In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE HIERARCHY OF TRUTHS IN THE CATECHISM AVERY DULLES, S.J. Fordham University Bronx, New Yark IN ORDER to throw light on the question of the hierarchy of truths in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the topic here being addressed, it may be best to move by stages. I shall begin by saying something about the nature and purpose of the Catechism, then turn to the meaning of (...) the expression, " hierarchy of truths," and thirdly, in the main part of this article, discuss how the hierarchy of truths is or is not respected in the Catechism. Before concluding I shall add some remarks, fourthly, on the question of the different levels of authority of different doctrines. The Nature of the Catechism The Catechism of the Catholic Church was composed in response to the request of the Extraordinary Synod of 1985, which declared in its Final Report: " Very many have expressed the desire that a catechism or compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals be composed, that it might be, as it were, a point of reference for the catechisms or compendiums that are prepared in the various regions. The presentation of doctrine must be biblical and liturgical. It must be sound doctrine suited to the present life of Christians." 1 From the beginning the new Catechism was conceived on the pattern of the Roman Catechism, also known as the Catechism of the Council of Trent. That catechism, published in 1566, was a lFinal Report, II B (a) 4; text in Origins 15 (December 19, 1985): 44450, at 448. 369 370 AVERY DULLES, S.J. rather complete restatement of Catholic doctrine in the light of the teaching of Trent. Like the Council out of which it grew, the Roman Catechism gave special emphasis to the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, which had been particularly contested by the Protestants. The volume was written not for children or catechumens but for pastors. In conformity with the requests made in a number of the small working groups (" circuli minores ") at the Synod of 1985, the present Catechism was intended to be a full restatement of Catholic doctrine in the light of the Second Vatican Council. As a compendium of all doctrine, it includes the teaching of the Church on points that were not touched by Vatican II. The result is a comprehensive summa incorporating the data of Scripture, the heritage of the fathers and doctors of the Church, the pronouncements of popes, councils, and congregations of the Holy See, testimonies of the liturgy, and memorable reflections of classical theologians, saints, and spiritual writers. I know of no comparable instrument for ascertaining the relevant data from Scripture and tradition regarding the full range of Catholic faith and morals. For readers professionally concerned with theology and religious education, the footnotes alone would be worth the price of the volume. The notes contain some 4,000 biblical references, more than 1,000 references to conciliar texts, more than 250 references to papal statements (more than half of them from John Paul II), over 100 references to the Eastern and Western codes of canon law, more than 100 to liturgical texts, and nearly 500 references to church fathers and ecclesiastical writers. Like the Roman Catechism, this new synthesis of Catholic doctrine is directed not to the simple faithful but to pastors. As is stated in the Prologue, " this Catechism is addressed principally to those responsible for catechesis : in the first instance, to the bishops as doctors of the faith and pastors of the Church. It is offered to them as an instrument for the fulfillment of their task of teaching the people of God. It is addressed, through the bishops, to the editors of catechisms, priests, and catechists. It will THE HIERARCHY OF TRUTHS 371 also be useful reading for all other faithful Christians " ( 12).2 The present Catechism is composed for Catholics all over the world, but the authors are quite aware that it needs to be adapted to meet the needs and capacities of different groups. They insist in the Prologue that those who instruct the faithful, or compose other catechetical materials, should adapt their teaching to the culture, age, spiritual maturity... (shrink)

In his celebrated "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger spoke of the need for an "original ethics" which did not submit itself to the ideal of something like a "subject" or the "human," two notions that he suggested were no longer serviceable for the task of thinking the problems of ethical life. The purpose of this article is to look at how Gadamer's hermeneutics might offer an avenue for developing this original ethics. To this end, Gadamer's discussion of language, in (...) particular the relation of language and freedom, serves as the guideline for unpacking this claim. (shrink)

In this chapter, we analyze the relationships between the Internet and its users in terms of situated cognition theory. We first argue that the Internet is a new kind of cognitive ecology, providing almost constant access to a vast amount of digital information that is increasingly more integrated into our cognitive routines. We then briefly introduce situated cognition theory and its species of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition. Having thus set the stage, we begin by taking (...) an embedded cognition view and analyze how the Internet aids certain cognitive tasks. After that, we conceptualize how the Internet enables new kinds of embodied interaction, extends certain aspects of our embodiment, and examine how wearable technologies that monitor physiological, behavioral and contextual states transform the embodied self. On the basis of the degree of cognitive integration between a user and Internet resource, we then look at how and when the Internet extends our cognitive processes. We end this chapter with a discussion of distributed and collective cognition as facilitated by the Internet. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

There is considerable controversy concerning the ability of the Internet to provide communal experiences. This article looks at the ability of the World Wide Web to foster religious community, particularly from a Christian perspective. It looks at the nature of religion and community and shows to what extent the Internet has and has not been successful in recreating religious community. It looks at the reaction of two particular groups of users and categorizes Web sites into five types: research (...) sites, extensions of local community, independent sites, spiritual retreats, and online worship. Finally it discusses the limitations of disembodied experience and argues that most individuals use the media within these limitations. (shrink)

