Drawing from existing theory and empirical evidence on mindfulness, we posit that trait mindfulness is associated with less accurate memories of immoral conduct. We report three studies that provide evidence of this argument. One significant implication of this finding is that it provides a more balanced and complete view of mindfulness. Specifically, while mindfulness is widely promoted for its positive effects for employee well‐being, mindfulness may inadvertently promote a biased moral self‐perception based on inaccurate memories of one's past immoral conduct. (...) In a fourth study, we explore this implication and demonstrate that memory mediates the negative relationship between trait mindfulness and self‐reported immoral conduct. This research contributes to literatures on mindfulness, memory, morality, and to the growing body of work assessing the importance of mindfulness. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a modified form of the theory of planned behavior in understanding the decisions of undergraduate students in engineering and humanities to engage in cheating. We surveyed 527 randomly selected students from three academic institutions. Results supported the use of the model in predicting ethical decision-making regarding cheating. In particular, the model demonstrated how certain variables (gender, discipline, high school cheating, education level, international student status, participation in Greek organizations or other clubs) and moral constructs (...) related to intention to cheat, attitudes toward cheating, perceptions of norms with respect to cheating, and ultimately cheating behaviors. Further the relative importance of the theory of planned behavior constructs was consistent regardless of context, whereas the contributions of variables included in the study that were outside the theory varied by context. Of particular note were findings suggesting that the extent of cheating in high school was a strong predictor of cheating in college and that engineering students reported cheating more frequently than students in the humanities, even when controlling for the number of opportunities to do so. (shrink)

The use of upper limb vibration during exercise and rehabilitation continues to gain popularity as a modality to improve function and performance. Currently, a lack of knowledge of the pathways being altered during ULV limits its effective implementation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate whether indirect ULV modulates transmission along spinal and corticospinal pathways that control the human forearm. All measures were assessed under CONTROL and ULV conditions while participants maintained a small contraction of the right flexor (...) carpi radialis muscle. To assess spinal pathways, Hoffmann reflexes elicited by stimulation of the median nerve were recorded from FCR with motor response amplitudes matched between conditions. An H-reflex conditioning paradigm was also used to assess changes in presynaptic inhibition by stimulating the superficial radial nerve 37 ms prior to median nerve stimulation. Cutaneous reflexes in FCR elicited by stimulation of the SR nerve at the wrist were also recorded. To assess corticospinal pathways, motor evoked potentials elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the contralateral motor cortex were recorded from the right FCR and biceps brachii. ULV significantly reduced H-reflex amplitude by 15.7% for both conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. Therefore, ULV inhibits cutaneous and H-reflex transmission without influencing corticospinal excitability of the forearm flexors suggesting increased presynaptic inhibition of afferent transmission as a likely mechanism. A general increase in inhibition of spinal pathways with ULV may have important implications for improving rehabilitation for individuals with spasticity. (shrink)

Previous research indicates that students in engineering self-report cheating in college at higher rates than those in most other disciplines. Prior work also suggests that participation in one deviant behavior is a reasonable predictor of future deviant behavior. This combination of factors leads to a situation where engineering students who frequently participate in academic dishonesty are more likely to make unethical decisions in professional practice. To investigate this scenario, we propose the hypotheses that (1) there are similarities in the decision-making (...) processes used by engineering students when considering whether or not to participate in academic and professional dishonesty, and (2) prior academic dishonesty by engineering students is an indicator of future decisions to act dishonestly. Our sample consisted of undergraduate engineering students from two technically-oriented private universities. As a group, the sample reported working full-time an average of six months per year as professionals in addition to attending classes during the remaining six months. This combination of both academic and professional experience provides a sample of students who are experienced in both settings. Responses to open-ended questions on an exploratory survey indicate that students identify common themes in describing both temptations to cheat or to violate workplace policies and factors which caused them to hesitate in acting unethically, thus supporting our first hypothesis and laying the foundation for future surveys having forced-choice responses. As indicated by the responses to forced-choice questions for the engineering students surveyed, there is a relationship between self-reported rates of cheating in high school and decisions to cheat in college and to violate workplace policies; supporting our second hypothesis. Thus, this exploratory study demonstrates connections between decision-making about both academic and professional dishonesty. If better understood, these connections could lead to practical approaches for encouraging ethical behavior in the academic setting, which might then influence future ethical decision-making in workplace settings. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical vocabularies, so that their accounts are written in mutually incompatible languages. In recent years social, cognitive and cultural evolutionary theories, building on a growing body of archaeological evidence, (...) have made substantial sense of the social and cultural evolution of the genus Homo. However, specialists in this field of studies have found it difficult to extend their kind of analysis into the Holocene human world. Within southwest Asia the three or four millennia of the Neolithic period at the beginning of the Holocene represents a pivotal point, which saw the transformation of human society in the emergence of the first large-scale, permanent communities, the domestication of plants and animals, and the establishment of effective farming economies. Following the Neolithic, the pace of human social, economic and cultural evolution continued to increase. By 5000 years ago, in parts of southwest Asia and northeast Africa there were very large-scale urban societies, and the first large-scale states. An extension of cultural niche construction theory enables us to extend the evolutionary narrative of the Pleistocene into the Holocene, opening the way to developing a single, long-term, evolutionary account of human history. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in how people conceptualise the legal domain for the purpose of legal knowledge systems. In this paper we discuss four such conceptualisations (referred to as ontologies): McCarty's language for legal discourse, Stamper's norma formalism, Valente's functional ontology of law, and the ontology of Van Kralingen and Visser. We present criteria for a comparison of the ontologies and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the ontologies in relation to these criteria. Moreover, we critically review the criteria.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 202-204.

