This article argues for an unconventional interpretation of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s distinctive approach to method in the history of ideas. It is maintained that the value of the central concept of the ‘unit-idea’ has been misunderstood by friends and foes alike. The commonality of unit-ideas at different times and places is often defined in terms of familial resemblance. But such an approach must necessarily define unit-ideas as being something other than the smallest conceptual (...) class='Hi'>unit. It is therefore in tension with Lovejoy’s methodological prescription and, more importantly, disregards a potentially important aspect of intellectual history – the smaller conceptual units themselves. In response to this, an alternative interpretation of unit-ideas as ‘elemental’ – as the smallest identifiable conceptual components – is put forward. Unlike the familial resemblance approach, the elemental approach can provide a plausible explanation for changes in ideas. These are construed as being either the creation of new unit-ideas, the disappearance of existing ones, or alterations in the groups of unit-ideas that compose idea-complexes. The focus on the movement of unit-ideas and idea-complexes through history can also be sensitive to contextual issues, carefully distinguishing the different meanings that single words may have, in much the way that both Lovejoy and his influential critic Quentin Skinner suggest. (shrink)

Collects four years' worth of editorials Richard Kyte has written for the La Crosse Tribune on the topic of the ethical life.

Nolan reviews three works describing the influence of ethics on modern international relations, namely Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States ; The Age of Rights ; and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs.

The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing theories predict. By maintaining the salience of reform goals, elaborating new analytic frameworks, and deploying (...) specialized expertise in post-enactment debates, smaller organizations have contributed to a diffuse but often decisive network of pro-reform actors. Through the rule-writing process for macroprudential supervision and derivatives trading, these small organizations coalesced with other groups to form a new stability alliance that has so far prevented industry groups from dominating financial regulation to the degree that occurred in earlier cases of regulatory reform. (shrink)

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)

An idea is not a replicator because it does not consist of coded self-assembly instructions. It may retain structure as it passes from one individual to another, but does not replicate it. The cultural replicator is not an idea but an associatively-structured network of them that together form an internal model of the world, or worldview. A worldview is a primitive, uncoded replicator, like the autocatalytic sets of polymers widely believed to be the earliest form of life. Primitive replicators generate (...) self-similar structure, but because the process happens in a piecemeal manner, through bottom-up interactions rather than a top-down code, they replicate with low fidelity, and acquired characteristics are inherited. Just as polymers catalyze reactions that generate other polymers, the retrieval of an item from memory can in turn trigger other items, thus cross-linking memories, ideas, and concepts into an integrated conceptual structure. Worldviews evolve idea by idea, largely through social exchange. An idea participates in the evolution of culture by revealing certain aspects of the worldview that generated it, thereby affecting the worldviews of those exposed to it. If an idea influences seemingly unrelated fields this does not mean that separate cultural lineages are contaminating one another, because it is worldviews, not ideas, that are the basic unit of cultural evolution. (shrink)

Argumentation has been an important topic in knowledge representation, reasoning and multi-agent systems during the last twenty years. In this paper, we propose a new abstract framework where arguments are associated with a strength, namely a quantitative information which is used to determine whether an attack between arguments succeeds or not. Our Strength-based Argumentation Framework combines ideas of Preference-based and Weighted Argumentation Frameworks in an original way, which permits to define acceptability semantics sensitive to the existence of accruals between (...) arguments. The question of accruals arises in situations where several arguments defending the same position against another argument are unable to individually defeat this argument, but could do it collectively if they combine their strengths. We investigate some of the theoretical and computational properties of our new framework and semantics, and present a reasoning algorithm that is based on a translation of the problem into pseudo-boolean constraint satisfaction. This paper proposes an intuitive framework which allows strength compensations in an argumentation context where attacks may not succeed, completed by an approach which detects accruals throughout the reasoning process without requiring the elicitation of all compensatory combinations of arguments as an input. (shrink)

