This volume unites Peter Winch's previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King's College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza's work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza's predecessors such as René Descartes, (...) but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors. (shrink)

There is a major debate as to whether there are non-causal mathematical explanations of physical facts that show how the facts under question arise from a degree of mathematical necessity considered stronger than that of contingent causal laws. We focus on Marc Lange’s account of distinctively mathematical explanations to argue that purported mathematical explanations are essentially causal explanations in disguise and are no different from ordinary applications of mathematics. This is because these explanations work not by appealing to what the (...) world must be like as a matter of mathematical necessity but by appealing to various contingent causal facts. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.

In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick think deeply about punishment and discipline practices in American schooling. To delve into this controversial subject, the authors carefully consider two major issues. The first involves questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed overtime? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? The second issue involves the justification of punishment and (...) discipline in schools. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are these things important for moral education? Or, are they fundamentally opposed to education? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should direct its administration? The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the past century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment (such as suspension), school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes, they argue, disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental ethos of education. What we need is a view of discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools should be. (shrink)

1. Praktická filozofie na základě sociologie : etika --.

Explores and articulates Jean-Luc Nancy's profound impact on our understanding of artistic and literary modernism.

Inleiding in de muziekfilosofie die aanzet tot denken, maar ook tot luisteren dankzij de bijbehorende website.

According to informal logic, the possibilities of deductive logic as a tool for analysing and evaluating ordinary arguments are very limited. While I agree with this claim in general, I question it in the case of the argument from cause to effect. In this paper I first show, on the basis of carefully chosen examples, that we usually react differently to falsification of the conclusion of the argument from cause to effect than we do to the falsification of the conclusion (...) of other defeasible arguments. I then identify general conditions and assumptions under which the causal argument from cause to effect can be reconstructed as deductive. Finally, I compare the causal argument with the expert argument, which is a typical example of a defeasible argument in the narrower sense. (shrink)

Postdisciplinary Knowledge is the first book to articulate postdisciplinarity in philosophical, theoretical and methodological terms, helping to establish it as an important intellectual movement of the 21st century. It formulates what postdisciplinarity is, and how it can be implemented in research practice. The diverse chapters present a rich collection of highly creative thought-provoking essays and methodological insights. Written by a number of pioneering intellectuals with a range of backgrounds and research foci, these chapters cover a broad spectrum of areas demonstrating (...) alternative ways of producing knowledge. Essays are interspersed with dialogue, encouraging a comprehensive and engaging discussion on this emerging movement. Not limited to a specific field or discipline, this will be of great interest to upper level students and researchers in a wide range of subject areas, including: tourism, sociology, education, psychology, physiotherapy, fine arts, architecture and design, as well as those with a general interest in epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

In Heraclitus’ time, thymos and psyche carried highly similar or even identical meanings, because both could refer to life, courage, personality, emotions, and reason. Heraclitus probably worked with all of these meanings. He may have been partly inspired by Homer and post-Homeric literature, where the two terms were likewise placed side by side and often used interchangeably. In Heraclitus, thymos and psyche are not opposites in terms of signification. Oftentimes, they can be “swapped,” and their meaning and “costs” exchanged. The (...) source and cause of this special exchange is desiring or wanting (thelein), which connects all these senses but is also the source of conflict and fighting. Desire—regardless of what it is and what is desired—is simultaneously the acquisition of the desired object or person and a way of paying for it. This struggle for the desired object is difficult not only because of its consequences (the price), but also because it is not possible to permanently stop desiring, which is why this struggle cannot be brought to an end. (shrink)

Taking a fundamentally critical approach to the subject of business ethics, this book deals with the traditional material of ethics in business, as well as introducing and surveying some of the most interesting developments in critical ethical theory which have not yet been introduced to the mainstream. Including chapters on different philosophical approaches to ethics, this is a highly structured and clearly written textbook, the first book of its kind on this often neglected aspect of business.

Las 15 piezas que ahora lo conforman abrevan en la Historia, en confeciones personales y entrevistas, y mezclan la literatura y el periodismo de manera audaz y perfecta. Los protagonistas son hombres excepcionales y el momento que se ha elegido para contar son las visperas de sus muertes -tal vez el momento de mayor soledad y de mayor intimidad de un hombre. A traves de la magistral escritura de Tomas Eloy Martinez tenemos el privilegio de asistir a los ultimos (...) minutos de sus vidas, el momento previo a perderlo todo y cuando, resistiendo a la indiferencia del mundo, se suena con alguna inmortalidad. (shrink)

The ‘No Ought From Is’ principle (or ‘NOFI’) states that a valid argument cannot have both an ethical conclusion and non-ethical premises. Arthur Prior proposed several well-known counterexamples, including the following: Tea-drinking is common in England; therefore, either tea-drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. My aim in this paper is to defend NOFI against Prior’s counterexamples. I propose two novel interpretations of NOFI and prove that both are true.