The consensus among spacetime substantivalists is to respond to Leibniz's classic shift arguments, and their contemporary incarnation in the form of the hole argument, by pruning the allegedly problematic metaphysical possibilities that generate these arguments. Some substantivalists do so by directly appealing to a modal doctrine akin to anti-haecceitism. Other substantivalists do so by appealing to an underlying hyperintensional doctrine that implies some such modal doctrine. My first aim in this paper is to pose a challenge for all extant forms (...) of this consensus position. My second aim is to show what form substantivalism must take in order to uphold the consensus while addressing this challenge. The result is a novel "plenitudinous" substantivalist view, which predicts that certain modal facts about spacetime are vague or indeterminate. I then argue against this view on independent grounds, concluding that substantivalists should reject the consensus position. The paper also discusses the way forward for substantivalists in light of this conclusion. (shrink)

Burrowing mammals are ubiquitous on farms in South Africa and can hinder agricultural practices. This study explored farmer perspectives of these species, and specifically the factors that influence these perspectives. Forty-four farmers responded to a questionnaire that assessed their ecological knowledge of, tolerance towards and lethal management of burrowing mammals that occur on their farms. The results from generalised linear models showed that neither farmer age, nor level of education are accurate predictors of ecological knowledge, overall tolerance towards burrowers, or (...) their lethal management. Knowledge of burrowing mammals showed a significant relationship with tolerance, with more knowledgeable individuals displaying higher levels of tolerance. However, a farmer’s overall tolerance towards burrowing species did not affect the number of species managed. Our results also suggest that different values are attached to different species when it comes to lethal management. Thus, farmers commonly controlled the numbers of the problem rodent species, Highveld gerbil (Gerbilliscus brantsii) and Cape ground squirrel (Xerus inauris), but were less likely to manage black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) and warthog (Phacochoerus africanus), even when experiencing these as problematic. We suggest that the larger, more charismatic species possibly evoke more sympathy from farmers. Agro-ecosystems are likely to become increasingly important for conservation in the future, and we encourage continued studies on the environmental attitudes and approaches of agricultural practitioners as a means to understanding the current status and future trends in ecologically sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

Philip James Jones, a Fellow of the British Academy, was one of the most distinguished, complex, and challenging of medieval historians. His works on the Italian city-states of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and on Italy's agrarian history are monuments built to last, benchmarks that defined the field for a generation. Jones was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and was awarded the Serena Medal for Italian studies in 1988. He won a major open scholarship in Modern (...) History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Jones took a First in Modern History in 1945 and was appointed to a research studentship at Magdalen College. He had also secured a temporary teaching post at Glasgow University. All Jones's previous works flowed into the 700 pages of his mammoth book Italian City-State: from Commune to Signoria. (shrink)

Significant challenges arise for clinical care teams when a patient or surrogate decision-maker hopes a miracle will occur. This article answers the question, “How should clinical bioethicists respond when a medical decision-maker uses the hope for a miracle to orient her medical decisions?” We argue the ethicist must first understand the complexity of the miracle-invocation. To this end, we provide a taxonomy of miracle-invocations that assist the ethicist in analyzing the invocator's conceptions of God, community, and self. After the ethicist (...) appreciates how these concepts influence the invocator's worldview, she can begin responding to this hope with specific practices. We discuss these practices in detail and offer concrete recommendations for a justified response to the hope for a miracle. (shrink)

