate about defining health and disease within the project of a metaphysics of science and its aim to work with and contribute to science. We make use of Guay and Pradeu’s ‘metaphysical box’ to reframe this debate, showing what is at stake in recent attempts to move beyond it, revealing unforeseen points of agreement and disagreement among new and old positions, and producing new questions that may lead to progress. We then discuss the implications of the (...) two-way benefits between medicine and philosophy when the latter is driven and constrained by medical science. (shrink)

Famously, Kant is a transcendental idealist. Yet he also endorses empirical realism, and even boasts that only the transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. The difficulty of making sense of those commitments together leads many interpreters to begin by attributing to Kant some variant of conventional, subjective idealism. That in turn requires that Kant's empirical realism be at best a merely ersatz or quasi-realism. But that drains Kant's boast of its significance. For any idealist can be a realist if (...) the 'realism' in question is defined in terms of a prior commitment to idealism. Thus I argue, on the contrary, that we must begin the interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy by taking his empirical realism to be a genuine, common-sense realism about empirical things. That approach yields a consistent, satisfying, and novel reading of the Critical enterprise, including transcendental idealism, as explaining how empirical realism is possible. Along the way I show, among other things, (1) how to make systematic sense of Kant's controversial theory of meaning, which is standardly either downplayed or regarded as grossly inconsistent with his other core commitments; (2) how to dispense with the centuries-old Neglected Alternative objection; and (3) how to account for the syntheticity of the moral law and its role in conferring experience-immanent meaning on the practical postulates (e.g., of the existence of God). (shrink)

自史蒂芬·霍金(Stephen Hawking) 的暢銷科普著作《時間簡史》(以下簡稱《簡史》) 在上世紀八十年代末問世以來，至今天二十一世紀，華人基督教界就他宇宙無起點的論述仍有相當之評論，但可惜對評論未有綜合分析。評論者因寫作目的，也甚少交代霍金宇宙學的來龍去脈。故本文嘗試略述霍金宇宙學的歷史 背景及發展經過，繼而舉出華人基督教界的評論，帶出其獨特性，並提出商確的地方，以反省未來可行路向。.

An extended example illustrating various theories of personal identity and imagining how duplicates would confront the argument that neither of them is identical with the original.

John Baconthorpe (c.1290-1345/8) was the best-known of the Carmelite scholastics in the Middle Ages. This article is a brief study of his solution to the philosophical problem of how the soul may be wholly present in the human body and present whole and undivided in each part. Baconthorpe’s account is of great interest for a number of reasons. He takes issue with one of his fellow Carmelite masters, alerting us to diversity of opinion within that ‘school’. Furthermore, in using terminology (...) and illustrative analogies drawn from terminist logic and the mathematical sciences, Baconthorpe is an important witness to what has been described as the ‘mathematization’ of philosophy and theology in late medieval England. Finally, study of Baconthorpe’s texts provides further evidence of the emergence of the theme of extension in fourteenth-century thought in which we can discern the roots of modern philosophical debate. (shrink)

Der Berliner Theologe, Philosoph und auch politische Reformer Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher führte eine umfangreiche Korrespondenz. Der zwölfte Band der 5. Abteilung der historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgabe Schleiermachers enthält Briefe von Januar 1811 bis Juni 1813. Sie umfassen die ersten Jahre der Berliner Reformuniversität, in denen Friedrich Schleiermacher erster Dekan der theologischen Fakultät war und an der Konzeption und Umsetzung der Preußischen Bildungs- und Kirchenreformen mitwirkte. Nach dem von ihm herbeigesehnten Abfall Preußens von Napoleon oblagen ihm die Organisation des Berliner Landsturms und (...) die Redaktion der Tageszeitung "Der preußische Correspondent", während die allmählich anwachsende Familie im scheinbar sicheren Schlesien untergebracht war. (shrink)

Contrary to what writers such as Hans Jonas and Val Plumwood suggest, much of nature is indifferent to human interests. Mountains, glaciers, sun-baked salt pans—such entities care neither about what interests us humans nor about what is objectively in our interests. It might be hard to see how the property of being indifferent, in this sense, could add value. But it can. For those of us who inhabit highly technological, user-friendly environments, entities such as mountains can have therapeutic value precisely (...) because they so obviously do not care about what matters to us. (shrink)

This book offers an in-depth account of the most important moral debates surrounding human rights today. They are the basis of legitimacy for modern Western civilisation, yet there still exists differences between our common view on the importance of rights and our profound disagreement on their meaning and content.

Cushman characterizes rationalization as the inverse of rational reasoning, but this distinction is psychologically questionable. Coherence-based reasoning highlights a subtler form of bidirectionality: By distorting task attributes to make one course of action appear superior to its rivals, a patina of rationality is bestowed on the choice. This mechanism drives choice and action, rather than just following in their wake.

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of (...) the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization. (shrink)

The Greenough stereomicroscope, or “Stemi” as it is colloquially known among microscopists, is a stereoscopic binocular instrument yielding three-dimensional depth perception when working with larger microscopic specimens. It has become ubiquitous in laboratory practice since its introduction by the unknown scientist Horatio Saltonstall Greenough in 1892. However, because it enabled new experimental practices rather than new knowledge, it has largely eluded historical and epistemological investigation, even though its design, production, and reception in the scientific community was inextricably connected to the (...) new epistemological ideals of the life sciences caught between natural history and modern science. The development of the microscope will be contextualized within the scientific and technological landscape, showing how Greenough navigated his way through this terrain, and what led him to sow the seeds for the stereoscopic microscope. The historical controversy over the optical mechanism, through which the instrument would generate the desired depth perception, and how this quality was embedded into laboratory practice, will be examined. Subsequently, it will become evident that the specific image of nature produced by the stereoscopic microscope corresponded to the new ideals of the life sciences and their representation. (shrink)

We prove a couple of results on NTP2 theories. First, we prove an amalgamation statement and deduce from it that the Lascar distance over extension bases is bounded by 2. This improves previous work of Ben Yaacov and Chernikov. We propose a line of investigation of NTP2 theories based on S1 ideals with amalgamation and ask some questions. We then define and study a class of groups with generically simple generics, generalizing NIP groups with generically stable generics.

Yves R. Simon explores moral virtue in this piece through identifying three moral positions common in modernity that attempt to substitute the traditional concept of virtue, as well as discussing the distinction between nature and use of sources of good or evil. He also discusses the distinctions between habits and opinions, as well as the virtue and science. He gives clear examples that make this book enjoyable for readers of all levels to understand moral virtue.