ABSTRACT:Giving without the expectation of reward is difficult to understand in organizational contexts. In opposition to a logic based on self-interest or a sense of duty, a “logic of gift” has been proposed as a way to understand the phenomenon of free, unconditional giving. However, the rationale behind, and effects of, this logic have been under-explored. This paper responds by first clarifying the three logics of action—the logic of exchange, the logic of duty, and (...) the logic of gift—and then explains how their balanced integration promises to enhance organizational life and outcomes. Having explicated the unique character and contributions of the logic of gift, the paper further suggests practical implications for management. Encouraging the logic of gift fosters more humane relationships within organizations and to enable individuals to be generous in ways that inspire trust and promote creativity. (shrink)

In this work the authors present a general theory of bureaucracy and use it to explain behaviour in large organizations and to explain what determines efficiency in both governments and business corporations. The theory uses the methods of standard neoclassical economic theory. It relies on two central principles: that members of an organization trade with one another and that they compete with one another. Authority, which is the basis for conventional theories of bureaucracy, is given a role, despite reliance on (...) the idea of trade between bureaucracies. It is argued, however, that bureaucracies cannot operate efficiently on the basis of authority alone. Exchange between bureaucrats is hampered because promises are not enforceable. So trust and loyalty between members of bureaucratic networks play an important part. The authors find that vertical networks promote efficiency while horizontal ones impede it. (shrink)

Economics is privileged in contemporary government policy such that all human transactions are seen as economic forms of exchange. Education has been discursively restructured according to the logic of the market, with education policy being increasingly colonised by economic policy imperatives. This paper explores some of the consequences of this reframing which draws upon metaphors from industrial and business domains. This paper examines a significant dimension of teaching that currently has marginal presence in official discourse: social contingency. We (...) argue that social contingency is characterised by a variety of distinctive features that include unpredictability, relationality and ethical demands. The significance of social contingency is highlighted by a comparison with industrial production, which is organisationally contingent, and craft production, which is characterised as materially contingent. We argue that the different nature of contingency in these domains makes them inappropriate as metaphors for teaching. We explore the nature of social contingency and some of the practical and ethical consequences of the failure to articulate this in official discourse. Its absence in such discourse is illustrated by consideration of competence statements in the Initial Teacher Education context. We argue that the neglect of social contingency is founded on assumptions of teacher sovereignty that are both philosophically and ethically unsustainable. (shrink)

This essay examines conceptual metaphors from Śaiva-Śākta traditions of Hindu tantra. It explores how conceptual metaphors associated with heterodox ritual exchanges between humans and fierce divinities were employed and used to transform other ideas to express a new kind of kinship or family that replaced or supplemented orthodox concepts. It then considers the combination or blending of these conceptual systems with other ideas about concentration and miniaturization. The resulting conceptual metaphors are then directly related to the way that tantric traditions (...) moved over time to semanticized, abstract, orthodox, and mystical expressions and concepts. There is a diverse body of scholarship that examines and interprets the historical traditions of Hindu tantra. This body of scholarship is seldom considered outside of conversations among area specialists. Some of this is due to the heterodox nature of some tantric practices, especially concepts or rituals that use sex or sexual symbolism. Tantric focus on these heterodox conceptual frameworks conflicts directly with purity-oriented conceptual systems of orthodox Hindu traditions. Through a kind of meta-analysis of some of these conceptual metaphors, this essay seeks to consider a kind of conceptual logic that makes their heterodox content more understandable and accessible to other areas of religious studies and philosophy. The study relies on certain insights drawn from metaphor theory to formulate the concepts it examines. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such (...) forms of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work. (shrink)

When the original Dutch version of this book was presented in 1971 to the University of Leiden as a thesis for the Doctorate in philosophy, I was prevented by the academic mores of that university from expressing my sincere thanks to three members of the Philosophical Faculty for their support of and interest in my pursuits. I take the liberty of doing so now, two and a half years later. First and foremost I want to thank Professor G. Nuchelmans warmly (...) for his expert guidance of my research. A number of my most im portant sources were brought to my attention by him. During the whole process of composing this book his criticism and encouragement were carried out in a truly academic spirit. He thereby provided working conditions that are a sine qua non for every author who is attempting to approach controversial matters in a scientific manner, conditions which, however, were not easily available at that time. In a later phase I also came into contact with Professors L. M. de Rijk and J. B. Ubbink, with both of whom I had highly stimulating discussions and exchanges of ideas. The present edition contains some entirely new sections, viz. 1-9, IV-29, V-9, V-20, VII-14 (iii), (iv), VII-17 (i), VIII-22, IX-17, IX-19, X-9 and XI-8. Section X-9 was inspired by a remark made by Professor A. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Logic of the SiteAlain Badiou (bio)Translated by Steve Corcoran (bio) and Bruno Bosteels (bio)The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of the CommuneTake any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this world—whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this world—is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that (...) happens to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance.Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singularity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself.We will ask: can we give a more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site?Let us consider the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim government of bourgeois "Republicans" capitulates to Bismarck's Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"—very comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal enemy)—it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by a frightened rural world, an assembly that sits in Bordeaux.Led by Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition. The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National Guard, battalions [End Page 141] that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of Paris—Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth.Thus we have a divided world whose logical organization—what in philosophical jargon could be called its transcendental organisation—reconciles intensities of political existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria. Concerning the representative, electoral, and legal dispositions, one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance, political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the International, local military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this world, which had been separated and disbanded [délié] owing to the war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the inexistent aspect [l'inexistant propre] of the term "political capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The government receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these reprobates." First up then, an imperative task, and a seemingly easy one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military committees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will make... (shrink)