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

V práci sa zaoberám kritickou expozíciou argumentačných schém v kontexte pragma-dialektického prístupu k argumentácii. Nadväzujem pritom na prácu Hitchcocka a Wagemansa (2011), ktorí sa sústredili najmä na problémy súvisiace s typológiou argumentačných schém v pragma-dialektike. Pozorovania Hitchcocka a Wagemansa sú v priebehu výkladu kriticky hodnotené, prípadne upravené. Časť kritiky, ktorú v práci uvádzam, súvisí s tým, že niektoré dôležité aspekty argumentačných schém sú v rôznych pragma-dialektických publikáciách prezentované odlišne bez toho, aby sa odlišnosť akokoľvek komentovala, alebo zdôvodnila. Existencia takýchto zdôvodnení (...) nie je pritom iba znakom, ale aj nevyhnutnou podmienkou toho, aby sme akúkoľvek zmenu mohli nazývať pokrokom v teórii. Posledná časť práce je zameraná na problémy týkajúce sa hodnotenia argumentácie v pragma-dialektickom prístupe. Hoci článok prináša vlastné pozitívne návrhy, dôraz a celkový zámer spočíva predovšetkým na expozícii nedostatkov súčasného stavu pragma-dialektickej koncepcie argumentačných schém. Kľúčové slová: argumentačné schémy, kritické otázky, pragma-dialektický prístup k argumentácii, hodnotenie argumentov. (shrink)

Text kriticky hodnotí tvrzení o pojmu fenomenálního vědomí, která jsou obsažena v šesté kapitole knihy Tomáše Hříbka Jaké to je, nebo o čem to je? Mým východiskem je teze Erica Schwitzgebela, že fenomenální vědomí můžeme definovat natolik neutrálně a minimalisticky, že se na jeho existenci mohou shodnout i teoretikové vědomí z velmi rozdílných táborů. Hříbek tento názor nesdílí, snažím se ale ukázat, že na základě lichých argumentů. Značnou pozornost v textu věnuji názorům Daniela Dennetta na podstatu vědomí, především pak „iluzionismu“ (...) jakožto teorii vědomí. Ten pokládám za teorii se značně nejasným obsahem a navrhuji, aby se o něm ve filozofii vědomí vedly soustředěné diskuze. (shrink)

Přijetí teze, že některé výrazy referují bez zprostředkování identifikujícími podmínkami přímo k objektům, vede k několika problematickým důsledkům týkajícím se propozičních postojů. Jedním z těchto důsledků je ten, že bychom tudíž na základě přesvědčení Lois Lanové, že Superman je silnější než Clark Kent, byli nuceni uznat, že je též přesvědčena o existenci někoho, kdo má tu vlastnost, že je silnější, než skutečně je. Snad žádný racionálně uvažující člověk by však zřejmě přesvědčení o existenci někoho, o kom by tato nemožná vlastnost (...) měla platit, nepřijal. Klíčovým pojmem, na němž platnost vyvození tohoto přesvědčení stojí, je reflexivita – ze zjevně nereflexivního obsahu přesvědčení se vyvozuje přesvědčení reflexivní. Příspěvek se pokouší odhalit, kam je možno reflexivitu v rámci informačního obsahu věty zasadit. Zváženy jsou nejprve dvě možnosti: reflexivita je buď sémantickou vlastností vztahů, nebo anaforických zájmen. Obě možnosti budou vyvráceny prostřednictvím argumentace, že ve větách popisujících vztah mezi obsahy dvou koreferujících singulárních termínů nemůže být reflexivita součástí sémantické informace, jelikož znalost identity reference není podmínkou sémantické kompetence. Reflexivita je u těchto typů vět vázána na koordinaci znalostí mezi mluvčími. Jsou formulovány nutné podmínky, které by platnost daného vyvození teprve ospravedlnily. (shrink)

El concepto de autopoiesis ha tenido un importante impacto en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales, en la filosofía y las humanidades en general. Algunos intelectuales contemporáneos han llevado a cabo una apropiación crítica del mismo y otrxs han realizado una traspolación directa desde la biología hacia sus respectivas disciplinas y campos de interés. El objetivo del presente artículo es desarrollar un estudio comparativo sobre ciertos usos críticos y no críticos del concepto de autopoiesis que, en su mayoría, hasta el (...) momento no han sido examinados en profundidad y menos aún de una manera comparativa. Se trata de trabajos de investigadorxs con recorridos, intereses y posiciones ético-políticas diversas: Terry Winograd y Fernando Flores, Arturo Escobar, Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Sylvia Wynter y Donna Haraway. (shrink)