Changing concepts comes with a risk of creating merely verbal disputes. Accounts of topic continuity (such as Herman Cappelen’s) are supposed to solve this problem. As this paper shows, however, no existing solution avoids the danger of mere verbalness. On the contrary, accounts of topic continuity in fact increase the danger of overlooking merely verbal disputes between pre- and post-ameliorators. Ultimately, this paper suggests accepting the danger of mere verbalness resulting from a change in topic as a downside of conceptual (...) engineering. Changing the topic under discussion may be worth the risk, however, in many cases. In fact, this paper proposes that the main goal of conceptual engineering should be seen as changing topics for the better. (shrink)

Autorki, wspierając się metodologią semiotyki, geopoetyki i komparatystyki, analizują toruńską „fikcję topograficzną” w lokalnych trylogiach kryminalnych Piotra Głuchowskiego, Roberta Małeckiego i Marcela Woźniaka, traktowanych w artykule jako element projektu literackiego pod hasłem „mordercze miasta”. W omawianych powieściach przeważają fabuły oparte na modelu śledztwa dziennikarskiego i dominuje styl dziennikarski. Badaczki wskazują, że toruńskie kryminały bazują na „pakcie topograficznym”, któremu towarzyszy „słaby” pakt autobiograficzny; zwracają też uwagę na zabiegi Małeckiego i Woźniaka podsycające poczytność ich utworów, m.in. gry intertekstualne i aluzje, co znajduje (...) odzwierciedlenie w „geopoetyce odbioru” i buduje topograficznie zaangażowaną wspólnotę interpretacyjną. Podkreślają jednak rolę nieco zapomnianej trylogii Głuchowskiego (zwłaszcza pierwszej powieści) w kreowaniu „morderczego Torunia”. Według autorek fikcja Głuchowskiego jest nie tylko najbardziej oryginalna, ale też najbardziej aktualna. Artykuł dowodzi, że kryminalne trylogie miejskie, kreujące narracyjną tożsamość Torunia, zdążyły już wytworzyć odrębną przestrzeń na literackiej mapie polskich „kryminalnych miast”. (shrink)

On a naive view of conceptual engineering, conceptual engineers simply aim at engineering concepts. This picture has recently come under attack. Sarah Sawyer (2018, 2020) and Derek Ball (2020) present two rather different, yet equally unorthodox, accounts of conceptual engineering, which they take to be superior to the naive picture. This paper casts doubts on the superiority of their respective accounts. By elaborating on the explanatory potential of “going meta”, the paper defends the naive view against Sawyer’s and Ball’s rival (...) proposals. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

Verbal disputes are often seen as closely related to a lack of substantivity. However, a systematic and comprehensive investigation of how verbalness relates to substantivity is still missing. The present paper attempts to close this gap. In addition to offering different conceptions of verbalness, the paper further develops Sider’s (Writing the Book of the World, OUP, Oxford, 2011) notion of substantivity. Ultimately, I argue for a more careful choice of terminology when it comes to assessing a dispute as “(merely) verbal” (...) or “nonsubstantive”. While the paper shows that there is no strict logical relation between mere verbalness and nonsubstantivity construed along the lines set out by Sider, it also demonstrates that further notable notions of (mere) verbalness and substantivity are in fact closely intertwined. (shrink)

The article highlights the practical realization of synergies, to improve social infrastructure in rural areas. The paper analyzes trends and positive consequences of the involvement of community organizations to improve rural infrastructure component elements. The research emphasizes that the financial and labor cooperation and the bulk of local authorities is the positive step towards improving social infrastructure in rural areas under the shortage of budgetary funds.

SummaryThe establishment of the discipline of architectural acoustics is generally attributed to the physicist Wallace Clement Sabine, who developed the formula for reverberation time around 1900, and with it the possibility of making calculated prognoses about the acoustic potential of a particular design. If, however, we shift the perspective from the history of this discipline to the history of architectural knowledge and praxis, it becomes apparent that the topos of ‘good sound’ had already entered the discourse much earlier. This paper (...) traces the Europe-wide discussion on theatre architecture between 1750 and 1830. It will be shown that the period of investigation is marked by an increasing interest in auditorium acoustics, one linked to the emergence of a bourgeois theatre culture and the growing socio-political importance of the spoken word. In the wake of this development the search among architects for new methods of acoustic research started to differ fundamentally from an analogical reasoning on the nature of sound propagation and reflection, which in part dated back to antiquity. Through their attempts to find new ways of visualising the behaviour of sound in enclosed spaces and to rethink both the materiality and the mediality of theatre auditoria, architects helped pave the way for the establishment of architectural acoustics as an academic discipline around 1900. (shrink)

It is a startling fact that, despite its long and rich history, the debate about per- sonal identity is far from settled. The present paper examines two deflationary explanations for this: a) the dispute is merely verbal (verbalism); b) there cannot be sufficient justification for preferring one theory of personal identity over the others (epistemicism). As this paper argues, there is evidence that either verba- lism or epistemicism provides a correct account of the personal identity debate.