Abela and Murphy (J Acad Mark Sci 36(1):39–53, 2007 ) examined Service-Dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, J Mark 68(1):1–17, 2004 ) from the viewpoint of Marketing Ethics and concluded that whilst S-D logic does not have explicit ethical content, the Foundational Premises (FPs) of S-D logic do have implicit ethical content. They also conclude that what may be needed to make the implicit more explicit is the addition of another FP. The aim of this article is (...) to explore whether S-D logic needs to be modified, if one wishes to construct a theoretical framework for analysis of Marketing that has ethical considerations fully integrated. We critically evaluate the claim that the FPs are inherently ethical and conclude that S-D logic should be modified. We offer an additional FP for consideration that relates to the role of personal and societal values in the co-creation of value. This FP is necessary because of the role that the ethical positions of actors play in exchange behaviour. However, it should be pointed out that whilst the article explores the ethical potential of S-D logic it does not privilege any particular ethical position or code. These concerns will be addressed in subsequent articles: the aim here is to establish the underlying rationale for including an explicit commitment to ethics in S-D logic. (shrink)

Allen Orr wrote an extended critical review (over 6000 words) of my book No Free Lunch for the Boston Review this summer (http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/orr.html). The Boston Review subsequently contacted me and asked for a 1000 word response. I wrote a response of that length focusing on what I took to be the fundamental flaw in Orr's review (and indeed in Darwinian thinking generally, namely, conflating the realistically possible with the merely conceivable). What I didn't know (though I should have expected it) (...) is that Orr would have the last word and that the Boston Review would give him 1000 words to reply to my response (see the exchange in the current issue at http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.5/exchange.html). (shrink)

Modern social theory, by and large, has aimed at reducing the complexity of action situations to a set of manageable abstractions. But these abstractions, whether functionalist or linguistic, fail to grasp the indeterminacy of action situations.Action proceeds by discovery and combination. The logic of action is serendipitous and combinative. From these characteristics, a number of consequences flow: The whole field of our intentions is engaged in each action situation, and cannot really be understood apart from the situation itself. In (...) action situations we remain aware of the problems of categorization, including the dangers of infinite regress and the difficulties of specifying borders and ranges of categories. In action situations, attention is in permanent danger of being overwhelmed. We must deal with many features of action situations outside of attention; in doing so, we must entertain simultaneously numerous possibilities of action. Emotional expression is a way of talking about the kinds of possibilities we entertain. Expression and action have a rebound effect on attention. "Effort" is required to find appropriate expressions and actions, and rebound effects play a role in such effort, making it either easier or more difficult.Recent theoretical trends have failed to capture these irreducible characteristics of action situations, and have slipped into a number of errors. Language is not rich in meanings or multivocal, except as put to use in action situations. The role of "convention" in action situations is problematic, and therefore one ought not to talk of "culture." Contrary to the assertions of certain theorists, actors do not follow strategies, except when they decide to do so. Actors do not "communicate," in the sense of exchanging information, except in specially arranged situations. More frequently, they intervene in the effortful management of attention of their interlocutors. Dialogue, that is, very commonly becomes a form of cooperative emotional effort.From these considerations, it follows that the proper method for gaining social knowledge is to examine the history of action and of emotional effort, and to report findings in the form of narrative. (shrink)

Most recently, what I have been working on in connection with it is the larger picture of the role of the editor in professional communication. Since the basic context for this is not philosophical communication in particular but rather scientific communication in general—ultimately professional communication in general—I've been exchanging some ideas with one of the main editors for the American Physical Society, which is the major professional society for physicists, and it has been most helpful in expanding my understanding of (...) the editorial role, which is clearly the single most important factor in the publication system at this point. I don't get into that in what follows below, but the basic frame for the discussion is adjusted to make that a part of what is considered. (shrink)

In Pure Inductive Logic, the rational principle of Predicate Exchangeability states that permuting the predicates in a given language L and replacing each occurrence of a predicate in an L-sentence phi according to this permutation should not change our belief in the truth of phi. In this paper we study when a prior probability function w on a purely unary language L satisfying Predicate Exchangeability also satisfies the principle of Unary Language Invariance.

