Este ensayo plantea una cuestión filosófica perseguida como investigación histórica que desemboca en una explicación sociológica en torno a la medición de la ciencia. Medir, etimológicamente relacionado con una praecisio adquiere su sentido más profundo en una era postontológica para describir las implicaciones culturales de un mundo privado de metafísica. Basado en un relato sucinto del surgimiento del pensamiento bibliométrico enmarcado por el debate historiográfico de principios del siglo XX entre historiadores seriales e historiadores del evento, este ensayo une tanto (...) el significado postontológico como la evidencia histórica en un análisis sociológico de la ciencia y políticas tecnológicas en la Colombia del cambio de siglo que conlleva una transformaciónradical de la universidad como institución social, del estatus del conocimiento en la sociedad contemporánea y de la identidad de nosotros los académicos que habitamos ese espacio. (shrink)

RESUMO Busco traçar uma articulação teórica em torno de duas obras póstumas de Mikhail Bakhtin e Yuri Lotman, expoentes chave para pensar a cultura sob uma perspectiva semiótica. Nessas produções tardias, os dois pensadores expõem um interesse compartilhado em refletir como o medo se materializa, podendo-se ler em textos concretos que buscam explicar os fenômenos que estão ocorrendo no horizonte cultural. Nesse sentido, Lotman e Bakhtin estão focados em investigar a aparência regular de um conjunto de princípios e motivos (...) que seriam sistematicamente atualizados na relação entre laços sociais e medo. Meu objetivo vai além do descritivo para delinear aparatos críticos sobre o medo na perspectiva semiótica, à luz da interpretação desses artigos que mantêm o poder heurístico e fornecem um instrumento para iniciar uma reflexão sobre esse modo cultural de sentimento.ABSTRACT I seek to draw a theoretical articulation around two posthumous works by Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, key exponents to think about culture from a semiotic perspective. In these late productions, both thinkers expose a shared interest in reflecting how fear materializes, being able to be read in concrete texts that seek to account for the phenomena that are occurring on the cultural horizon. In this sense, Lotman and Bakhtin focus on investigating the regular appearance of a set of principles and motives that would be systematically updated in the relationship between social ties and fear. My purpose is not only to describe, but also to outline a critical apparatus about fear from a semiotic perspective, in light of the interpretation of these articles that keep heuristic power and provide an instrument to initiate a reflection on this cultural mode of feeling.RESUMEN Busco trazar una articulación teórica en torno a dos trabajos póstumos de Mikhail Bakhtin y Yuri Lotman, exponentes clave para pensar la cultura desde una perspectiva semiótica. En estas producciones tardías, ambos pensadores exponen un interés compartido por reflexionar de qué manera el miedo se materializa, pudiendo leerse en textos concretos que buscan dar cuenta de los fenómenos que van produciéndose en el horizonte cultural. En tal sentido, Lotman y Bakhtin se abocan a indagar sobre la aparición regular de un conjunto de principios y motivos que se actualizarían, sistemáticamente, en la relación entre lazo social y miedo. Mi propósito irá más allá de lo descriptivo para esbozar aparato crítico sobre el miedo en perspectiva semiótica, a la luz de la interpretación de estos artículos que guardan potencia heurística y proveen de un instrumental para iniciar una reflexión sobre este modo cultural del sentir. (shrink)

Open-mindedness is an under-explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open-minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open-minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open-mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness to entertain novel (...) ideas in one's cognitive space and to accord them serious consideration. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a general representation theory for MV-algebras. We furnish the appropriate categorical background to study this problem. Our guide line is the theory of classifying topoi of coherent extensions of universal algebra theories. Our main result corresponds, in the case of MV-algebras and MV-chains, to the representation of commutative rings with unit as rings of global sections of sheaves of local rings. We prove that any MV-algebra is isomorphic to the MV-algebra of all global sections of (...) a sheaf of MV-chains on a compact topological space. This result is intimately related to McNaughton’s theorem, and we explain why our representation theorem can be viewed as a vast generalization of McNaughton’s theorem. In spite of the language used in this abstract, we have written this paper in the hope that it can be read by experts in MV-algebras but not in sheaf theory, and conversely. (shrink)

Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence in the context of social structure. While much (...) has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

Although there has been a great deal said about Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, little attention has been specifically paid to future-consciousness. This article gives an Husserlian account of future-consciousness. It begins by arguing that protention should be understood as a future-directed version of retention and so that future-consciousness should be understood as perception. This account is developed in two ways: the future need not be determinately given in protention and so future-consciousness can be vague; cases when the future turns out (...) to be other than we perceived it to be can be understood as temporal illusions. This account of future-consciousness both illuminates some of Husserl’s more obscure remarks on time-consciousness and provides a means of understanding an often neglected phenomenon of independent philosophical interest: our awareness of the future. (shrink)

Economists have always recognised that human endeavours are constrained by our limited and uncertain knowledge, but only recently has an accepted theory of uncertainty and information evolved. This theory has turned out to have surprisingly practical applications: for example in analysing stock market returns, in evaluating accident prevention measures, and in assessing patent and copyright laws. This book presents these intellectual advances in readable form for the first time. It unifies many important but partial results into a satisfying single picture, (...) making it clear how the economics of uncertainty and information generalises and extends standard economic analysis. Part One of the volume covers the economics of uncertainty: how each person adapts to a given fixed state of knowledge by making an optimal choice among the immediate 'terminal' actions available. These choices in turn determine the overall market equilibrium reflecting the social distribution of risk bearing. In Part Two, covering the economics of information, the state of knowledge is no longer held fixed. Instead, individuals can to a greater or lesser extent overcome their ignorance by 'informational' actions. The text also addresses at appropriate points many specific topics such as insurance, the Capital Asset Pricing model, auctions, deterrence of entry, and research and invention. (shrink)

In a series of joint papers, Teppo Felin and Nicolai J. Foss recently launched a microfoundations project in the field of strategic management. Felin and Foss observe that extant explanations in strategic management are predominantly collectivist or macro. Routines and organizational capabilities, which are supposed to be properties of firms, loom large in the field of strategic management. Routines figure as explanantia in explanations of firm behavior and firm performance, for example. Felin and Foss plead for a replacement of such (...) macro-explanations by micro-explanations. Such a replacement is needed, Felin and Foss argue, because macro-explanations are necessarily incomplete: they miss out on crucial links in the causal chain that connect macro phenomena with each other. I argue that this argument is flawed. It is based on a doubtful if not outright incorrect understanding and use of Coleman’s diagram. In a sense to be explained below, only if Coleman’s diagram is squared it can accurately account for the relations between individual action and interaction, routines and firm behavior and firm performance. Once Coleman’s diagram is squared, one can see why and how macro-explanations need not miss out on any link in the causal chains that connect macro phenomena. Micro-analyses are still needed, not to highlight and specify causal links that macro-explanations miss out on, but to check whether the many properties that are ascribed to routines in macro-explanations of firm behavior are warranted. (shrink)

The process of dehumanization, or thinking of others as less than human, is a phenomenon with significant societal implications. According to Haslam's model, two concepts of humanness derive from comparing humans with either animals or machines: individuals may be dehumanized by likening them to either animals or machines, or humanized by emphasizing differences from animals or machines. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience emphasizes understanding cognitive processes in terms of interactions between distributed cortical networks. It has been found that reasoning about (...) internal mental states is associated with activation of the default mode network and deactivation of the task positive network ; whereas reasoning about mechanical processes produces the opposite pattern. We conducted two neuroimaging studies. The first examined the neural bases of dehumanization and its relation to these two brain networks, using images and voice-over social narratives which either implicitly contrasted or implicitly likened humans to either animals or machines. The second study addressed a discrepancy between findings from the first study and prior work on the neural correlates of dehumanization: using a design similar to prior work we examined neural responses to pictures of humans, animals and machines, presented without any social context. In both studies, human and humanizing conditions were associated with relatively high activity in the DMN and relatively low activity in the TPN. However, the non-human and dehumanizing conditions deviated in different ways: they demonstrated more marked changes either in the DMN or in the TPN. Notably, differences between the animal dehumanizing and humanizing conditions were most evident in regions associated with mechanistic reasoning, not in the mentalizing network. Conjunction analysis of contrasts from both paradigms revealed that only one region was consistently more active when participants saw human, a medial parietal region regarded as the central hub of the DMN. These findings provide a neural basis for Haslam's distinction between two types of dehumanization, and suggest that the DMN and TPN play opposing roles in creating a sense of moral concern. (shrink)

