Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate responses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s account of (...) responsibility. I argue this on the grounds that without reference to the passions, Hume does not have the resources to distinguish between responsible and non-responsible entities. Instead, I attribute to Hume a distinctive, sympathy-based response-dependent conception of responsibility. (shrink)

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in how their food is produced. Many studies have focused on consumers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for specific production-related claims on food products. However, few studies have asked consumers to rank the importance of different production claims. In this study, we use a best-worst scaling approach to have consumers rank the importance of seven common production claims used on food products. Rankings are obtained across four product types: beef, milk, chicken, and eggs. Results of the study (...) show that consumers often prefer specific components of more encompassing claims as opposed to the broader, more encompassing claim itself. The majority of preference shares were captured by the top three claims, though the order of these preferences appears to vary for meat and non-meat animals. (shrink)

Liber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (d.c.815), a court astrologer of the Abbasid dynasty, was one of the earliest Latin sources of Aristotelian physics. Until recently, its Arabic original could not be identified among Arabic works. Through extensive examination of Arabic manuscripts on exact sciences, I found two manuscripts containing the Arabic text of this Latin work, although neither of them is ascribed to Māshā'allāh: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 273, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania University Library, MS LJS 439. (...) In this paper, I describe these two manuscripts in great detail, so that I confirm their originality of theLiber de orbe, and then by analysing the contents of the Arabic text, I deny the attribution to Māshā'allāh, and identify the title and author asBook on the Configuration of the Orbby Dūnash ibn Tamīm, a disciple of Isaac Israeli (c.855–c.955). (shrink)

– This paper aims to suggest that ethical issues in information and communications technology (ICT) should be researched from a holistic perspective, including environmental values and other values inherent in ICT. This paper thoroughly discusses the value of speed by drawing on ICT advertisements and theories of speed, primarily Paul Virilio’s work., – The methodology consists of a semiotic analysis of ICT-related advertisements primarily from Sweden. These empirical data are combined with a close reading of Paul Virilio’s work, and the (...) analysis moves abductively between theory and empirical data., – Speed is promoted in ICT-related advertisements and may be analyzed using concepts of dromology, dromocracy, dromoscopy, the dromosphere, instantaneity and grey ecology., – Most of the data are from the Swedish context., – To create a sustainable society, one must explicitly discuss how speed forms and shapes society., – The paper combines philosophical theories with everyday commercials. It draws on the work of Paul Virilio, whose theories are seldom used in studies of information ethics, and redraws attention to the need for a holistic perspective to understand the values of ICT. (shrink)

Este artículo examina las diversas interpretaciones sobre el origen de la filosofía en José Ortega y Gasset y Karl Jaspers. Ortega redactó “Fragmentos de Origen de la filosofía” para celebrar el septuagésimo cumpleaños de Jaspers. Sin embargo, este ensayo aparentemente conmemorativo incluye una crítica sustancial a la interpretación jaspersiana del origen de la filosofía. En este contexto, analizamos tanto el concepto jaspersiano del “tiempo-eje (Achsenzeit)” como la tesis orteguiana que interpreta el origen de la filosofía como un fenómeno colonial y (...) ateo. Y, en realidad, la discrepancia entre Ortega y Jaspers en este tema se debe a sus concepciones radicalmente opuestas de la filosofía misma. (shrink)

To articulate their understanding of Hume’s discussion of ‘distinctions of reason’, commentators have often taken what I refer to as a ‘respect-first view’ on resemblance, in which they cat...

In the concluding section of the Book One of the Treatise, Hume confronts radical scepticism about the standards of correct reasoning. According to the naturalistic interpretations, Hume resolves this scepticism by appealing to some psychological facts. A common criticism of this interpretation is that the alleged naturalistic epistemic norm seems to be merely Hume’s report of his psychology, and it remains unclear why this seemingly mere psychological description can provide a principled reason to overcome his scepticism. In this paper, I (...) will argue that Hume’s discussions of the “indirect passions” and social identity provide a constitutivist ground for the naturalistic epistemic standards in the “Conclusion”: being the object of the indirect passions constitutes what kind of person one is, and being the kind of person (philosopher in Hume’s case) gives non-optional reason to pursue certain kinds of reasoning. (shrink)