The article is devoted to transformations and the crisis of values in a global world. The genealogy of values is traced as a way of existence and justification of normativity characteristic of modernity. In this context, value is compared with cost. Both the first and second are reductions inherent in the modern way of human existence. Value personifies the reduction of the complex, heterogeneous, qualitatively diverse world of external goods of pre-industrial society to a single denominator of abstract labor. Same, (...) the complexly structured and heterogeneous reality of due acquired the appearance of a single space of values. In this context, the theoretical limitations of the pan-production view of human historical development are analyzed. The current war, which in its impact on humanity has acquired a de facto global character, is considered as a defining symptom of the crisis of values in global reality. War as a feature of the modern world is significant not in itself, but as an expression of the growing role of violence in the life of global civilization. In turn, the increase in violence and coercion is a manifestation of an even deeper process — the depreciation of values. The depreciation of values does not mean the destruction of certain specific values, but in general the role of the due in human life. In this regard, a key question arises about the prospects for overcoming the process of depreciation of values. By analogy with the three recognized paradigms of philosophizing (being, consciousness/subject, language), three historical paradigms of normativity are distinguished: transpersonal indisputable prescriptions (“commandments”); mediated by personal reflection and recognition of binding significance (values); abstinences — negative normative presumptions aimed at ensuring peaceful productive interaction with guaranteed autonomy of participants in interactions. The development of the normative practice of such abstinences may be with a possible scenario for overcoming the depreciation of values in the global world. (shrink)

Das Problem der Sterblichkeit und Unsterblichkeit gehört untrennbar zum Nachdenken des Menschen über sich und seine Stellung in der Welt. Auch für das antike Denken stellt diese Thematik ein anthropologisches Prisma dar. Es verbindet Fragen der praktischen und theoretischen Philosophie in existentiell relevanter Weise. Disziplinübergreifend beleuchtet der vorliegende Band wirkmächtige Positionen des frühgriechischen Denkens und erkundet dabei die Dimensionen menschlicher Begrenztheit.

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

In the article of Viktoria Zaporozhets «Main aspects of external church relations of UAOC in the 90’s. XX century» from the religious-scientific point of view is carried out a comprehensive analysis of the institutionalization of the UAOC in the 90's of the twentieth century in the context of her external-church relation. It is noted that inter-church relations of the UAOC during the specified period of her existence can be characterized as two-vector. It is emphasized that the first vector is (...) due to the processes of interaction between the UAOC and the UOC-KP and the UOC that took place at the canonical councils / sessions of commissions, and the second vector is related to the fact that the UAOC tried to gain the canonical status of the Ecumenical Patriarch through the diocese of Canada and the United States. At the same time it is noted that although there were diplomatic inter-Orthodox relations of the UAOC, nevertheless there were temple seizures from each other. It is proved that the church-state relations of the UAOC in this period can be characterized as stable, since it was granted the right to perform services and own property, to open Sunday schools, to freely serve services in the Ukrainian language, although sometimes it was possible to find a negative attitude to this religious organization from the side of power. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers (...) who are speaking different languages. The objection generalises to metalinguistic approaches to e.g. moral disagreements. This paper discusses the Babel objection and shows how to dispel it. (shrink)

The article considers the leading and indisputable role of discursive practices in the existence of social institutions, especially in democratic governance. The necessity of searching for heuristi- cally effective approaches in the analysis of social reality in general, and especially modern soci- ality, is substantiated. In this context, the theoretical modernization of the institutional approach in the analysis of social phenomena by involving the concept of discourse in the structure of this approach is proposed. Emphasis is placed on the dual (...) meaning of social institutions — as ways of organizing the life of society and as instances (mediums) of normative, through which the order of social life is constituted, reproduced, and changed. This solves the “rule-organization” dilem- ma in neo-institutionalism. It is transferred to the mode of two inseparable and complementary functions of the institute — normative and regulative. The analysis of those semantic, organiza- tional, and procedural loadings which carry out discursive practices inactivity of institutes of society is given. In particular, emphasis is placed on the complex structure of normativity em- bodied by the public institution. It should at least highlight the explicit normativity of the system of rules and regulations on the one hand, and the order of discourse created and maintained by this institution, on the other. Discourse corresponds to the normativity in its usability — as a real process of normalization of life. Normativity exists only by generating certain practices of speech, communication, and argumentation (conclusion). This becomes the basis for distin- guishing the concept of an institution as a discursive mode of existence of a social institution on the one hand, and as a way of organizing discourse in society (order of discourse) — on the other. Among the main social effects of institutions are the generation of trust as the basis of social relations and the longevity of cultural experience. Emphasis is placed on the complexity of the existence and activities of institutions: each institution is involved in the general discursive-com- municative field of society, and in turn, influences it. (shrink)

In the article by analysed the specifics of the religious studies of the functioning of the UAOC in the post-Soviet period. It turns out that the study of this religious organization should be carried out by involving both religious studies, methods and principles, as well as sociological, political science. According to the author, such a position will allow us to comprehensively disclose the studied issues.