"Works of art sometimes leave us speechless. But they almost never shut us up. They can't. There's just too much to say. Talking about art doesn't leave things as they are; it changes everything. To look, to think, to say what you see, or why you respond as you do, this changes what you see and it changes your response. The effort and the caring remake us. They remake us, in real time, as we listen to the song, or examine (...) the painting, or watch the movie. This is not unique to art, of course. What I have just outlined goes for all experience and is really life's first principle: life is a process of growth and reorganization, a process that commences right then when we first act, for we reorganize ourselves and develop in response to the ways what we do changes what we undergo, as Dewey might have said. But art aims at this; there is art so that we may remake ourselves, and also, so that we may catch ourselves in the act of this remaking. Art requires creation, even from its beholder. Yogi Berra was right: you can see a lot by observing. But observation - the effort and the caring - this requires thought, attention, focus. It can be play, but it is also work-like. Art always proposes a task, and the task is neither easy nor quite well-enough defined. The task, though, is only this: try to perceive, try to bring what is there into focus. If you do this, you will find yourself unveiled and, to whatever little extent, put together anew. The crucial thing to accept is that we don't get all this - the wow, the pleasure, the unveiling, and the reorganization - just for the price of admission. We have to join in, turn on, throw thoughts and reactions at the works themselves, position ourselves to catch them on the rebound, and allow room for emotions, not always positive. This is something we typically do with other people, and in the field cast by their responses and their words and argument. Works of art are always strange provocations; sometimes they offend us; more often they leave us untouched, unaffected, even bored. And this is where their value lies. Each of the short writings collected here is an exercise in giving art and myself the time to let something happen; I try to do this work so that art may do its work. Some of them were written while I was working on my 2015 book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, and they flow from the same well of curiosity that nourished that project. The title is borrowed from Joshua C Taylor's famous Learning To Look, which was the first book about art that I ever read"--. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is (...) broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

Under what conditions do women create places for women on the Internet? And what kinds of difficulties do they meet if they try to do so? These questions are studied by comparing two groups of women involved in the design of Amsterdam's digital city DDS. The female designers, who were involved as DDS was set up, did not want to pay attention to women's issues. This can be explained by looking at their position in feminist debates in Dutch (...) society, their position in the organization of which they were a part and their personal identity. The second group of women, who were part of a women's organization, differed in all these respects. Thus, they had no problems in wanting to pay specific attention to women in DDS by building a `Women's Square'. The problems of this second group of women were caused by the late stage at which they entered the design process. The ideas on gender and technology of the initial group of women had by then solidified in the script of DDS, making it hard for the second group to design the Women's Square in the way they wanted it. In this article it is argued that designers, women's organizations and subsidizing organizations should stimulate women's groups to get involved in the design of new technology at an early stage. From this case study, one can conclude that leaving women's issues to individual female designers is not an effective strategy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The End of Argument: Knowledge and the InternetSimon Barker1. Fermat's last videoModern mathematics is nearly characterized by the use of rigorous proofs. This practice, the result of literally thousands of years of refinement, has brought to mathematics a clarity and reliability unmatched by any other science.(Jaffe and Quinn 1993, 1)The above passage illustrates how mathematicians have come to esteem rigorous argument as the most important feature of their subject. (...) In turn, the example of mathematics has, over a long period, made rigorous argument an ideal in many other areas of inquiry—from the sciences to theology. How interesting it is, then, that some mathematicians have begun to question that ideal. Gian-Carlo Rota, for example, has said that the axiomatic method of presentation in mathematics has now reached "the zenith of fanaticism" and that the identification of mathematics with this method "is having a corrosive effect on the way mathematics is viewed by scientists in other disciplines" (1997, 189). William Thurston has blamed the formality of contemporary mathematics for "the whole system of generally poor communication" within the subject. According to Thurston, ordinary conversation between mathematicians can often convey a new solution in a matter of minutes, whereas a formal proof delivered in a seminar will take an hour, and a written article may take several hours or even days to understand. In Thurston's view, this disparity arises precisely because conversationalists go far beyond formal mathematical language:They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what's going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well. [End Page 154](Thurston 1994, 166)Sadly, however, mathematicians can only converse like this in private. To reach the rest of their audience, they have to publish in journals. Journal articles are limited to formal language and so must convey results more slowly. Formality, though less efficient, is more publishable.Yet there is hope. Another mathematician, Andrew Odlyzko, has suggested that the unfortunate limitations of printed journals can now be overcome with computers. Computers can allow mathematicians to distribute something more than the traditional style of printed proof. Odlyzko suggests an electronic scrapbook that would include a video of each author lecturing about their results (Odlyzko 1995, 90-91). Fermat's Last Video? The point is that if these suggestions come to pass, publication of mathematical results will no longer involve stripping away informal features and replacing them with formal language, as if rigorous argument was all that mattered. Instead, the informal features that help mathematicians to understand new results so quickly in ordinary conversation will be given equal air time. The ideal, for publication at least, will be less formal.Is this just a gimmick? Is it something that will go away, if we shut our eyes, leaving the centuries old ideal of formal proof intact? What I wish to discuss here are some of the reasons why mathematics, as well as other branches of knowledge, may adopt greater informality and may cease to idealise rigorous argument.2. From parents to premissesI will start by examining how and why rigorous, formal argument became an ideal in the first place. This is a long story, going back to the origins of Western literature; so I am forced to be brief.1 I will start with the matter of how argument became an ideal. The first thing we should recognise is that even in the West's earliest literary works—the Iliad and the Odyssey—there are plenty of rudimentary arguments, particularly in the speeches put into the mouths of the major characters. Nevertheless, for sustained or rigorous argument, we must look a little harder. Havelock has put forward the following passage as an example of unusual rigour in early literature (Havelock 1966b, 209). The passage is taken from the start of Hesiod's poem, Works and Days, a piece of wisdom literature almost as old as... (shrink)