This article studies the possible dialogue, both personal and theoretical, about primitive thought between the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade. Although it is well known that both got acquainted with each other in Portugal, their theoretical relationship has not been fully studied. However, by analyzing closely their encounters, both personal and philosophical, it seems highly probable that Ortega had a great influence on Eliade’s theory of primitive mentality. For this reason, firstly (...) we analyze the personal contact between the two thinkers recorded in Eliade’s Portugal Journal. Secondly, we examine some important aspects of the theory of primitive thought in Ortega and Eliade in order to clarify their similarities and differences. (shrink)

We have developed a broadcasting agent system, public opinion channel (POC) caster, which generates understandable conversational form from text-based documents. The POC caster circulates the opinions of community members by using conversational form in a broadcasting system on the Internet. We evaluated its transformation rules in two experiments. In experiment 1, we examined our transformation rules for conversational form in relation to sentence length. Twenty-four participants listened to two types of sentence (long sentences and short sentences) with conversational form or (...) with single speech. In experiment 2, we investigated the relationship between conversational form and the user’s knowledge level. Forty-two participants (21 with a high knowledge level and 21 with a low knowledge level) were selected for a knowledge task and listened to two kinds of sentence (sentences about a well-known topic or sentences about an unfamiliar topic). Our results indicate that the conversational form aided comprehension, especially for long sentences and when users had little knowledge about the topic. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results with regard to human cognition and text comprehension. (shrink)

El presente estudio investiga la influencia de José Ortega y Gasset sobre la teoría del juego de Johan Huizinga. Analiza especialmente la distinción entre el juego auténtico y el pueril, el deporte y el pasatiempo y el concepto de club en ambos autores. El club es una comunidad originaria por la cual el espíritu lúdico entra e interviene en el mundo cotidiano. Según ambos autores, el espíritu lúdico deportivo crea el Estado y todas las instituciones culturales políticas a través de (...) este extraño tipo de comunidad. (shrink)

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)

Rousseau a bien compris, mieux que ses contemporains peut-être, le paradoxe de la communication propre aux Lumières, prises entre le développement du savoir et la constitution d'une opinion publique. Avec l'accélération de la circulation des discours et des écrits, comment parler et agir philosophiquement sans se perdre? Comment concilier la culture du secret, issue de la tradition littéraire du libertinage érudit, et la publicité, qui ouvre de plus en plus grands les horizons de la sphère publique? Masano Yamashita examine (...) ici l'articulation entre les stratégies rhétoriques de l'adresse au lecteur chez Rousseau et sa conception proprement philosophique de la communication. Elle met en lumière l'originalité et la lucidité de Rousseau face aux difficultés liées à cette société de l'information d'Ancien Régime. Rousseau cherche les conditions de possibilité d'une parole émancipée et pleinement publique. Au moyen d'une philosophie incarnée mettant en scène une figure de lecteur, il met à l'épreuve l'idée d'un sujet universel, la constitution d'un espace public, le sens de l'exercice de la philosophie, les enjeux politiques et éthiques des actes de discours. La réception des textes et le rapport au public constituent ainsi pour Rousseau un enjeu philosophique. Entre exigence de transparence et désir d'expérimenter les diverses facettes du moi public, se dessine la conception originale que Rousseau se fait de l'homme des Lumières. Masano Yamashita montre que la réflexion de Rousseau sur les manières de vivre dans un espace public, social comme littéraire, débouche sur une véritable vie philosophique. (shrink)

Two experiments examined false recall for lists of semantically and phonologically associated words as a function of presentation duration. Veridical recall increased with long exposure durations for all lists. For semantically associated lists, false recall increased from 20–250 ms, then decreased. There was a high level of false recall with 20 ms durations for phonologically associated lists , which declined as duration increased. In Experiment 2, for lists presented at 20 and 50 ms rates, false recall given zero correct recall (...) was observed frequently, suggesting that conscious recollection of studied words was not necessary for phonological false memory. Differences between phonologically and semantically associated lists were consistent with a feature integration model based on automatic initial processing of phonetic features of words. (shrink)

The book explores the ways in which Jean Jacques Rousseau envisaged time as a diagnostic tool for understanding the state of society and the predicaments of modernity. Central to his conceptualization of both nature and history, time also plays a unique role in Rousseau's literary and aesthetic explorations of selfhood and effect. The book brings into dialogue specialists from education, political theory, literature and cultural studies with the aim to underscoring Rousseau's contributions to themes that preoccupy us today such as (...) the appreciation of slow time, the uncounted time of women's lives and temporal challenges related to politics and economy. (shrink)