Two Community Development Corporations in Oakland, California, anchor the following analysis. These legally homogenous organizations have implemented similar “low-income” redevelopment projects widely hailed as representing a single successful blueprint for urban revitalization. Despite their similarities, however, these entities have produced starkly different socio-economic outcomes—a phenomenon traced to the CDCs' divergent internal structures and the contrasting external contexts of their development activities. These variations generated competing “logics” of redevelopment. On one hand, we find a CDC dominated by market-oriented interests and the (...) economic logic of exchange-values, while on the other, we find a CDC dominated by community-oriented interests and the social logic of neighborhood use-values. (shrink)

One conventional view of businesses is to reduce them to mere performers of economic transactions in an exercise of exchange based on the “logic of self‐interest,” and under the criterion do ut des, meaning “I give in order that you may give.” Drawing from personalist philosophy, this article argues that financial and organizational interactions are encounters, relations between persons, not mere economic transactions. Furthermore, people involved in business have the capacity to establish relations of gratuity with others under (...) the criterion do propter alterum, that is, “give to the other as another,” without expecting a return. This criterion is at the core of the “logic of gift.” We argue that giving authentic gifts is intrinsically good, since it contributes to the human flourishing of those who practice this behavior. Implementing the “logic of gift” is also beneficial for the company because it contributes to humanizing the company. In addition, applying the logic of gift will probably bring about trust and social cohesion between people, with positive consequences for business performance, which is consistent with previous findings. (shrink)

This paper seeks to bring together the notions of human dignity and gift exchange in a mutually enriching relation. Two interpretations of the gift and of gift exchange are investigated, and in each case brought to bear on the understanding of human dignity. To start, dignity understood as the gift of uniqueness in relation is considered, followed by a consideration of dignity as the gift of absolute responsibility. The conclusion reached at the end of the paper is that (...) an understanding of human dignity in terms of gift exchange will allow for the irreducibly social aspects inherent in the notion to be appreciated complementary to the more objective, factual and individual elements usually associated with human rights. The paper argues for a plurivocal interpretation of dignity as gift that allows for both the relational and the absolute elements gathered together in this conception to be appreciated. (shrink)

So simple and imperfect as it may appear this book has made use of knowledge on invention and discovery accumu lated during a lifetime. Those persons who would be tempted to emphasize only its imperfections should read the correspondence exchanged between Cantor and Dedekind at the end of the nineteenth century; they would then realize how difficult it was, even for an outstanding man, the creator of the set theory, to propose impeccable results in a completely new field. The field (...) I have chosen here is plausibility. I have proposed an intuitive, some would say a naive, presentation as I want to reach as large an audience as possible and because I personally believe that it is easier to axiomatize a mathematical theory precisely than to dis cover it and enunciate its key theorems. Professor Polya said: "The truly creative mathematician is a good guesser first and a good prover afterward. " For centuries a formalized generalized logic was found necessary and many attempts have been made to build it. vi Preface Mine is based on plausibility which covers with precision a wider field than probability and makes the formalization of analogy and generalization possible. As Laplace said: "Even in the mathematical sciences, our principal instru ments to discover the truth are induction and analogy. "* The examples of application I have chosen are not des cribed in detail. (shrink)