While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept “in the loop” of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his decisions (...) to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working “in his loop,” but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be “programmed into” their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all. (shrink)

Every human being has a vast store of knowledge about health and sickness and the ability to draw conclusions on the basis of this knowledge. Yet science research continues to be based largely on `objective studies' conducted by academics and to look down on `subjective' studies. The belief that `pure' objective science is highest and subjective information is lowest, inculcated by the way science is taught in schools, deters doctors from communicating information based on personal experience lest it be decried (...) - as it certainly will be - as scientifically worthless. Alternative medicine with its open, flexible approach to the whole person, has something to teach conventional medicine. And doctors must pay more attention to what their patients can tell them. There is no rational justification for accepting the factual information that people give (in a case history) while disregarding what they have to say about their condition. Old-style science is particularly inept in helping doctors deal with psychosomatic problems. What is needed is a new `science of the subjective' which would be truly appropriate to the subject of study, the whole human being. There is a commentary on this paper by Sir Douglas Black, President of the Royal College of Physicians. (shrink)

While the unprecedented lockdown measures were at the heart of the debate in the first year of the pandemic, the focus since then has shifted to vaccination issues. The reason, of course, is that vaccines and vaccinations have become available by now. All experts agree: If mankind had failed to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the death toll would have been much higher. This issue seeks to explore what could be described as a “generational approach to vaccinations”. The question “What can (...) we do to avoid future pandemics?” is related to different aspects of the failures and successes of humanity’s vaccination strategy against SARS-CoV-2. Pathogens are among the existential risks to humanity that could potentially kill a large part of it in a very short time. For all the tragedy and horror it has brought upon the world, the Corona virus has not been lethal on such a large, all-encompassing scale. But it could serve as a wake-up call for more and better prevention in the future, put differently: as a call to build a “preventive society”. When people look back to the year 2022 from the year 2200, will they think of the absence of mandatory vaccination as a dangerous anachronism? And will the unequal global distribution of vaccines be seen as an unbearable vice of our epoch? And will “human infection studies” still be dismissed as unethical if a dangerous new virus boards human bodies? If intergenerational justice means improving the life chances and living conditions of future generations to the largest possible extent, then its link to (the avoidance) of infectious diseases is obvious. We should protect future generations from foreseeable damage if we have the power to do so. “We” is humankind in its entirety. Politically, humanity is divided into many single nations. But biologically, as members of the same species, we share the same vulnerability regardless of ethnicity. The regular reader of this journal might wonder why this issue of IGJR has a different structure. An unprecedented pandemic calls for an unprecedented reaction and therefore IGJR 1/2021 and 2/2021 are special issues that deal with this disruptive event. We have invited several health experts, politicians and scholars alike to share their perspectives in short opinion pieces (instead of regular peer-reviewed articles). And we are exploring something new: the publication of a FRFG policy paper. This policy paper starts off with a historical overview on how pandemics have afflicted humanity in the past. It separates moral from legal duties and formulates “epidemiological imperatives” – the way of thinking of a responsible and solidary individual facing the task of preventing an outbreak of epidemics in a community. With the discovery of vaccines, and their availability, the catalogue of duties is increased by one more: to get the jabs as an act of solidarity with others, including future generations. This would prevent states from being forced to take disease control measures that bring about drastic collateral damage. During the first two years of the Corona pandemic, states have imposed lockdowns. The closure of schools has put a special burden on the youngest members of society. This could have been prevented during the second and the further waves. The policy paper also calls for more government funding for prophylactic vaccine research and for the designation of vaccines as “global public goods”. The issue then moves on to a section dedicated to opinion papers by various different authors. The first paper, written by Agnes Binagwaho and Kedest Mathewos (both from University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda), focuses on the issue of health inequity, a concern which has gained more and more traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper examines how vaccine distribution during the pandemic was mainly focused on the global north and how such actions might affect future generations’ perception of what is just, fair and morally correct. The second paper, by Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford), focuses on the right and wrongdoings connected to pandemic preparedness and response. The third paper, authored by Rajeev Sadanandan (Health Systems Transformation Platform, India), talks about the lessons that can and should be drawn from child immunisations. The fourth paper, by Adriano Mannino (LMU and Parmenides Foundation, Munich), delves into the question how future generations will assess our actions and our response to the current pandemic. The fifth and final paper, written by Jörg Tremmel (FRFG and University Tübingen), is centered around the question whether human infection studies could have been implemented during the early stages of the pandemic to minimise deaths and severe infections. The issue concludes with two reviews on recent books by Alberto Giubilini and Katie Wright. In his review of Giubilini’s The Ethics of Vaccination, Marius Kunte notes that it contains a “thought-provoking plea” for individual, collective and institutional obligations to reach high vaccination rates. Judith Kausch-Zongo concludes her review of Wright’s Gender, Migration and the Intergenerational Transfer of Human Wellbeing with a special emphasis on the book’s empirical findings, and praises it in its entirety as “undoubtedly important”. Both books serve as poignant reminders of how sustainable societies can only emerge once the challenges revolving around its most vulnerable members have been properly addressed. (shrink)