This paper provides a reply to articles by Nicola Angius and Guiseppe Primiero responding to our paper “Software Intensive Science”.

What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what would be an appropriate response? We argue that every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behavior is goal directed; responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; and describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountable. We conclude that interaction does not involve a ‘binning’ procedure in which the (...) stream of conduct is sorted into discrete action types. Our argument is grounded in data from recordings of talk-in-interaction. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the (...) same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands. (shrink)

This essay, and the special issue it introduces, sets out to reignite ethical interrogations of the theory and practice of Human Resource Management (HRM). To cultivate greater levels of boundary-spanning debate about the ethics of HRM, we develop a framework of four tenors for scholarly work: the ethical-declarative, the ethical-subjunctive, the ethical-ethnographic, the ethical-systemic. Each of these tenors denotes particular grounds for ethical critique and encourages scholars to consider the subjects and objects of their enquiry, the disciplinary scope of their (...) work and the limits to subsequent claims about ethics and HRM. We provisionally locate each of the papers comprising the special issue with regard to one, or more, of these tenors. (shrink)

In this thought-provoking study, Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of Adam Smith, a pioneer of modern economic theory and a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. While offering an interpretive methodology for approaching Smith’s two major works, _The Theory of Moral Sentiments _and _The Wealth of Nations_, Weinstein argues against the libertarian interpretation of Smith, emphasizing his philosophies of education and rationality. Weinstein also demonstrates that Smith should be recognized for (...) a prescient theory of pluralism that prefigures current theories of cultural diversity. (shrink)

The study of highly imagistic representations of Spinoza's philosophy found in popular, extra‐academic literature is essential for building a rational view on Spinoza's philosophy. Popular literature on Spinoza is an ineliminable condition of academic literature on Spinoza. The cementing of Spinoza's popularity belongs to a larger history of Spinoza's reception. This chapter examines two late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century works on Spinoza. Jules Prat's idiosyncratic blend of Spinozism and left‐wing French Republicanism stands out as a historically and philosophically rich approach to (...) Spinoza that has hardly been studied thus far. The chapter also examines the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. One common feature to Singer and Malamud is the way that they root their Spinozists in a Jewish world. In this, they are forerunners of the ongoing popular preoccupation with Spinoza's own relation to Judaism. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the purpose of public philosophy, challenging the claim that its goal is to create better citizens. I define public philosophy narrowly as the act of professional philosophers engaging with nonprofessionals, in a non-academic setting, with the specific aim of exploring issues philosophically. The paper is divided into three sections. The first contrasts professional and public philosophy with special attention to the assessment mechanism in each. The second examines the relationship between public philosophy and citizenship, calling (...) into question the effect public philosophy has on political reasoning. The third focuses on the practice of public philosophy, describing actual events to investigate the nature and limits of their outcomes. I conclude that public philosophy aims at future philosophical inquiry but is best considered a form of entertainment. (shrink)

The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and disciplinarity—the idea that there is a center or “core” of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or a shared historical “object” of theory and practice—is suggested in (...) the concepts and methods of some schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question. Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and decision making.Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no unified discipline exists. The “discipline” of economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought we discuss here as “economic” may have some regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought shares more concepts, approaches, and methods—may have more discursive regularity—with Marxian literary theory than do Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory. Jack Amariglio is associate professor of economics at Merrimack College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff are professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. (shrink)

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body, but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world today as an absent totality (...) represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory. (shrink)

