Publié en 1962, le livre de Charles N.R. McCoy, intitulé The Structure of Political Thought, demeure un travail important, encore qu’oublié, sur l’histoire de la philosophie politique. Bien que l’ouvrage ait reçu de bonnes appréciations, il n’existe pas encore d’examen critique de son traitement de la théorie politique médiévale. Dans le présent article, j’explore la structure de son argument dans les deux chapitres sur la pensée médiévale, en montrant comment McCoy centre sa discussion sur une investigation des différentes méthodes interprétatives (...) qu’emploient Thomas d’Aquin et Marsile de Padoue en lisant Aristote. Il le fait dans le dessein de déterminer comment l’enseignement aristotélicien - touchant la structure de la pensée politique - est le mieux préservé par la Révélation. (shrink)

This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often deliberately confusing juxtaposition of images and articles. The exhibition aims to represent both the sometimes incompatible (...) interests of the journal’s collaborators and the public dispute between Bataille and Breton over the aims of Surrealism. The article explores the intentions, risks, and possible effects of the exhibition in the context of Bataille’s own philosophy and his own peculiar part in the publication of Documents, which in its time was a contemporary review of diverse cultural phenomena interspersed with subversive dictionary entries. The article thus raises the question of what happens to the subversive intentions of a project like Documents in the scholarly historicist environment of public exhibition space. (shrink)

Neuroscience of art might give us traction with aesthetic issues. However it can be seen to have trouble modeling the artistically salient semantic properties of artworks. So if meaning really matters, and it does, even in aesthetic contexts, the prospects for this nascent field are dim. The issue boils down to a question of whether or not we can get a grip on the kinds of constraints present and available to guide interpretive behavior in our engagement with works of fine (...) art. I argue that biased competition models of selective attention can be used to solve this problem, generalize to the affective content of our responses to artworks, and so show that research in cognitive neuroscience is germane to the types of problems of interest within the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Heidegger affirmed traditional technology, but was opposed to science-based modern technology, in which everything (including man) is considered to be a mere “resource”. This opposition was expressed in the form of deep questioning and a suspicion of superficial evaluation, because the true nature of things was often concealed, though disclosed at times. Ways in which engineers should question technology are proposed, highlighting some of the hazards and injustices associated with technology and also its subtle sociological and psychological influences. The demands (...) of engineering ethics and the use of metaphor in design are other ways in which a narrowly rationalistic technological outlook can be confronted. (shrink)

The author argues that Thomas Hobbes anticipates a set of questions about meaning and semantic order that come to fuller expression in the 20th century, in the writings of W.V.O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Despite their different points of departure, these 20th-century writers pose a number of profound questions about the conditions for the stability of meaning, and about the conditions that govern the use of the term “language” itself. Though the more recent debate (...) benefits from a set of philosophical tools unavailable in the seventeenth century, the author further argues that Hobbes performs a number of maneuvers in his texts from which his 20th-century successors would profit. (shrink)

There are a growing number of publications arguing that if we had more wonder in social life, then its quality would be significantly improved, and that we therefore need an “ethics” or a “politics” of wonder. The aim of this paper is to show that that message is unfortunate, and this is for two reasons. First, wonder does not generally have the positive political and moral effects that are attributed to it, so to assume that it does may lead one (...) to adopt unrealistic social policies. Second, wonder does potentially have a number of negative moral and politicaleffects, so social policies that put a premium on wonder may bring adverse consequences. In this way, the paper makes a general case against wonder as a positive force in morality and politics. (shrink)

The six platinum group metals (pgms: ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum) posed a number of problems for 19th-century chemists, including Mendeleev, for their Periodic classification. This account discusses the discovery of the pgms, the determination of their atomic weights and their classification.

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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.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.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This paper describes how some aspects of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy resonate strongly with an engineering outlook. He argued that practice was more “primordial” than theory, though preserving an important role for theoretical understanding as well, thus speaking to the gap between engineering education (highly theoretical) and engineering practice (mostly empirical). He also underlined the reality of “average” practices into which we are socialized, though affirming the potential for original work and action too, thus providing the grounds for self-actualization whether within (...) the routine or in transcending it. His notion of “thrownness” emphasizes the importance of context, with which engineers are constantly engaged. While all this relates to the idea of our “being”, Heidegger also dealt with the influence of time on our practices. Future death could be seen as spurring innovation, cultural history as a source for critiquing current practice and the present “situation” as the immediate context for corrective action. His major book is appropriately called “Being and Time”.1. (shrink)

Each Girard quantale (i.e., commutative quantale with a selected dualizing element) provides a support for a semantics for linear propositional formulas (but not for linear derivations). Several constructions of Girard quantales are known. We give two more constructions, one using an arbitrary partially ordered monoid and one using a partially ordered group (both commutative). In both cases the semantics can be controlled be a relation between pairs of elements of the support and formulas. This gives us a neat way of (...) handling duality. (shrink)

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, the legal (...) system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices. (shrink)

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of (...) state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system. (shrink)