In recent years philosophers have done impressive work explicating the nature and moral importance of a kind of self-respect Darwall calls “recognition self-respect,” which involves valuing oneself as the moral equal of every other person, regarding oneself as having basic moral rights and a legitimate claim to respectful treatment from other people just in virtue of being a person, and being unwilling to stand for having one’s rights violated or being treated as something less than a person. It is (...) generally agreed that such self-respect is something all persons have a right to and ought to have and that it is morally objectionable for a person or a society to preclude or injure someone’s self-respect. But scant attention has been paid to another kind of self-respect, the kind that has to do not with the fact that you are a person but with the kind of person you are, that has to do not with rights but with character. I call this kind of self-respect “evaluative self-respect.” The central task of this paper is to explicate the moral value of evaluative self-respect. I do this by looking at the role it plays in the life of someone who is sincerely concerned to be a good person. This is not to deny that evaluative self-respect can go wrong, and I look at how it can go wrong. In particular, evaluative self-respect is, like everything else in human life, vulnerable to the distorting forces of oppression. But, I argue, evaluative self-respect can have moral value even when it goes wrong, and it can be a liberatory resource in the lives of the oppressed. (shrink)

The first topic of concern is anonymity, specifically the anonymity that is available in communications on the Internet. An earlier paper argues that anonymity in electronic communication is problematic because: it makes law enforcement difficult ; it frees individuals to behave in socially undesirable and harmful ways ; it diminishes the integrity of information since one can't be sure who information is coming from, whether it has been altered on the way, etc.; and all three of the above contribute (...) to an environment of diminished trust which is not conducive to certain uses of computer communication. Counterbalancing these problems are some important benefits. Anonymity can facilitate some socially desirable and beneficial behavior. For example, it can eliminate the fear of repercussions for behavior in contexts in which repercussions would diminish the availability or reliability of information, e.g., voting, personal relationships between consenting adults, and the like. Furthermore, anonymity can be used constructively to reduce the effect of prejudices on communications. Negative aspects of anonymity all seem to point to a tension between accountability and anonymity. They suggest that accountability and anonymity are not compatible, and they even seem to suggest that since accountability is a good thing, it would be good to eliminate anonymity. In other words, the problems with anonymity suggest that individuals are more likely to behave in socially desirable ways when they are held accountable for their behavior, and they are more likely to engage in socially undesirable behavior when they are not held accountable. I am not going to take issue with the correlation between accountability and anonymity, but rather with the claim that accountability is good. To examine this problem, let's look at a continuum that stretches from total anonymity at one end, and no anonymity at all at the other end. At the opposite extreme of anonymity is a panopticon society. The panopticon is the prison environment described by Foucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle with the side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guard tower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can see everything that goes on in every cell. In a recent article on privacy, Jeffrey Reiman, reflecting on the new intelligent highway systems, suggests that we are moving closer and closer to a panopticon society. When we contemplate all the electronic data that is now gathered about each one of us as we move through our everyday lives- intelligent highway systems, consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medical records, financial records, and so on- we see the trend that Reiman identifies. Electronic behavior is recorded and the information is retained. While actions/transactions in separate domains are not necessarily combined, it seems obvious that the potential exists for combining data into a complete portfolio of an individual's day to day life. So it would seem that as more and more activities and domains are moved into a IT-based medium, the closer we will come to a panopticon society. A panopticon society gives us the ultimate in accountability. Everything an individual does is observable and therefore available to those to whom we are accountable. Of course, in doing this, it puts us, in effect, in prison. The prison parallel is appropriate here because what anonymity allows us is freedom; prison is the ultimate in lack of freedom. In this way the arguments for a free society become arguments for anonymity. Only when individuals are free will they experiment, try new ideas, take risks, and learn by doing so. Only in an environment that tolerates making mistakes will individuals develop the active habits that are so essential for democracy. In a world without information technology, individuals have levels or degrees and various kinds of anonymity and consequently different levels and kinds of freedom. Degrees and kinds of anonymity vary with the domain: small town social life versus urban social life, voting, commercial exchanges, banking, automobile travel, airplane travel, telephone communication, education, and so on. Drawing from our experience before IT-based institutions, we might believe that what we need is varying levels or degrees and kinds of anonymity. This seems a good starting place because it suggests an attempt to re-create the mixture that we have in the physical, non-IT-based world. Nevertheless, there is a danger. If we think in terms of levels and degrees of anonymity, we may not see the forest from the trees. We may not acknowledge that in an electronic medium, levels and kinds of anonymity mean, in an important sense, no anonymity. If there are domains in which we can be anonymous but those domains are part of a global communication infrastructure in which there is no anonymity at the entry point, then it will always be possible to trace someone's identity. We delude ourselves when we think we have anonymity on-line or off-line. Rather, what we have both places is situations in which it is more and less difficult to identify individuals. We have a continuum of situations in which it is easy and difficult to link behavior to other behavior and histories of behaviors. In the physical world, we can go places and do things where others don't know us by name and have no history with us, though they see our bodies, clothes, and behavior. If we do nothing unusual, we may be forgotten. On the other hand, if we do something illegal, authorities may attempt to track us down and figure out who we are. For example, law enforcement officials, collection agencies, those who want to sue us may take an active interest in removing our anonymity, ex post facto. Think of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols-the men who apparently bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Much of what they did, they did anonymously, but then law enforcement officials set out to find out who had done various things, e.g., rented a car, bought explosives, etc. The shrouds of anonymity under which McVeigh and Nichols had acted were slowly removed. Is this any different than behavior on the internet? Is there a significant difference in the kind or degree of anonymity we have in the physical world versus what we have in an IT-based world? The character of the trail we leave is different; in the one case, its an electronic trail; while in the other it involves human memories, photographs, and paper and ink. What law enforcement officials had to do to track down McVeigh is quite different from tracking down an electronic law breaker. Also, the cost of electronic information gathering, both in time and money, can be dramatically lower than the cost of talking to people, gathering physical evidence, and the other minutia required by traditional detective work. We should acknowledge that we do not and are never likely to have anonymity on the Internet. We would do better to think of different levels or kinds of identity. There are important moral and social issues arising as a result of these varying degrees and kinds of identity. Perhaps the most important matter is assuring that individuals are informed about the conditions in which they are interacting. Perhaps, even more important is that individuals have a choice about the conditions under which they are communicating. In the rest of this paper we explore a few examples of levels and kinds of identity that are practical on the Internet. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages that we see for these "styles" of identity for individuals, and we examine the costs and benefits of these styles for society as a whole. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between deliberative democracy, the Internet, and systems theory’s thoughts on diversity. After introducing Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy and how diversity fits into it, the article discusses various ideas about whether and how it could work on the Internet. Next, the article looks at research into diversity done in the field of complex adaptive systems, showing that diversity has both good and bad effects, but is clearly preferred for the purpose of survival. The (...) article concludes with an analysis of how the results of systems theory’s study of diversity can assist society in bringing democracy to the Web. (shrink)