Despite its consistently mild tone, Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy is a provocative and uncompromising work. It is to be admired for this. Without “chickening out” (94), Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. Furthermore, he argues that the vast majority of us working in this so-called tradition actually know this at some level but shy away from this uncomfortable conclusion. This (...) second claim might seem to be readily falsifiable, but Glendinning’s suggestion that we can’t face up to this absence of a unified tradition guards against this. In fact, many of his central arguments rely upon a highly perceptive deconstructive and psychoanalytic understanding of the ‘divide’ between analytic and continental philosophy, which is not surprising given his previous important work on Derrida in Arguing With Derrida (Blackwell 2001) and On Being With Others (Routledge 1998). In what follows, however, I’ll raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other, much as the foreign policy of successive US administrations has projected an internal threat upon others through rhetoric like the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘rogue states’. I will also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’. (shrink)

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm production, which involve extensive cooperation in the production process. Changes in power relations affect patterns of production;the authors suggest that they also (...) have knock-on consequences for trust and cooperation among actors. (shrink)

At the core of pragmatism is the idea of an active projection of experience into the future. William James’s contribution to pragmatism included an emphasis on emotions in the apprehension of possible futures and related processes. After presenting a summary of Jamesian pragmatism, and especially the significance of emotions in it, the article notes the reception of James’s writings in Europe and their influence on European intellectual developments. Max Weber, for instance, studied James closely. He treated James’s approach to religion (...) as a negative example. While Emile Durkheim rejected the individualist approach of James, he nevertheless found much of value in James’s conceptualization of religious experience, including its emotional underpinnings. Discussion below explores the neglected Jamesian quality of Durkheim’s account of religion. It is noted in conclusion that the more recent sociological neglect of James and the failure to appreciate his particular approach in pragmatism, coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Si bien la crítica antihumanista de la categoría de lo humano tenía un objetivo eminentemente emancipador, ha desembocado en los últimos años en una paradoja vinculada a la defensa del carácter construido y, por tanto, descualificado de lo humano. Para responder a esta paradoja, varios filósofos ubicados en el espacio teórico del antihumanismo se han visto forzados a repensar, y en cierto modo a recuperar, lo humano. Judith Butler ofrece uno de los tratamientos más sofisticados de esta cuestión en la (...) medida en que propone, según nuestra hipótesis, no un nuevo concepto de lo humano o un nuevo humanismo, sino distintas figuras de lo humano articuladas en torno a dos vértebras fundamentales: la impropiedad y la precariedad. Al explorar la tensión que modula la relación entre estas dos vértebras, sostenemos que Butler estaría sentando las bases para una antropología política crítica, antihumanista y no antropocéntrica. (shrink)

RESUMEN Si bien la crítica antihumanista de la categoría de lo humano tenía un objetivo eminentemente emancipador, ha desembocado en los últimos años en una paradoja vinculada a la defensa del carácter construido y, por tanto, descualificado de lo humano. Para responder a esta paradoja, varios filósofos ubicados en el espacio teórico del antihumanismo se han visto forzados a repensar, y en cierto modo a recuperar, lo humano. Judith Butler ofrece uno de los tratamientos más sofisticados de esta cuestión en (...) la medida en que propone, según nuestra hipótesis, no un nuevo concepto de lo humano o un nuevo humanismo, sino distintas figuras de lo humano articuladas en torno a dos vértebras fundamentales: la impropiedad y la precariedad. Al explorar la tensión que modula la relación entre estas dos vértebras, sostenemos que Butler estaría sentando las bases para una antropología política crítica, antihumanista y no antropocéntrica. ABSTRACT While the antihumanist critique of the concept "the human" initially had a fundamentally emancipatory aim, a particular paradox -related to the thesis of the constructed and ultimately disqualified character of the human- eventually grew from it. To deal with this, subsequent thinkers working within and from this position have, therefore, re-thought and, to a certain extent, recuperated the notion of "the human." We argue that Judith Butler offers one of the most sophisticated treatments of this issue by proposing not a new concept of the human or a new humanism, but different figures of the human articulated around two axes: inconsistency and pre-cariousness. The argument defended is that, by exploring the tension that modulates the relation between these two axes, Butler establishes the parameters for a critical, political antihumanist and non-anthropocentric anthropology. (shrink)