L'Église orthodoxe traverse, ou paraît traverser, des difficultés dans ses rapports avec le Conseil oecuménique des Églises . En réalité, ces difficultés prolongent un malaise déjà exprimé lors de la 6' Assemblée du COE qui s'est tenue à Vancouver en 1983. Ses représentants dénoncèrent alors le risque de voir ce Conseil devenir un simple forum d'échange d'idées sans fondement théologique spécifiquement chrétien et où « une prière commune deviendrait de plus en plus difficile et en fin de compte impossible ». (...) À ces difficultés d'ordre théologique s'ajoutent les difficultés spécifiques, notamment pour l'Église de Russie. Malgré cela, l'Église orthodoxe, à travers notamment le document adopté lors du Concile jubilaire d'août 2000, tient « que la recherche de l'unité est un élément essentiel de notre existence chrétienne ».The Orthodox Church is going through, or appears to be going through, some difficulties in its relationship to the World Council of Churches . As a matter of fact, these difficulties continue an uneasiness already expressed at the time of the 6th Assembly of the WCC, which was held in Vancouver in 1983. There, its representatives denounced the risk of seeing the Council become a simple forum for the exchange of ideas without a specific Christian theological foundation, and where « a common prayer would become more and more difficult and finally impossible ». On top of these theological problems there are some specffic ones, notably, for the church of Russia. In spite of that, the Orthodox Church, especially by the document adapted during the Council's jubilee in August 2000, holds « that the search for unity is an essential element of our Christian existence”. (shrink)

What are facts, situations, or events? When Situation Semantics was born in the eighties, I objected because I could not swallow the idea that situations might be chunks of information. For me, they had to be particulars like sticks or bricks. I could not imagine otherwise. The first manuscript of “An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought” that I submitted to Linguistics and Philosophy had a footnote where I distanced myself from all those who took possible situations to be units (...) of information. In that context and at that time, this meant Jon Barwise and John Perry. (shrink)

Political and cultural diversity in contemporary Europe can be encountered on many levels and in a variety of forms. The significance of such political and cultural diversity is, however, differently understood, and conceptualized, and not always sufficiently appreciated in distinct perceptions of Europe. A variety of perceptions of Europe have played a role in the project of Eastern enlargement, even if a communitarian/unitarian vision of a single European identity seemed to prevail. Such a vision was not only promoted by Western (...) European political forces, but also actively endorsed by some of the new-comers themselves, who, in a way, embedded the unitarian understanding of European identity in their local self-identification as `Central Europe'. A unitary vision of Europe was, however, at odds with a number of connotations associated with the myth of a distinct Central European identity as it had emerged in the 1980s. The article identifies three understandings of the idea of Central Europe as they have historically emerged, and suggests their contemporary relevance for the European integration project. Subsequently, the usage and understanding of Central Europe will be briefly looked at in the context of the fifth enlargement project. Finally, the future of political and cultural integration in the post-enlargement era is hypothesized. While the unitary vision of European identity remains an important marker, a diversity-sensitive, post-national, and deliberative understanding of European identity seems increasingly important, an identity that can significantly build on an emancipatory reading of Central Europe. (shrink)

De Pierris offers a reading that unites radical skepticism and normative naturalism as “two equally important and mutually complementary aspects of Hume’s philosophical position”. The “modern theory of ideas” shapes skepticism, and Newtonian methodology is the basis for naturalism. The “modern theory of ideas” holds that evidence for optimal human cognition is grounded in the “immediate acquaintance with ostensive presentations that are or have been given to the mind”. This is the “presentational-phenomenological model of apprehension”. Descartes introduces to (...) the model pure intellectual items, that is, clear and distinct ideas, which have “‘immutable and eternal’ essences or forms” as referents... (shrink)

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended (...) altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers. Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven’t paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime. While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences. (shrink)