The social exchange theory of reasoning, which is championed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, falls under the general rubric “evolutionary psychology” and asserts that human reasoning is governed by content-dependent, domain-specific, evolutionarily-derived algorithms. According to Cosmides and Tooby, the presumptive existence of what they call “cheater-detection” algorithms disconfirms the claim that we reason via general-purpose mechanisms or via inductively acquired principles. We contend that the Cosmides/Tooby arguments in favor of domain-specific algorithms or evolutionarily-derived mechanisms fail and that the (...) notion of a social exchange rule, which is central to their theory, is not correctly characterized. As a consequence, whether or not their conclusion is true cannot be established on the basis of the arguments they have presented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heuretics: The Logic of InventionTom ConleyHeuretics: The Logic of Invention, by Gregory L. Ulmer; xiv & 267 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper.Heuretics designates areas of logic devoted to discovery and invention. This book sets out to reconfigure the metaphors that have dominated investigation since the advent of print-culture and the Columbian voyages. Adventure, quest, risk, discovery: Francis Bacon’s analogy (...) of scientific research to oceanic travel established the stereotypes that Ulmer strives to dismantle. In 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss noted in The Raw and the Cooked that in our time: “It is no longer a question of sailing toward other lands: only the voyage is real, not the earth, and the routes have been replaced by the rules of navigation.” With the advent of hypermedia, creation becomes an art of selection and combination. Truth gives way to discovery. Creation is likened to a programmed mélange of material ordered by negotiation, intuition, and strategy.Ulmer performs his proof—and proves his performance—by constructing a virtual staging of a multilayered commemoration he fashions from cinema, architecture, Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, American history, and autobiography. The result is a collage of signifiers that apposes literary theory, memory-arts, Gary Cooper’s persona in Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939), Columbian voyages, Platonic dialogues, and a canon of postmodern writings. Ulmer divides the book into four parts, the first of which crafts the overall method from Cartesian reason and Surrealist practices of juxtaposition and automatism. Part two offers a dynamic definition of choreography, the study of local, inherited, and originary areas in which subjectivity is born. In part three Ulmer [End Page 147] sets forth textual rehearsals, based on Lee Strasner’s Method (via Stanislavsky), that mobilize the space and time of his chosen materials. Part four, “Yellowstone Desert,” bring together the strands of the narrative embroidery into a gag-joke (a “puncept” on Custer and custard) that explodes in the author’s face.A good deal of the work turns on Ulmer’s treatment of chora. Exploiting its signifying potential (chora, corps, choral, chorus, coral) he discovers that the myth of the world’s creation recounted in the Timaeus begins when the demiurge makes an X from two strands of plasma. The chi is folded as colures of a sphere that becomes the globe. Nonetheless the presence of the self as an unknown (x) is inferred (in I, or ich). Ulmer shows that “in subordinating mystery to memory, and arguments to paradigms,” choreography will “engage the users’ premises in the process of learning, opening a mutually transforming circuit between judgment and theory, and hence affect not only (...) institutional practices (...) but human subjectivation as well” (p. 202). Patterned constructions replace the creation and resolution of enigmas. Hypermedia becomes the technology of new creation, while choreography comprises “the institutional practice for augmenting the intuitions of inference, for writing with the logic of the unconscious” (p. 224).Heuretics extends the field of play staked out in Ulmer’s Teletheory. Here is offered a scheme for creating multileveled texts that are both creative and critical and infinitely generative, and that invite readers to connect electronic media to the unconscious. Most readers will not fail to appreciate the wit of the exposition and the clarity of the creative method. Others will pause over some of its assumptions. Certain critical paradigms, such as the antithetical ontologies of Lacan and Derrida, appear easily reconciled. The unnameable traumas of history (genocide) and psychogenesis (the birth and growth of subjectivity) are glossed with an effortless art of citation (pp. 114, 233). The unconscious is assimilated into an easily “accessed” logic, the latter effortlessly “logging in” to the former. The redesign of the Columbian quincentenary indirectly ratifies some of the modes of control that flexible capitalism seeks to impose upon the unconscious. These four points require greater space of exchange in the rich and problematic dialogue that informs Ulmer’s stunning performance of theory.Tom ConleyUniversity of MinnesotaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

We give a unified account of some results in the development of Polyadic Inductive Logic in the last decade with particular reference to the Principle of Spectrum Exchangeability, its consequences for Instantial Relevance, Language Invariance and Johnson's Sufficientness Principle, and the corresponding de Finetti style representation theorems.

This article reflects on how the contemporary relationship between movement and space can be reversed so that movement regains priority over space in the experience of life. Its key argument is that movement has potential to take priority over space but only via the logic of the gift. The logic of the gift has potential to undermine the privilege colonial modernity accords to space over movement because its conception of exchange challenges exchange as a construct of (...) economic logic central to the experience of modernity. The article focuses on the gift as is found in the work of John Milbank and the African religious archive. It tries to show that along with Milbank’s imagination of the gift, the gift as a construct of the African religious archive stands to contribute in the fight against the continuing alienation brought about by the project of modernity. This is because it imagines the sacred dimension primarily via the terrain of the family. Contribution: This article contributes to a reading of capitalism via the logic of the gift as a construct of the African religious archive and does so by borrowing from the work of theologians. In doing so, it tries to present a different way of thinking about gift giving in relation to the African religious expression, which has until the recent past been dominated by anthropologists. (shrink)

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that (...) one and the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience - its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms. (shrink)