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed. The work of one of the world's greatest philosophers, it draws on Aristotle's own great knowledge of the political and constitutional affairs of the Greek cities. By examining the way societies are run - from households to city states - Aristotle establishes (...) how successful constitutions can best be initiated and upheld. For this edition Sir Ernest Barker's fine translation, which has been widely used for nearly half a century, has been extensively revised to meet the needs of the modern reader. The accessible introduction and clear notes by R F Stalley examine the historical and philosophical background of the work and discuss its significance for modern political thought. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a set of well-known objections defeat John Stuart Mill’s plural voting proposal, but do not defeat plural voting as such. I adopt the following as a working definition of political equality: a voting system is egalitarian if and only if departures from a baseline of equally weighted votes are normatively permissible. I develop an alternative proposal, called procedural plural voting, which allocates plural votes procedurally, via the free choices of the electorate, rather than according to a substantive (...) standard of competence. The alternative avoids standards objections to Mill’s proposal. Moreover, reflection on the alternative plural voting scheme disrupts our intuitions about what counts as an egalitarian voting system. Undue emphasis on Mill’s version of plural voting obscures three important reasons to reject plural voting in favor of strictly egalitarian voting systems: that certain choices that generate inequalities of political power are morally impermissible; that even... (shrink)

One day, Matthew Eaton was walking through an impromptu animal shelter display at his local pet store when suddenly an eight-month-old kitten dug his claws into Eaton’s flesh. Eaton recognized that the “eyes of this cat and the curve of his claw” compelled a response analogous to those found in the writings of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida. And not just Eaton but a whole community of theologians have found themselves in an encounter with particular places and animals that demands rich (...) theological reflection. Eaton enlisted fellow editors Harvie and Bechtel to collect the essays in this volume, in which theologians listen to horses, rats, snakes, cats, dogs, and the earth itself, who become new theological voices demanding a response. In this volume, the voice of the more-than-human world is heard as making theology possible. These essays suggest that what we say theologically represents not simply ideas of our own making subsequently superimposed onto the natural world through our own discovery, but rather flow from an expressive Earth. With additional contributions from: Kimberly Carfore Lisa E. Dahill Celia Deane-Drummond Heather Eaton Nathan Kowalsky Abigail Lofte Jame Schaefer Cristina D. Vanin Mark Wallace Grace Y. Kao Chris Carter John Berkman Laura Hobgood. (shrink)

In his book The Retreat to Commitment Professor Bartley raised an important problem: can rationalism can rationalism be held in a rational way, that is, in a way that complies with its own requirements? Or is there bound to be something irrational in the rationalist's position? Briefly, Hartley's answer was that an element of irrationalism is involved in extant versions of rationalism; however, Bartley proposed a new version of rationalism that can, he claimed, be held in a way that is (...) rational according to its own account of rationality. Bartley called this ‘Comprehensively Critical Rationalism’. (shrink)

This article examines the role that humbling plays in Socratic practice. Specifically, we consider how Socrates humbles his interlocutors in order to turn them towards the pursuit of philosophical friendship. We argue against a standard interpretation of humbling in the Lysis, which holds that Socrates humbles Lysis by exposing his own ignorance to him at 210d. Instead, we argue that the humbling occurs not when Lysis is (allegedly) made aware of his own ignorance, but at 222d near the end of (...) the dialogue, when Lysis is made to think that he is not as good a friend as he thought he was. On this reading, Socrates humbles Lysis not by exposing to him his ignorance about theoretical matters but by suggesting to him that he may be not the sort of person he thought he was. (shrink)

This paper will explore an epistemic aspect of hope, namely hope’s relationship to knowledge. It has been taken for granted that people do not hope for things to occur that they know will occur. I will be giving an argument that hope and knowledge are compatible, and I will defend that argument against one primary objection. More specifically, I will argue that there are instances when an agent knows that p and still hopes that p.