El siguiente trabajo tiene como objetivo principal describir y analizar la percepción de Manuel Baldomero Ugarte sobre Estados Unidos. Ugarte fue literato y político, pero también fue un pensador interesado por los asuntos internacionales de América Latina. Evidencia de ello son sus propuestas integracionistas y antiimperialistas, en las cuales la presencia de Estados Unidos era evidente. Debido a lo anterior, se estima conveniente explicar qué pensó Ugarte sobre la nación norteamericana, y desde esa perspectiva, contribuir a la discusión sobre tan (...) trascendental intelectual latinoamericano. The purpose of this work is to describe and analyze the perception of Manuel Baldomero Ugarte about the United States. Ugarte was a writer and a politician, but it was also a thinker interested in the Latin America’s international affairs. Testimony of this are his integrationist and anti-imperialist proposals, in which the U.S. presence was evident. Thus, it is considered advisable to explain what he thought about the American nation, and from this perspective, to contribute to the discussion around this important Latin American intellectual. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of an extended unit of action, which is the idea that the reasons for or against an individual action can depend on the qualities of a larger pattern of action of which it is a part. One concept of joint action is that the unit of action can be extended in this sense. But the idea of an extended unit of action is surprisingly minimal in its commitments. The paper argues for this (...) conclusion by examining uses of the idea of an extended unit of action in four theoretical contexts. It also explains why the idea of an extended unit of action need not involve magical thinking, and discusses possible replies to an objection based on a worry about recklessness. (shrink)

The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in the history of concepts as developed by Reinhart Koselleck, progress has occupied the dual role (...) of a ‘basic concept’ that grasps modern sociopolitical reality and a ‘collective singular’ that aggregates previous and adjacent meanings in the one linguistic unit. This article compares these two historical research programmes, highlights their merits and deficiencies, and concludes by offering a new approach to the history of concepts as suggested by R.G. Collingwood’s theory of a scale of forms. In each of the approaches to the history of ideas and concepts addressed, particular attention is given to the problem of what qualifies as progress, and thus to a longstanding problem concerning the attribution of progress to past societies routinely excluded from its history, including those left out by Koselleck’s conventional secular-modern thesis. (shrink)

It Is A Uniquely Rewarding Book That Will Open Up Vast Uncharted Regions For Exploration, Especially For The Serious Thinker Unsatisfied By The Modern Pop Philosophy. A Meaningful Philosophy Must Have An Absolute Idea Implicit In It And This Book Investigates Several Prominent Strains Of Philosophy, To Identify The Absolute Element.

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there (...) are different traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there (...) are different traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there (...) are different traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there (...) are different traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

The proposed comment to the paper by W. Lynch provides another indirect argument in favor of the thesis about Lakatos’s hidden Marxist roots. The methodology of research programmes and the sociology of scientific knowledge (social epistemology) share a common object of criticism, and a constant opponent. Lakatos calls him the naïve falsificationist while a social epistemologist dubs him a metaphysical realist, or fact-objectivist. Both criticized the non-critical trust in scientific theories and facts as well as their reification though using different (...) means: the internal dialectic of science’s development and the socio-communicative interpretation of scientific knowledge. Still, the differences between them like the differences between Lakatos’s and Feyerabend’s approaches are two ways of expressing the similar position based on acceptance of some non-dogmatic Marxist ideas. (shrink)

Among Leibniz’s contributions to the philosophy of mind, two topics bear relevance to contemporary discussions in cognitive sciences: the mind-body problem, and the universal language. Leibniz’s deterministic view rejects inter-substance causality between mental and bodily states, as well as between mental or bodily states of different individuals. In addition, Leibniz believed in the need to enhance communication through a universal language based on symbolic representations. Here I reconsider Leibniz’s ideas in the light of experimental evidence coming from mirror neurons. (...) These recently discovered brain cells, responsive to both action execution and observation, are thought to enable the interpretation of the action performer’s intentions through their representation in the observer’s own brain, thus storing embodied shared representations. I propose that mirror neurons’ cross-modal responsiveness, whereby seeing an action being performed by somebody else triggers similar neural response to that of performing that action oneself, can be interpreted as an instantiation of intersubstance causality. I suggest that mirror neurons’ properties speak not only to the non-dualistic equation, supported by brain science in general, whereby in a given individual, mental states arise from bodily states but also introduce the possibility that bodily states may arise from someone else’s bodily states. In addition, I propose that this automatic embodied flow of information between individuals (from performer to observer) bears relevance to Leibniz’s intuitions on symbols. Specifically, I suggest that the shared representations stored in mirror neurons, thought to enable the interpretation of the action performer’s intentions, may be seen as a biological instantiation of Leibniz’s planned, but never realized, universal characteristic. (shrink)