The only reliable remedy against anxiety is information, and reliable information and news are of crucial value in times of crises, such as COVID-19. Contemporary social media offers almost everyone a platform to publish one’s own thoughts, opinions, political statements and others, some of which may gain significant interest of others and thereby become so called “influencers”. This role has in the past been held by news agencies primarily, but this role is increasingly adopted also by private people and among (...) them, also some who do not necessarily adhere the high standards of good journalism or scientific ethics. These give rise to fake news, spreading as unconfirmed rumors and possibly causing dramatic impacts to a society. With information available almost everywhere in the internet today, the distinction between good and bad sources has become a challenge, and highly difficult task. Even more intricate is the question of verifying information against multiple independent sources. If many people say something, does this make it true or any more plausible? Do we need to trust information in lack of better information? Is it possible to judge information and make our own opinion about its validity, quality, relevance or usefulness for our own business? This article shall provide pointers towards answers to the above questions. We discuss some technical means of judging the quality of information and what anyone, even without much technical background can do to avoid falling victim to fake information and fake news. (shrink)

Previous research has noted the ambiguous persuasive potentials of reiteration: repeating a statement, slogan or image can work both positively and negatively, can both help and hinder the effectiveness of a political message. Considering that repeated propaganda in China is broadly ineffective in generating wholehearted public support, this article is interested in how and when repetition does achieve meaningful persuasion. Drawing on affect theory to address these multiple potentials, it critically reconsiders the nature of persuasion itself, arguing that affective engagement (...) is crucial in sustaining and consolidating temporary tendencies that lead to alteration in the social fabric. Looking at humorous ‘socialist memes’ popularised on the Chinese internet in recent years, the article conducts a discourse analysis on the patterns they reveal to break down this reiterative practice as an unfolding event, revealing how its humour disrupts official language and engages the public affectively. It argues that practice of repeating these memes produces interpretive ambiguities around the official language, and in doing so re-directs socialist persuasion towards a liberalised end. (shrink)