The paper investigates exchangeability in the context of probability logic. We study generalizations of basic inference rules and inferences involving cardinalities. We compare the results with those obtained in the case in which only identical probabilities are assumed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 49-77 [Access article in PDF] The Time of the King Gift and Exchange in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio Joan Ramon Resina There is something paradoxical about José Zorrilla's revision of the Don Juan legend, a certain contradiction between the play's structure and the logic of the action. The character of the protagonist, the form and implications of Don Juan's salvation, the strategies and temporality (...) of seduction, even the play's generic status--all come under the law of self-cancellation. And so does the historical time in which the play is set: the time of absolute monarchy. The proportionality between terrestrial and eschatological time, organic to the play's Golden Age precursor, 1 is strangely neutralized in Zorrilla's work through an expanding temporality without equivalent in the afterlife; and the same is true of the king's dramatic role through his removal from the scene, which he regulates nonetheless as deus ex machina of the social edifice.A nineteenth-century reader, Francesc Pi i Margall, remarked that "Zorrilla hace a Don Juan escéptico o creyente según lo van exigiendo las peripecias de su drama, y merced a esa indeterminación del carácter, le pone repetidamente en contradicción consigo mismo" (Zorrilla makes Don Juan a skeptic or a believer depending on the drama's events, and by virtue of this indeterminacy, he brings his character repeatedly into contradiction with himself) [204]. This indeterminacy affects not only the libertine's relation to religion but also the doctrinal coherence of the play, which has been the object of debate [see Mazzeo; Abrams; Wang; Romero]. Others, curiously, detect a contradiction between the play's sound theological conception and the author, who "quizá no sabe apenas nada de teología" (perhaps knows next to nothing about theology) [Alberich 16]. Yet not only Don Juan's piety but also his seductions appear self-annulling. For Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Zorrilla's most original and thus most revealing decision is "presentar el acto de seducción engañosa en el momento mismo en que deja de serlo: la carta con que comienza el drama participa de una tradición que también cancela. En el curso de la obra, es y no es un instrumento de seducción; sin cambiar de palabras, es a la vez falsa y verdadera... " (to present the act of deceitful seduction at the very moment in which it stops being deceitful: the letter with which the play starts participates in a tradition which it also cancels. Throughout the play the letter is and is not a tool of seduction; its words are at once true and false...) [83]. In the same line of structural contradictions must be included the play's temporality, which runs counter to the causal logic of the action. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat points out: "In Juan's verses normal temporal and causal sequence collapses, for future events are always catching up and outstripping the present, as if time were circular and past, present, and future travelled the circle at different speeds" [7]. Even the play's representativeness as a privileged [End Page 49] instance of Spanish romanticism has been flatly denied in light of its inconsistencies with the patterns of that movement [Gies, "José Zorrilla"]. 2 But perhaps the most telling contradiction is the one between the play's undiminished popularity for almost a century and its author's sedulous efforts to undermine its prestige. 3Author's second thoughts? A repentant artist in ascetic revulsion against mundane acclaim? It seems reasonable to assume a link between the play's popularity and the contradictions to which it gives expression. Thus, taking at face value the tired notion that Don Juan presents a fundamentally Spanish profile, 4 I will inquire whether the play's manifest contradictions are culturally efficient. 5 To this end, I will need to consider a possible incongruity between nineteenth-century forms of consciousness and the objective historical conditions. Joaquín Casalduero already pointed out a discrepancy between historical changes and... (shrink)

"A subtly telling blow to the old-timey distinction between philosophy and literature, a distinction that still persists in practice, despite many overly ideological campaigns to revise it. He, too, talks a lot about theory and ideology, but he shows in practice the wonderful complexities of the interplay of rhetoric and philosophy. Furthermore, he shows how this interplay helped to fabricate the many textures of eighteenth-century life. Kenshur's is the first comprehensive 'cultural history' that actually takes pleasure in the rich, interdisciplinary (...) exchanges of the era."--Kevin L. Cope, author of "Criteria of Certainty" "This is an important book. It is provocative at many turns regarding the individual texts studied, and sees them in not simply untraditional but counter-traditional, yet quite well-substantiated, ways. The book may be still more important on account of its strong, reasoned, poised challenge to theoretical orthodoxies ranging from Foucault to New Historicism to Stanley Fish's idea of interpretive communities."--Frederick M. Keener, author of "The Chain of Becoming". (shrink)

There are several three-valued logical systems that form a scattered landscape, even if all reasonable connectives in three-valued logics can be derived from a few of them. Most papers on this subject neglect the issue of the relevance of such logics in relation with the intended meaning of the third truth-value. Here, we focus on the case where the third truth-value means unknown, as suggested by Kleene. Under such an understanding, we show that any truth-qualified formula in a large range (...) of three-valued logics can be translated into KD as a modal formula of depth 1, with modalities in front of literals only, while preserving all tautologies and inference rules of the original three-valued logic. This simple information logic is a two-tiered classical propositional logic with simple semantics in terms of epistemic states understood as subsets of classical interpretations. We study in particular the translations of Kleene, Gödel, ᴌukasiewicz and Nelson logics. We show that Priest’s logic of paradox, closely connected to Kleene’s, can also be translated into our modal setting, simply by exchanging the modalities possible and necessary. Our work enables the precise expressive power of three-valued logics to be laid bare for the purpose of uncertainty management. (shrink)