Developing a simple test to identify swiftly neonates with sepsis who carry the genetic variant which means that one dose of the recommended antibiotic, gentamicin, will cause the child to become profoundly deaf looks like an admirable objective. The baby needs antibiotics and needs them within 1 hour of admission to the neonatal intensive care unit. Conventional genetic tests take much longer to yield results. The test being trialled produces results in 25 min; a baby who carries the variant (...) can be treated with a different antibiotic. All the test requires is a gentle swab of the baby’s inner cheek. Babies can be treated for potentially fatal sepsis without the risk that the drugs designed to save their lives will cost them their hearing. Parents and healthcare staff are relieved of worry—a great idea? PALOH is not a trial of the safety or efficacy of the test, only to assess how feasible it will be to carry out this test in a busy NICU, without disrupting the care of the baby. A tiny painless ‘scrape’ will take a sample of DNA—what’s the fuss about? Several other invasive and painful procedures will be carried out without a fuss.1 The problem is DNA. Genetic information must be safeguarded from falling into the wrong hands. In section 45 of Human Tissue Act 2004, Parliament legislated to prohibit non-consensual DNA testing.1 It fits uncomfortably in a statute designed to regulate retention and uses of human material, after revelations that organs and tissue from the …. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans inspire us to consider ourselves as citizens of the world and to take this allegiance to the world community as relevant in our moral deliberations. Cosmopolitanism is a western notion that epitomizes the need social agents have to conceive of a political and cultural entity, larger than their own homeland, that would encompass all human beings on a global scale. Cosmopolitanism presupposes a positive attitude towards difference, a desire to construct broad allegiances and equal and peaceful global communities of (...) citizens who should be able to communicate across cultural and social boundaries forming a Universalist solidarity. Its inclusive drive is most evident in moments of crisis of other modes of representing and ascribing membership to existing socio-political and cultural units. Cosmopolitanism slowly began to come to the fore again with the renewed study of more ancient texts, but during the humanist era cosmopolitanism still remained the exception. Despite the fact that ancient cosmopolitan sources were well-known and that many humanists emphasised the essential unity of all religions, they did not develop this idea in cosmopolitan terms. In most versions of cosmopolitanism, the universal community of world citizens functions as a positive ideal to be cultivated, but a few versions exist in which it serves primarily as a ground for denying the existence of special obligations to local forms of political organisations. Versions of cosmopolitanism also vary depending on the notion of citizenship they employ, including whether they use the notion of 'world citizenship' literally or metaphorically. The philosophical interest in cosmopolitanism lies in its challenge to commonly recognised attachments to fellow citizens, the local state, parochially shared cultures, and the like. Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea compiles both historical and contemporary methodologies to cosmopolitanism, in addition to recognising its multidimensional nature to show the essence of cosmopolitanism as a theoretical idea and cultural practice. Since its inception, cosmopolitanism has been a category marked by a need to negotiate with others and has reflected tensions between local and supralocal realities, ethnocentric and relativist perspectives, and particularism and universalism. Historically, cosmopolitanism has mirrored the ideologies of different periods and modes of integration to larger, imperial or global, political entities. The Internet has brought about the possibility of a transnational imagined virtual community: a decentred cosmopolitan crowd, synchronized by cyberspace, interacting on real-time, and engaging in global commercial, cultural and political exchange. A number of works provide general overviews of cosmopolitanism, including its practices, theorising, and interpretations of issues in contemporary political and social theory. The monograph examines the idea of cosmopolitanism -- what it is and what it entails and its role in addressing global issues. (shrink)

Brandon ([1982] 1984, 1990) has argued that Salmon's (1971) concept of screening-off can be used to characterize (i) the idea that natural selection acts directly on an organism's phenotype, only indirectly on its genotype, and (ii) the biological problem of the levels of selection. Brandon also suggests (iii) that screening-off events in a causal chain are better explanations than the events they screen off. This paper critically evaluates Brandon's proposals.