In this paper we present a study of adjectival/adverbial modification using modern type theories, i.e. type theories within the tradition of Martin-Löf. We present an account of various issues concerning adjectival/adverbial modification and argue that MTTs can be used as an adequate language for interpreting NL semantics. MTTs are not only expressive enough to deal with a range of modification phenomena, but are furthermore well-suited to perform reasoning tasks that can be easily implemented given their proof-theoretic nature. In MTT-semantics, common (...) nouns are interpreted as types rather than predicates. Therefore, in order to capture the semantics of adjectives adequately, one needs to meet the challenge of modeling CNs modified by adjectives as types. To explicate that this can be done successfully, we first look at the mainstream classification of adjectives, i.e. intersective, subsective and non-subsective adjectives. There, we show that the rich type structure available in MTTs, along with a suitable subtyping framework, offers an adequate mechanism to model these cases. In particular, this modelling naturally takes care of the characterising inferences associated with each class of adjectives. Then, more advanced issues on adjectival modification are discussed: degree adjectives, comparatives and multidimensional adjectives. There, it is shown that the use of indexed types can be usefully applied in order to deal with these cases. In the same vein, the issue of adverbial modification is discussed. We study two general typings for sentence and VP adverbs respectively. It is shown that the rich type structure in MTTs further provides useful organisational mechanisms in giving formal semantics for adverbs. In particular, we discuss the use of \-types to capture the veridicality/non-veridicality distinction and further discuss cases of intensional adverbs using the type theoretic notion of context. We also look at manner, subject and speech act adverbials and propose solutions using MTTs. Finally, we show that the current proof technology can help mechanically check the associated inferences. A number of our proposals concerning adjectival and adverbial modification have been formalised in the proof assistant Coq and many of the associated inference patterns are checked to be correctly captured. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 645-648 [Access article in PDF] Thomas N. Habinek. The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. x + 234 pp. Cloth, $39.50. This is an important book, one that has in its brief life (a paperback edition appeared in 2001) spawned many scholarly debates in both written and spoken form. Many have disagreed—and will (...) disagree—with Habinek's ideas, and I certainly have many questions about his methodology, his use of sources and evidence, and his sometimes conflicting claims. Nonetheless, he takes on one of the most serious issues in Classics: how we read classical texts, what the reader's involvement with the text should be, and what part ideology plays (and did play) in both the formation and the reception of a text.Habinek's task, as he states it, is to study literature as a representation of society and an intervention in it (3). His overall aim is to assess the social function of Latin literature, a literature that was produced within a traditional aristocratic empire "by and for an elite that sought to maintain and expand its dominance over other sectors of the population through reference to an authorizing past" (3). As his title indicates (with "Politics" coming before "Literature"), he sets out to "politicize and historicize the reading of texts of classical Latin literature that are still too frequently regarded in purely formalistic and aesthetic terms" (4-5) by examining, chapter by chapter, a series of test cases or scenarios that embed Roman literature in its social, economic, and cultural context. This book is meant to offer the reader, then, a "historically engaged mode of reading" (5) by looking at intertexts of many sorts.Such an approach to literature belongs to the school of cultural-materialist studies, those critics who read and analyze literature as "ideological discourse and social institution" (5), and it draws from many schools of thought and disciplines, including Marxism, feminist theory, anthropology, political science, deconstruction, literary criticism, New Historicism, and Foucauldian theory. The genesis of Habinek's book was the close philological study of the "meaning and usage of specific Latin words and phrases in specific discursive contexts" (6). Thus he began with a close examination of the political basis of words but then broadened his lens to analyze textual systems and the construction of political identity. Habinek distinguishes himself from the semioticians and the formalists in his focus on the "interestedness" of textual utterances and the historical and political dynamics of the text. The particular kind of interestedness that Habinek zeroes in on is the Roman aristocratic elite and its anxieties about strategies for sustaining a moral and political hegemony.Habinek enters into a fray that has long simmered in the discipline of Classics but that boiled up into a full-scale battle with the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena. Habinek contends that Classical scholars' idealizing view of the ancient world (more Greece than Rome) and their isolation of Latin literature from Roman culture has allowed them to ignore "the social implications of their own practice" (10), a comfortable, ahistoricized position that militates [End Page 645] against reading Latin literature in a sociopolitical framework. If, for example, we read Ovid's exile poetry without acknowledging Ovid's contribution to Roman colonialism and his authorly assistance in constructing and disseminating an imperial discourse of domination, we risk imitating some famous scholarly forebears who "avoided the historical reality of Rome in order to actualize their own fantasies of the apolitical innocence of literature and literary studies" (14). Thus, Habinek sympathizes with Bernal's idea that "scholarship... is influenced by the scholar's sociopolitical background" (173, n. 2), and he urges us to follow Giambattista Vico, who privileged Roman literature and culture (over Greek), saw society and culture as something changing not fixed, and regarded language and cultural institutions as social constructs. Habinek contrasts Vico with figures like Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, who, in the German Romantic tradition, idealized Greece and firmly separated... (shrink)