The beginning of Marx’s Capital has references to Hegel’s Logic of Being. From the individual commodity considered in isolation, Marx derives the value form as the germ cell of capitalist society. Marx’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic posits the value form as a spectral objectivity that constitutes the real abstraction specific to capitalism. As the most abstract expression of capital, it rules unconsciously the totality of social praxis as an absolute fetish. Value arises from a double mystification: the (...) reification of capitalist social relations of production in an objective abstract form, and its representation in concrete objects, as commodities and money in circulation. Value, as the real abstraction of capitalist social relations of production, is the disjunctive synthesis between the despotic command of capital in production and the reciprocity of exchange in circulation. In the final chapter on primitive accumulation, Marx identifies its historical genesis in the dispossession of the commons, which, by separating the subjective from the objective conditions of production, gives rise to the capital-wage labour relation. (shrink)

A necessary and sufficient condition in terms of a de Finetti style representation is given for a probability function in Polyadic Inductive Logic to satisfy being part of a Language Invariant family satisfying Spectrum Exchangeability. This theorem is then considered in relation to the unary Carnap and Nix–Paris Continua.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 150-177 [Access article in PDF] The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations Lydia H. Liu It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the (...) imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined Communities 6]. That insight, however, has not drawn to itself as much attention or scrutiny as some of his other concepts, like "print capitalism" or "creole nationalisms." If one were to name a few of the blind spots in the contemporary discussions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora, one of them would be the place and placing of sovereignty and sovereign right. To those of us whose initial purpose has been to historicize the nation and nationalism, this blind spot cannot but raise some serious methodological and interpretive questions. Insofar as sovereignty articulates a major mode of exchange between nation and empire in recent history and moreover figures prominently in the realm of what Anderson calls "quotidian universals" [Spectre of Comparisons 33], the truism of its truth needs to be unpacked carefully.Hence, I would like to raise some tentative questions about desire and sovereignty, not in terms of legal studies, but in light of what we have learned about colonial exchange and its production of difference, fetishism, identity, and the logic of reciprocity. I am going to show that these intellectual and material developments have had significant bearings on the making of international law such that our inquiry into the latter can no longer be confined to the self-explanatory evolution of legal discourse. For sovereign thinking is one of those areas that must be reexamined, to borrow Edward Said's words, "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" [18].In this essay, I begin with a critical analysis of Benedict Anderson's work, focusing on the interplay of the historical and the universal in his study of the nation. I am particularly interested in examining what Anderson chose to do, or not to do, with sovereignty in his theory of nationalism, and I raise some questions about his idea of the "modular," whereby the universal takes on the role of a migrant figure making histories [End Page 150] here and there. Section two introduces the subject of fetishism and desire into the discussion by linking the display of the thrones of the Emperor Qianlong in British museums to significant moments of sovereign thinking in the reign of Queen Victoria and the Empress Dowager of China at the turn of the century. In section three, I attempt a detailed discussion of the sovereignty complex of Ku Hung-ming, a diasporic subject who grew up in colonial Malaysia, was educated in Europe, and ended up serving China as his adopted sovereign country. My analysis centers on Ku's well-known defense of the Empress Dowager during the popular nationalist uprising of 1900 and his work as a translator and publicist in Anglo-Chinese military confrontations. Finally, I turn to the theories of international law itself and ask how nineteenth-century jurists revised the notion of sovereignty to arrive at a new constitutive theory of recognition in the heyday of imperialist expansion. I argue that any attempt to explain the rise of the modern nation-state must take full account of this significant revision in the early nineteenth century, because the revision signaled a paradigmatic shift from natural law to positivist jurisprudence to the effect that a constitutive understanding of sovereign right would eventually overcome and displace the natural law notion of universal sovereignty. Sovereign Thinking in Migrant Nationalisms In Imagined Communities, Anderson pointed to sovereignty as a necessary condition in thinking about the nation when, for example, he... (shrink)