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...) here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

Robert Wolfe writes about the nature of the ajata teachings, or the nature of emptiness and absolute reality.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

A unique and interdisciplinary collection in which scholars from Philosophy join those from Film Studies, English, and Comparative Literature to explore the nature and limits of love through in-depth reflection on particular works of literature and film.

Examining the ways and extent to which systemic factors affect health outcomes with regard to quality, affordability and access to curative healthcare, this explorative book compares the relative merits of tax-funded Beveridge systems and insurance-based Bismarck systems. The Law and Policy of Healthcare Financing charts and compares healthcare system outcomes throughout 11 countries, from the UK to Colombia. Thematic chapters investigate the economic and legal explanations for the relevant similarities, variations and trends across the globe. Concluding that systemic factors may (...) be less significant than previously believed, this comprehensive book notes that no one system consistently outperforms the others, yet incentives and funding improvements may lift performances across all curative healthcare systems. Analytical and comparative, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of health law and health economics. Public authorities including health ministries, policymakers and international health organisations will also find this to be an invaluable resource. (shrink)

A chapter on the specifically 'medical' Epicureanism of La Mettrie, connecting his materialist approach to mind-body issues and his hedonistic ethics.

Abstract (German version follows): -/- This paper develops a new proposal for a coherentist business ethic in which ethically justified and empirically supported proposed solutions to economic problems are developed through a coherentist process of adjustments between the three levels of (1) conception of problem and its solution, (2) positive economic theory, and (3) ethical theories. Using an example, it illustrates how in this framework, Homann's business ethics gains in validity and relevance but loses its claim to universality. // -/- (...) Diese Arbeit entwickelt eine kohärentistische Wirtschaftsethik, in der ethisch begründete und empirisch gestützte Lösungsvorschläge für ökonomische Probleme durch einen kohärentistischen Anpassungsprozess zwischen den drei Ebenen (1) Auffassung von Problem und Lösungsansatz, (2) positive ökonomische Theorie, sowie (3) ethischen Theorien erarbeitet werden. Anhand eines Beispiels wird illustriert, wie Homanns Wirtschaftsethik in diesem Rahmen an Validität und Relevanz gewinnt, jedoch ihren Universalitätsanspruch verliert. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the (...) discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore striking that the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution conspicuously avoid any consideration of what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe (I discuss this in Wolfe 2011, 2019 chapt. 1). Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this chapter I seek to establish how something we might call ‘the knowledge of Life’, to use an expression of Georges Canguilhem’s, emerged as part of early modernity without being part of the mainstream history of life science. This leads to the question, can one can correlate early modern “knowledge of life” with the emergence of a science called ‘biology’? (see Zammito 2018, Wolfe 2019, Bognon-Küss and Wolfe eds. 2019). It was once fashionable to speak of, e.g. ‘precursors of Darwin’, and then Canguilhem and Foucault famously did away with the category of precursor. But how then do we account for the phase that precedes the constitution of a science? With the case of biology, how do we account for the increasing fascination with the ontology of Life during the decades prior to the ‘naming of biology’, as McLaughlin has called it, at the end of the eighteenth century? This increased focus on Life and the ontology of Life sits awkwardly, both with mainstream narratives of the Scientific Revolution and of the history of biology. In seeking to address this increased focus (in which vitalism plays a role but was by no means the only conceptual actor: Wolfe 2020), I critically examine Foucault’s notorious claim (Foucault 1966) that there was no such thing as ‘Life’ in the eighteenth century and thus no such thing as biology. (shrink)

Die Analyse von Klangphänomenen und ihrer (inter)kulturellen Funktion ist inzwischen zu einem wichtigen Forschungsfeld avanciert. Grundlage der Aufsätze dieses Bandes ist eine anthropologische Perspektive, die darauf abzielt, auch den naturwissenschaftlich-empirischen Diskurs produktiv einzubeziehen. Die Beiträge gehen dem Verhältnis von Klang und Kognition, Kulturtheorie, Literaturästhetik, Medialität, Kunstpraxis sowie Transzendenz nach.

This illuminating introduction to Nietzsche's thought is the substance of a course of three lectures delivered by Wolf at the University of London, University College in February 1915. This study provides a comprehensive and helpful summary of the key elements in Nietzshe's writings.

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)