This essay looks at Norplant qua technology and uses analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history. The author contend that there were multiple uses of Norplant, in terms of rhetorical strategies, symbolic representations, and contraceptive intentions, constructed by reproductive scientists, population control advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, birth control clinic staffers, government regulators, legislators, judges, women’s health activists, potential users, and actual users. However, while relevant social groups shaped the discourse surrounding Norplant (...) in the 1990s, its ultimate fate was determined by choices made by potential users. At the ‘‘consumption junction’’ of the late twentieth-century contraceptive marketplace, American women ignored the meanings constructed for Norplant by developers, producers, providers, and policy makers and made their decisions based on what Norplant meant to them. Individuals’ decisions to choose other methods of preventing pregnancy coalesced into a collective rejection of this contraceptive technology. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that interdisciplinarity (ID) is very diverse. Our contribution is a demonstration that considerable diversity exists also on the level of understandings of ID that researchers working in the same ID field express. Specifically, we analyse qualitatively, building on the method of culture contrast, six interviews with researchers working in computational linguistics and language technology in Estonia. We identify six understandings of ID expressed by the interviewees: centred on an ID method; a disciplinary method in an ID (...) field; an ID way of seeing and thinking; ID education; ID interests; one’s field as naturally ID. We show how understandings of ID are significant for analysing research practice, since they are involved in how researchers form a positive picture of themselves and their colleagues. We also show how an awareness of different understandings of ID is useful for discussing the significance of integration in ID. (shrink)

Most of our best scientific descriptions of the world employ rates of change of some continuous quantity with respect to some other continuous quantity. For instance, in classical physics we arrive at a particle’s velocity by taking the time-derivative of its position, and we arrive at a particle’s acceleration by taking the time-derivative of its velocity. Because rates of change are defined in terms of other continuous quantities, most think that facts about some rate of change obtain in virtue of (...) facts about those other continuous quantities. For example, on this view facts about a particle’s velocity at a time obtain in virtue of facts about how that particle’s position is changing at that time. In this paper we raise a puzzle for this orthodox reductionist account of rate of change quantities and evaluate some possible replies. We don’t decisively come down in favour of one reply over the others, though we say some things to support taking our puzzle to cast doubt on the standard view that spacetime is continuous. (shrink)

Readers have much to consider when evaluating Greenblum and Hubbard’s conclusion that ‘physicians have no business doing theology’.1 The two central arguments the authors offer are fairly convincing within the confines they set for themselves, the provisos they stipulate and their notions of ‘privacy’ and ‘public reason’. However, I would ask readers to consider two questions, the answers to which I believe the authors leave opaque. First, what is theological negotiation? Second, what makes chaplains the singular group of healthcare professionals (...) responsible for theological negotiation? In this Commentary, I explore these questions not with the goal of rejecting the authors’ conclusion, but rather with the goal of highlighting relevant considerations when evaluating the authors’ central tenets. First, I would like readers to consider Greenblum and Hubbard’s descriptions of theological negotiation. They categorise theological negotiation into metaphysical, normative and alternative responses, and hold that this kind of negotiation is, for the most part, impermissible for healthcare professionals, save chaplains.1 The examples of Dr Chatterjee and Dr Thompson expand theological negotiation to include instances where physicians add a theological veneer to their clinical recommendations. In both the examples, the physician has made the case for accepting or rejecting a certain intervention—for Dr Chatterjee, accepting …. (shrink)

This paper argues that, despite appearances to the contrary, Kant and contemporary analytic metaphysicians are interested in the same kind of metaphysical dependence relation that finds application in a range of contexts and that is today commonly referred to as grounding. It also argues that comparing and contrasting Kant’s and contemporary metaphysicians’ accounts of this relation proves useful for both Kant scholarship and for contemporary metaphysics. The analyses provided by contemporary metaphysicians can be used to shed light on Kant’s understanding (...) of what a real conditioning relation is, while Kant’s perspective on the practice and goals of metaphysics sheds light on several claims and issues at home in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal commitment to reduce (...) one’s emissions. On these grounds, individuals who contribute to climate change have a prima facie moral duty to lower their personal greenhouse gas emissions. After presenting this argument and supporting each of its premises, I defend it from two major lines of objection: skepticism about integrity’s status as a virtue and concerns that the resulting moral duty would be too demanding to be morally required. I then consider the role that an appeal to integrity could play in galvanizing the American public to take personal and political action regarding climate change. (shrink)