A natural way of understanding (non-epistemic) looks talk in natural language is phenomenalist: to ascribe looks to objects is to say something about the way they strike us when we look at them. This explains why the truth values of looks-sentences intuitively vary with the circumstances with respect to which they are evaluated. But Mike Martin (2010) argues that there is no semantic reason to prefer a phenomenalist understanding of looks to “Parsimony”, the position according to which looks are (...) basic visible properties. He suggests a semantics for looks-sentences that explains their intuitive truth values and is compatible with Parsimony. I argue that there is semantic reason to prefer a phenomenalist understanding of looks to a parsimonious one since there is a simpler semantics compatible with a phenomenalist understanding of looks, but not with Parsimony. This semantics provides a better explanation of the relevant truth value distribution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ancient Quarrel Revisited:Literary Theory and the Return to EthicsJoseph G. KronickThe modern quarrel between theory and practice, like the ancient one between philosophy and poetry, is at once a practical one—at its heart is the question how we should live—and a pedagogical one—who or what is the proper teacher of virtue? Today, the quarrel is between theory and literature rather than between philosophy and poetry, a change that (...) has not been beneficial. The modern complaint against the abstractions of theory reflects a diminution in the quality of the argument. For the ancient Greeks, to ask about the virtuous life was to inquire into what it is to be human, for aretê, which is typically translated as "virtue," but is understood to mean "excellence" or "goodness," meant acting in accordance with what it is to be fully human. 1 The notion that "real issues," as one prominent theorist argues, belong to the realm of action and epistemological and ontological questions to the abstract realm of theory is a simplification of the more serious question of the relation of particulars to universals. It reverses the Platonic and Aristotelian hierarchy that makes thinking the highest form of activity. But something else is going on in this call to action: in denigrating thinking as abstract, it elevates doxa, opinion, in its place. Under the regime of doxa, two things occur: philosophy and poetry are looked upon as useless because utility becomes the criteria for measuring value, and singularity is looked upon with disdain, if it is, indeed, acknowledged at all, because to the extent the world as it appears is common to us all, doxa is not distinct or individual but uniform or the same. Philosophy and poetry share not only the stigma of being deemed useless, but they are dismissed as odd, singular, not common.This essay is concerned with the status of the singular in philosophy [End Page 436] and poetry. The ancient quarrel has not been settled, which may indeed be a good thing because the quarrel keeps alive the question, who is to speak for that which cannot be spoken of, the singular? Silence may be the appropriate response, yet to preserve the experience of that which resists language is the task of philosophy and poetry, hence the quarrel. A long tradition has it that the philosopher seeks universals, while the poet offers particular images of virtue, but at the heart of this argument over ethics is the question of how to account for the singular or unique. To do so, I turn to Socrates, whose singularity remains unaccounted for to this day.Socrates may be said to embody the very problem of the relation between philosophy and literature, for he left us no writings and exists for us primarily through the writings of Plato. Yet there is widespread acceptance of Plato's portrait of him, particularly as to Socrates' method, the elenchus, and his principle of the priority of definitions. However, Socrates' insistence upon the priority of definition is not an example of the philosopher elevating theory over experience but a practical issue involving the care of the self. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, moral and philosophical questions concerning the soul were as much the provenance of poetry as they were of philosophy. The search for truth is a practical matter concerning the conduct of life, but the Platonic philosopher wishes to give a rational account, or logos, that would link conduct to knowledge, whereas the poet's examples are bound to their representations. Nevertheless, to presume that Socrates was seeking a definition of virtue on the grounds that possession of the definition would translate into a good life is an absurdity, for he could never have sought after the knowledge of virtue if his mode of life depended upon the definition rather than on his character. 2The error is to accuse Socrates of placing abstract knowledge before virtuous conduct. When Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful, for instance, he does not reject the answer, "the beautiful is a beautiful woman," because it confuses a particular with a universal (when compared to the beauty of the gods, the woman is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 149 Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel: Interpretations of St. Thomas Aquinas in German Nominalism on the Eve of the Reformation. By JOHN L. FARTHING. Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988. Pp. x +265. $22.50 (cloth). In this hook, John Farthing examines the use made by the fifteenth· century theologian Gabriel Biel of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Contemplating the various (...) aspects of what he calls the ' dialogue ' between Biel and Aquinas {see e.g., pp. ix, 58, 191), Farthing wants to determine the extent and quality of Biel's knowledge and appropriation of Thomas's thought. Biel was a major shaper of contemporary theological opinion, who stood in the Occamist tradition in theology. Yet, although he himself shared Occamist presuppositions in theology and usually came out in various theological disputes on the Occamist side (pp. 5, 6, 8, 13-14, 16, 28, 33, 56, 122), as has long been recognized Biel often made a determined effort in his analyses to become acquainted with, and to repor·t, the thought of significant non-Occamist theologians, including Thomas Aquinas. Farthing thus justifies the present study by asking how precisely Thomas figures in the ' theological enterprise' of Gabriel Biel: Farthing wants to know how Biel used Aquinas and what Biel learned from his reading of Aquinas (pp. ix, 68 ). While Biel's significance for late fifteenth-century thought in itself justifies a study of his theological project and method, Farthing also believes that this hook on Biel and Aquinas is warranted on other grounds as well. Martin Luther learned much about scholasticism through his mastery of Biel's corpus. Hence, by establishing the quality of Biel's study and reporting of Aquinas on various theological questions, Farthing prepares the way for a future study of Luther's knowledge of Aquinas, a task however that he will leave to others (pp. x, 5, 7). Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel is divided into ten chapters. After a brief Preface in which he provides the rationale for this study and an opening chapter on Thomas Aquinas and the via moderna, Farthing looks in turn at Biel's reading of Aquinas in the subject areas "God and Creatures," "Christ and Mary," "The Human Condition," "Ethics," "Church, Ministry, and Worship," "Sacraments," "Justification," and "Eschatology; " the tenth chapter, entitled "Post Thomam," summarizes the principal results of Farthing's research. After listing in an early footnote the hooks on Aquinas which he has found especially useful on each subject, Farthing in each chapter examines Biel's citations of Aquinas on the topic at hand. As he pro- 150 BOOK REVIEWS ceeds through each chapter, Farthing is careful to indicate when Biel has misread or misquoted Aquinas, offering in these instances possible reasons for Biel's errors. The longest chapters are on ethics and on sacraments (Chapters Five and Seven), reflecting Biel's own greater interest in these aspects of Thomistic theology (pp. 103, 191). On the basis of this close study, Farthing offers the following general conclusions about Biel's reading of Thomas Aquinas. On the whole, Biel is accurate in his reporting of Thomas's thought on various questions : Farthing claims that " statistically speaking, it is exceedingly rare for Biel to lay himself open to the change of infidelity to Thomas's intention" (p. 193). Second, Biel exploits Thomas's expertise more on ' practical ' than on ' speculative ' matters; the greater number of Thomas citations in Biel have to do with ethics and practical issues associated with the sacraments (pp. 58, 94, 191, 195-96). Third, Biel holds Aquinas in esteem because he sees in Thomas a thinker who shares his interest in summarizing and reporting fairly the thought of other theologians. In this regard, Biel often uses Aquinas as one today would use a' theological encyclopedia' (the term, in fact, is Farthing's; see pp. 26, 132). Biel wants to provide for his own time as extensive as possible a spectrum of opinions on a given question ; to this end he takes over Aquinas's characterizations of different theological opinions on the question at hand. Fourth, while Aquinas's thought is usually fairly reported, Biel does occasionally misrepresent Thomas... (shrink)