I am skeptical of our ability to predict, or even forecast, the future—of human rights or any other important social practice. Nonetheless, an understanding of the paths that have brought us to where we are today can facilitate thinking about the future. Thus, I approach the topic by examining the reshaping of international ideas and practices of state sovereignty and human rights since the end of World War II. I argue that in the initial decades after the war, international society (...) constructed an absolutist conception of exclusive territorial jurisdiction that was fundamentally antagonistic to international human rights. At the same time, though, human rights were for the first time included among the fundamental norms of international society. And over the past two decades, dominant understandings of sovereignty have become less absolutist and more human rights–friendly, a trend that I suggest is likely to continue to develop, modestly, in the coming years. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work is commonly associated with the philosophical movement called existentialism and its intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite the same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death, anguished responsibility, and conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became both famous and notorious in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps because of this, he did not initially receive the same amount of attention as his French contemporaries (...) and friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. These days though, his phenomenological analyses are arguably being given more attention than either, in both France and in the Anglo-American context, because they retain an ongoing relevance in fields as diverse as cognitive science, medical ethics, ecology, sociology and psychology. Although it is difficult to summarize Merleau-Ponty’s work into neat propositions, we can say that he sought to develop a radical re-description of embodied experience (with a primacy given to studies of perception), and argued that these phenomena could not be suitably understood b y the philosophical tradition because of its tendency to drift between two flawed and equally unsatisfactory alternatives: empiricism and, what he called, intellectualism. This article will seek to explain his understanding of perception, bodily movement, habit, ambiguity, and relations with others, as they were expressed in his key early work, Phenomenology of Perception, before exploring the enigmatic ontology of the chiasm and the flesh that is so evocatively described in his unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)

In Arnauld’s view, a fruitful clarification of the nature of knowledge is possible if only one pays close attention to “ce qui se passe en nous,” in such a fashion “de n’y rien mêler dont nous ne soyons certains.” In support of his position, he cites not only Descartes’ testimony but also that of St. Augustine. Consequently, he treats—first of all—of the things that any one can know about his own soul upon consulting with himself with a little attention, and (...) by so doing Arnauld shows once again his faithfulness to the spirit of Cartesianism. Yet he does more, for he is among the first thinkers fully to appreciate the value of a truly descriptive method in philosophy. (shrink)

In the present study of Descartes’ epistemological investigations, I have tried to show that his renowned principle of clarity and distinctness is not, in fact, one but two axioms. Most interpreters and critics have taken the two formulations of such a principle here considered as successive moments of it. At best, this position is insufficient, for each “version” of the principle of clarity and distinctness guarantees different kinds of cognitive content. Moreover, while the validity of one “version” is not dependent (...) on the thesis of God’s veracity, no such thing can be asserted of the validity of the other. These two formulations of the principle of clarity and distinctness are: 1. Whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is true; 2. whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly as belonging to the nature of something can indeed be predicated of the thing in question. The fust formula corresponds to what I have characterized as “presentative” knowledge; the second one expresses the guarantee of “representative” knowledge. This distinction is all-important for solving the question of whether Descartes’ proofs of God’s existence and veracity---both the a priori and the a posteriori proofs that we find in the Cartesian corpus-are circular. On the basis of such a distinction, it is possible to argue that at least the ontological argument---and possibly as well the proof “par les effets”---is not at all dependent on the principle of clarity and distinctness, which in turn draws its ultimate validity from God’s faithfulness. In other words, as suggested above, only the second “version” needs to be guaranteed by God’s veracity. On the other hand, the first “version” has no normative value, for it merely describes what is the case whenever a clear and distinct cognition occurs. An example of this is our knowledge of God as the most perfect being. (shrink)

This is the on-going publication of Karl Schmitt diaries entitled.

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Keisha Ray and Jane Fallis Cooper argue that one aspect of environmental health h...