Lei, a twenty‐seven‐year‐old Mandarin speaker, visits the United States seeking curative treatments for his acute myeloid leukemia. His mother, Hua, has traveled with him. Neither she nor Lei speak English, and the hospital does not have an onsite professional Mandarin‐speaking interpreter. Using a professional interpreter over the phone, Lei's oncologist, Dr. Branson, attempts to initiate a face‐to‐face goals‐of‐care conversation with Hua as the surrogate decision‐maker. Dr. Branson explains that Lei has “only weeks to months to live” and recommends initiating comfort‐care‐only (...) measures, but Hua says that she wants (and that Lei would want) continued aggressive measures. Hua says that her son might be a candidate for a phase I trial. Eventually, Dr. Branson brings in Dr. Chou, a Mandarin‐speaking resident to provide face‐to‐face interpretation. Hua insists that “there must be more standard therapies available” and says that she will wait until the trial begins. She begins crying, and the meeting disintegrates. Following this, Dr. Branson calls for an ethics consultation for “help in end‐of‐life communicating and reconciling discordance about prognostic information.”How should the ethicist use the institution's interpreter services? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the technologizing of most things in our daily lives, from work and education to finance and leisure, can be seen to promote a loss of the tangible and a rootlessness for human societies, causing a disorientation in the knowledge and beliefs acquired over millennia. Arendt’s proposal that ‘the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition’ (1958, p. 2) appears to be challenged as digital interactions create new spaces that coax humans away from (...) a focus on their physical world. Instantaneity and simultaneity avoid the historic conditions of humanity in relation to time and place, while the hyperreal images and simulations of the virtual either distort reality or do not depict anything with a real existence. Stiegler goes so far as to suggest that human knowledge and memory is being confiscated by technology. The acceleration of reality, as a condition of the instant, erases the beginning as much as the end, and past, present and future are diminished as contemporary becomes simply temporary. My position, while not utopian, does not seek to be irrationally dystopian and accepts that there is much in technology that advances human physical well-being and thought. It is, however, cautionary in its concern that private technology corporations, having seconded science, actively seek to increase their market and control over hyperconnectivity, thinking, knowledge and the human condition. I draw on the writings of Stiegler and Virilio in particular, both of whom acknowledge a debt to Heidegger. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the technologizing of most things in our daily lives, from work and education to finance and leisure, can be seen to promote a loss of the tangible and a rootlessness for human societies, causing a disorientation in the knowledge and beliefs acquired over millennia. Arendt’s proposal that ‘the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition’ (1958, p. 2) appears to be challenged as digital interactions create new spaces that coax humans away from (...) a focus on their physical world. Instantaneity and simultaneity avoid the historic conditions of humanity in relation to time and place, while the hyperreal images and simulations of the virtual either distort reality or do not depict anything with a real existence. Stiegler goes so far as to suggest that human knowledge and memory is being confiscated by technology. The acceleration of reality, as a condition of the instant, erases the beginning as much as the end, and past, present and future are diminished as contemporary becomes simply temporary. My position, while not utopian, does not seek to be irrationally dystopian and accepts that there is much in technology that advances human physical well-being and thought. It is, however, cautionary in its concern that private technology corporations, having seconded science, actively seek to increase their market and control over hyperconnectivity, thinking, knowledge and the human condition. I draw on the writings of Stiegler and Virilio in particular, both of whom acknowledge a debt to Heidegger. (shrink)

In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although (...) the various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology. (shrink)

This commentary aims to place Grace de Laguna’s critique of pragmatism in its historical context. It examines her 1904 response to Henry Heath Bawden, her 1909 attack on John Dewey’s immediate empiricism, and her 1910 book Dogmatism and Evolution, focusing on the following question: Why did she describe her approach as an attempt to complete the pragmatists’ Darwinian revolution in logic?

Primary objective: This study represents the first large-scale research on high school philosophy in a public education curriculum in North America. Our objective was to identify the impacts of high school philosophy, as well as the challenges of teaching it in its current format in Ontario high schools. Research design: The qualitative research design captured the perspectives of students and teachers with respect to philosophy at the high school level. All data collection was structured around central questions to provide insight (...) into the dynamics of their shared process of teaching/learning. Methods and procedures: We conducted semi-structured with interviews philosophy teachers (n = 9), classroom observations (n = 142), and student focus groups at 16 diverse high schools. Transcripts were coded according to themes. Results: Our findings reflect the complicated nature of philosophy as a discipline characterized by abstract thinking. Participants found it mind-opening, yet challenging, providing educational opportunities that are largely absent in conventional schooling. They saw multiple connections between philosophy and other subjects, but also appreciated its distinctive benefits. Teachers relied primarily on textbooks and contemporary media to deliver the curriculum. We found that a teacher’s background in philosophy may influence what is taught in philosophy courses and how, especially given the flexibility of the provincial curriculum. Conclusions: The findings suggest that philosophy is a unique, beneficial subject that teachers enjoy teaching and students greatly value, characterizing it as both difficult and rewarding. Our study revealed that considerable differences exist in how philosophy is taught and learned around the province. The flexibility of the provincial curriculum appears to be an invitation for creative and responsive teaching; however, philosophy teachers’ weak preparation can, by their own admission, be a hindrance to effective curriculum delivery. Studying philosophy enhances students’ thinking about other academic areas of study and in some cases opens them up to new ways of thinking. (shrink)