The exclusive emergence of value and abstract human labour through exchange of mere products is a fundamental principle within the ‘New Reading of Marx’, especially that of Michael Heinrich. He invokes both Capital and the manuscript Additions and Changes, where Marx revised his value-form analysis for the second edition of Capital. However, this manuscript does not support Heinrich’s view. In the same handwritten manuscript, Marx drafted the subsection on the fetishism of the commodity with two passages that Heinrich claims (...) as evidence for his interpretation. Against this, we elaborate Marx’s understanding of abstract human labour as the specific social character of private labour; it does not result from exchange but rather is its prerequisite. Heinrich’s attempt fails to include demand in the magnitude of value. Finally, he does not explain the value-formation by circulation and production. Rather, his one-sided view of exchange means, by way of its logical implications, that the capitalist production process is no longer the unity of the labour process and the valorisation process, but mere production of use-values. (shrink)

This article examines how distrust drives exchange. We propose a theoretical framework integrating the literature of trust into cultural sociology and use a case of patients giving hongbao (red envelopes containing money) to doctors in China to examine how distrust drives different forms of unofficial exchange. Based on more than two years’ ethnography, we found that hongbao exchanges between Chinese patients and doctors were, ironically, bred by the public’s generalized distrust in doctors’ moral ethics. In the absence of (...) institutional assurance, Chinese patients drew on the cultural logic of particularism and its associated cultural repertoire to induce fidelity from their physicians. They mobilized interpersonal networks to function as assurance and presented hongbao as a return of favor to the doctors. This form of exchange is gifting-oriented. Alternatively, if there were no interpersonal networks to rely on, they proactively offered hongbao to doctors at arm’s length in an attempt to personalize the relationship to seek assurance and abate their anxieties. This form of exchange is bribery-oriented. Both forms of exchange co-existed when there was one-way generalized distrust manifested from patients to doctors. When doctors also developed generalized distrust in patients, arm’s length exchanges declined, leaving embedded exchanges as the dominant form. Our study asserts the central role of culture in constituting exchange behaviors and the importance of institutions in shaping the form of exchange. It contributes to the midrange theory of trust, generating a number of hypotheses for future research on the relationships among culture, institutions, distrust, assurance, and illicit exchange. (shrink)

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate over ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations is well explored, as far as its course in Britain is concerned. F. H. Bradley’s idealistic internalism, on the one hand, and Bertrand Russell’s realistic externalism, on the other, were at the center of this debate. Less well known, however, is that there was also a discussion about relations in the United States at the time. The central figures in this discussion were Edward Gleason Spaulding and John Dewey. (...) Like Russell, Spaulding advocated a realist-inspired externalism, while Dewey criticized this viewpoint from a pragmatist perspective. The aim of the present paper is to reconstruct the exchange between Spaulding and Dewey and to elaborate the specifics of this exchange. In doing so it will emerge, among other things, that, in contrast to Bradley’s idealist rejection of externalism, Dewey’s pragmatist attempt at a refutation was more in line with common sense and science and that Spaulding’s version of externalism differed markedly from Russell’s in its strong empirical orientation. Overall, an undeservedly forgotten chapter in the history of early twentieth-century American philosophy is revisited and reassessed. (shrink)

In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt’s recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism . She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt’s letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in print before. (...) She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling “logic” of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt’s letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin’s initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt’s letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt’s and Voegelin’s perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin’s letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange. (shrink)

We show that the first order theory of the lattice $\mathscr{L}^{ (S) of finite dimensional closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional Steinitz Exhange System S has logical complexity at least that of first order number theory and that the first order theory of the lattice L(S ∞ ) of computably enumerable closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional computable Steinitz Exchange System S ∞ has logical complexity exactly that of first order number theory. Thus, for example, the lattice (...) of finite dimensional subspaces of a standard copy of $\bigoplus_\omega$ Q interprets first order arithmetic and is therefore as complicated as possible. In particular, our results show that the first order theories of the lattice L(V ∞ ) of c.e. subspaces of a fully effective ℵ 0 -dimensional vector space V∞ and the lattice of c.e. algebraically closed subfields of a fully effective algebraically closed field F ∞ of countably infinite transcendence degree each have logical complexity that of first order number theory. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the concept of coerced exchange (and partly of voluntary exchange inasmuch as the absence of coercion is its necessary condition), which is of utmost importance to economic theory in general and to the Austrian School of Economics in particular. The subject matter literature normally assumes that a coerced action occurs under threat. Threats in turn can be studied from the perspective of speech act theory, which is concerned with the speaker’s intentions. Ultimately, our (...) goal is to provide a descriptive (i.e. non-moralized) definitions of threat and coercion, based on the analysis of the coercer’s intentions. If successful, we would be in a position to present such an account of coerced and voluntary exchanges that is compatible with both speech act theory and the Austrian methodology. Although we focus on the Austrian School of Economics, we believe that our investigations might impact on economic theory in general. We also criticize a rights-based account of coercion employed in the research practice of some neo-Austrians and based on the libertarian ethic of property rights. (shrink)