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century is a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores philosophy, biography, and texts about and by disabled people living in the eighteenth century. The book, which introduces and affirms the notion that disability studies predates most United States and United Kingdom findings by more than a hundred years, will be of interest to philosophers, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars.

The history of ideas deals with the elemental unit-ideas which for Lovejoy are components of systems distinguished by their patterns. Special histories explain how a particular form of human history developed. General histories draw on special histories to document or explain social contexts. Since patterns influence philosophers, the history of ideas contributes little to the history of philosophy, a discontinuous strand within a period's continuous intellectual history. By accepting cultural pluralism, denying the monistic position that there (...) always are internal connections among all or some strands of intellectual and cultural history, both continuity and change in philosophy can be best understood. (shrink)

The idea of Slavic solidarity served in the 19th century often as a means for rea-ching the cultural equality of particular Slavic nations. However, the representatives of the "New School" expanded its primarily cultural legacy also on the political collaboration of the Slavs. Their objective was a gradual national and civic emancipation within the given frontiers of Austria-Hungary. Its new meaning was the Hungarian patriotism as a uniting civic basis for national and cultural diversity. By including the anew articulated idea (...) of Slavic solidarity into their liberal political program they created favourable conditions for the collaboration of Slavic nations on a civic basis. This program was in clear opposition to the idea of the political panslavism proclaimed by Russia. (shrink)

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century is a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores philosophy, biography, and texts about and by disabled people living in the eighteenth century. The book, which introduces and affirms the notion that disability studies predates most United States and United Kingdom findings by more than a hundred years, will be of interest to philosophers, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars.

The idea of cultural heritage has become widespread in many countries, justifying government regulation and providing the background to disputes over valuable works of art and architecture. In this book, Derek Gillman uses several well-known cases from Asia, Europe, and the United States to review the competing claims that works of art belong either to a particular people and place, or, from a cosmopolitan perspective, to all of humankind. He looks at the ways in which the idea of heritage has (...) been constructed. He focuses first on Britain and the writings of Edmund Burke and then on China and its medieval debate about the nature of 'our culture'. Drawing on a range of sources, including the work of Ronald Dworkin, Will Kymlicka, and Joseph Raz, Gillman relates debates about heritage to those in contemporary political philosophy and offers a liberal approach to moral claims and government regulation. (shrink)

The unit of selection is the concept of that ‘something’ to which biologists refer when they speak of an adaptation as being ‘for the good of’ something. Darwin identified the organism as the unit of selection because for him the ‘struggle for existence’ was an issue among individuals. Later on it was suggested that, in order to understand the evolution of social behavior, it is necessary to argue that groups, and not individuals, are the units of selection. The (...) last addition to this debate was the formulation by Dawkins, in 1976, that the genes themselves are the units of selection while the organisms are merely the temporary receptacles and vehicles for such genes. Thus, the preposterous dissolution of the organism into genes and the proteins coded by such genes has been introduced in the evolutionary discourse by neglecting that the explanations for biological phenomena can be either synchronic or diachronic, depending on the phenomenon to be explained. Therefore explanations in molecular biology are synchronic while evolutionary biology needs diachronic explanations. Nevertheless, for ultra-Darwinians such as Dawkins, efficient replication is all that biology is about. Here I develop an argument in order to show that there is nothing in molecular and cell biology that might support such a contention and that the idea of the gene as the unit of selection is incompatible with the evident evolution of biological complexity. (shrink)