The primary objective of this two-part essay is to theorize the relationships between religious disenchantment, the autonomy of art, and the phenomenon of contingency. These connections are held to be vital for an understanding of modern aesthetics in general, and the possibility is put forth that they come to a head in the most modern of all the arts: cinema. In the first part, an account of the contemporary rift between the immanence of art and the transcendence of the divine (...) announces the end of the absolute and the beginning of the reign of contingency – a liberating yet catastrophic turning point where artists are responsible for creating meaning with the full knowledge that all meaning is a creation. In the second part, the secular autonomy of art is fully realized in the medium of film, particularly in the camera machine whose first glimpse in time and space reveals a disenchanted world or “contingency in the flesh.” The medium of the moving image and its modes of experience at the turn of the century are here understood as ontologically determined or overdetermined by the great symbolic threat against the powers of human agency – the world in its own image as opposed to the world in our image. However, at the same time this material threat against our will to power is counteracted by the desire to control the shock and indeterminacy of cinematic contingency, a desire fulfilled at the expense of acknowledging the implications of the new anti-absolute. (shrink)

We show that Weak Vopěnka’s Principle, which is the statement that the opposite category of ordinals cannot be fully embedded into the category of graphs, is equivalent to the large cardinal principle Ord is Woodin, which says that for every class [Formula: see text] there is a [Formula: see text]-strong cardinal. Weak Vopěnka’s Principle was already known to imply the existence of a proper class of measurable cardinals. We improve this lower bound to the optimal one by defining structures whose (...) nontrivial homomorphisms can be used as extenders, thereby producing elementary embeddings witnessing [Formula: see text]-strongness of some cardinal. (shrink)

This book presents an account of Hannah Arendt's performative and non-sovereign theory of freedom and political action, with special focus on action's disclosure of the unique 'who' of each agent. It aims to illuminate Arendt's critique of sovereign rule, totalitarianism, and world-alienation, her defense of a distinct political sphere for engaged citizen action and judgment, her conception of the 'right to have rights,' and her rejection of teleological philosophies of history. Arendt proposes that in modern, pluralistic, secular public spheres, no (...) one metaphysical or religious idea can authoritatively validate political actions or opinions absolutely. At the same time, she sees action and thinking as revealing an inescapable existential illusion of a divine element in human beings, a notion represented well by the 'daimon' metaphor that appears in Arendt's own work and in key works by Plato, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kant, with which she engages. While providing a post-metaphysical theory of action and judgment, Arendt performs the fact that many of the legitimating concepts of contemporary secular politics retain a residual vocabulary of transcendence. This book will be of interest not only to Arendt scholars, but also to students of identity politics, the critique of sovereignty, international political theory, political theology, and the philosophy of history.. (shrink)

_Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_ Edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2001 ISBN 0-8108-3892-3 xxviii + 360 pp.

Canada as a Neo-Europe is a relatively recent construct, although the people of its first nations, the Indians and Inuit, have been here for some twelve thousand years, since the beginning of the retreat of the last ice sheets. Western science came in a limited way with the first European explorers; Samuel de Champlain left a mariner's astrolabe behind him. The Jesuits followed with their organization and educational institutions, and from the eighteenth century science was established within European Canadian culture.

Object of this reply. A chap like myself, who struggles along with an amateur's box of logical tools, is bound to feel uneasy when his arguments are probed by the kind of logical precision-instruments which Professor Hempel manipulates so effortlessly. Yet after painstakingly working over his technical arguments, and after appealing for expert assistance on matters outside my competence,1 I have reached the surprising and agreeable conclusion that my argument stands intact and that Professor Hempel's criticisms reveal once more the (...) hopelessness of the position he defends—or rather, of the position he now defends. (shrink)