Spectrum Exchangeability, Sx, is an irrelevance principle of Pure Inductive Logic, and arguably the most natural extension of Atom Exchangeability to polyadic languages. It has been shown1that all probability functions which satisfy Sx are comprised of a mixture of two essential types of probability functions; heterogeneous and homogeneous functions. We determine the theory of Spectrum Exchangeability, which for a fixed languageLis the set of sentences ofLwhich must be assigned probability 1 by every probability function satisfying Sx, by examining separately (...) the theories of heterogeneity and homogeneity. We find that the theory of Sx is equal to the theory of finite structures, i.e., those sentences true in all finite structures forL, and it emerges that Sx is inconsistent with the principle of Super-Regularity. As a further consequence we are able to characterize those probability functions which satisfy Sx and the Finite Values Property. (shrink)

Based on Kolchinsky and Wolpert’s work on the semantics of autonomous agents, I propose an application of Mathematical Logic and Probability to model cognitive processes. In this work, I will follow Bateson’s insights on the hierarchy of learning in complex organisms and formalize his idea of applying Russell’s Type Theory. Following Weaver’s three levels for the communication problem, I link the Kolchinsky–Wolpert model to Bateson’s insights, and I reach a semantic and conceptual hierarchy in living systems as an explicative (...) model of some adaptive constraints. Due to the generality of Kolchinsky and Wolpert’s hypotheses, I highlight some fundamental gaps between the results in current Artificial Intelligence and the semantic structures in human beings. In light of the consequences of my model, I conclude the paper by proposing a general definition of knowledge in probabilistic terms, overturning de Finetti’s Subjectivist Definition of Probability. (shrink)

The combination of logic and game theory provides a fine-grained perspective on information and interaction dynamics, a Theory of Play. In this paper we lay down the main components of such a theory, drawing on recent advances in the logical dynamics of actions, preferences, and information. We then show how this fine-grained perspective has already shed new light on the long-term dynamics of information exchange, as well as on the much-discussed question of extensive game rationality.

The paper deals with credible and relevantinformation flow in dialogs: How useful is it for areceiver to get some information, how useful is it fora sender to give this information, and how much credibleinformation can we expect to flow between sender andreceiver? What is the relation between semantics andpragmatics? These Gricean questions will be addressedfrom a decision and game-theoretical point of view.

Information exchange can be seen as a dynamic process of raising and resolving issues. The goal of this paper is to provide a logical framework to model and reason about this process. We develop an inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic , which enriches the standard framework of dynamic epistemic logic , incorporating insights from recent work on inquisitive semantics. At a static level, IDEL does not only allow us to model the information available to a set of agents, (...) like standard epistemic logic, but also the issues that the agents entertain. At a dynamic level, IDEL does not only allow us to model the effects of communicative actions that provide new information, like standard DEL, but also the effects of actions that raise new issues. Thus, IDEL provides the fundamental tools needed to analyze information exchange as a dynamic process of raising and resolving issues. (shrink)

These letters between Irving Copi and Anthony Blair exchanged in 1981 are of poss ible interest for the history of informal logic.

Let G be a model of Presburger arithmetic. Let be an expansion of the language of Presburger. In this paper, we prove that the ‐theory of G is ‐minimal iff it has the exchange property and is definably complete (i.e., any bounded definable set has a maximum). If the ‐theory of G has the exchange property but is not definably complete, there is a proper definable convex subgroup H. Assuming that the induced theories on H and are definable (...) complete and o‐minimal respectively, we prove that any definable set of G is ‐definable. (shrink)

The bereaved Christian faces not only the difficult task of grief, but also the morally charged evaluations of the grief process: whether it should be fast or slow, whether God is necessary or unhelpful, and whether grief is “proper” for Christians in light of their call to “not grieve as others do who have no hope”.1 This article showcases these tensions involved in defining a “proper” Christian approach to grief, retrieves resources born in the engagement of similarly problematic tensions in (...) the field of grief theory, and conscripts these resources in order to read the book of Job through a new lens, which relieves some of the tensions which arise in Christian considerations of grief. In sum, Christians commonly read the book of Job through the “stage model” of grief –- as if Job's experience throughout the book conforms to and requires a logically sequential grief-progress. Conversely, a “trajectory model” of grief, a new advancement in grief theory, opens the door for reading each pericope in Job as supplying a unique and independently legitimate path for grief that does not require any preceding or subsequent stages. In the same way that Job accommodates these variegated trajectories of grief, so also the Christian faith entertains equally legitimate grief trajectories, each appropriate for the various felt needs of the bereaved. (shrink)