Idea generation, the process of creating and developing candidate solutions that when implemented can solve ill-defined and complex problems, plays a pivotal role in creativity and innovation. The algorithms that underlie classical evolutionary, cognitive, and process models of idea generation, however, appear too inefficient to effectively help solve the ill-defined and complex problems for which one would engage in idea generation. To address this, these classical models have recently been redesigned as forward models, drawing heavily on the “predictive mind” literature. (...) These pose that more efficiency can be achieved by making predictions based on heuristics, previous experiences, and domain knowledge about what material to use to generate ideas with, and evaluate these subsequently generated ideas based on whether they indeed match the initial prediction. When a discrepancy occurs between prediction and evaluation, new predictions are made, and thus shaping what actions, and how these actions, are undertaken. Although promising, forward models of idea generation remain theoretical and thus no empirical evidence exists about whether such predictions and evaluations indeed form part of the idea generation process. To take a first empirical look at this, a mixed-methods study was conducted by analyzing people’s self-reports for the reasons of the actions that they take during an idea generation task. The results showed that predictions and evaluations are pervasive in the idea generation process. Specifically, switching between concept selection and conceptual combination and idea generation, as well as repeating idea generation based on earlier selected conceptual combination, and possibly (but to a lesser extent) concept selection and the repetition thereof, are likely to be driven by predictions and evaluations. Moreover, the frequencies of the predictions and evaluations that drive these actions influenced the amount of ideas generated, amount of concepts used, and within-concept fluency (the ratio of the amount of ideas generated per concept used). Therefore, the contribution of this paper is the first empirical evidence that indicates that the idea generation process is driven by both predictions and evaluations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Looking at Love an Ethics of VisionMieke Bal (bio)Kaja Silverman. The Threshold Of The Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.“The eye can confer the active gift of love upon bodies which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain,” writes Kaja Silverman in her most recent book, The Threshold of the Visible World. The sentence neatly summarizes her project. “The active gift of love” is the central concept (...) of this book and indicative of the utopian dimension of the theory of love she develops.With Lacan as her primary interlocutor, she sets out to answer a question of one of her students: “does psychoanalysis have a theory of love?” Strange as it might seem, psychoanalysis, so often associated with an excessive interest in sexuality, has not seemed to believe in love. Within the rigorous framework of a discipline that has no use for love and theorizes a bleak view of human nature, Silverman sets out to think through the questions that every parent is at a loss, yet needs, to address: what is love, how can choices in love be culturally encouraged, reoriented, or discouraged? Lacan’s texts on the imaginary order and the visual field, and the imaginary’s stubborn presence within the symbolic order, remain a key resource for those who, like Silverman, wish to understand and analyze, critique and refocus contemporary culture with an eye open to contradictions and complexities. 1The ground for love, the ability to love, is idealization, Silverman claims. Without idealization life would be unbearable, but idealizing is influenced by cultural norms and values that we internalize from early childhood on. Silverman’s project—”to articulate the psychic and aesthetic conditions under which we might be carried away from both ideality and the self, and situated in an identificatory relation to [culturally] despised bodies” [2]—is an attempt to put pressure on two elements of this interaction, “idealization” and “self,” but as she does so she acknowledges the force of the transhistorical, heavy, thick structure of the psyche that is hard, if not impossible, to change.This project, the development of an “ethics of vision,” forms a key part within the larger framework of Silverman’s work. In her first book, The Subject of Semiotics, she argues for and explains the semiotic status of psychoanalysis and the indispensable contribution of psychoanalysis to semiotics. The book remains a valuable handbook for an understanding of the importance of such divergent theorists as De Saussure and Benveniste, Kristeva and Peirce, Freud and Lacan, and the theorists of suture for a coherent and comprehensive theory of culture. One example that will speak to many a cultural analyst is the way Silverman disentangles, and then connects again, the often conflated conceptual pairs of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, and paradigm and syntagma, showing that the first pair is situated on the level of interactions between the signifier and [End Page 59] the signified, the second on the level of the signified, and the third on the level of the structuration of the signifier. 2With this book, then, Silverman lays the foundation for a psychoanalytical semiotic that is nevertheless radically cultural in orientation: no conflation or confusion of psyche and culture, no flattening of the one through the other, but an integration that demonstrates convincingly that what happens within a psyche is irrevocably cultural and that every cultural expression entertains a relationship with one or more psyches. The structural similarities and interactions between the two then seem self-evident. But how these interactions work is explained in a manner that renders them analyzable.Silverman is in the habit of raising questions that remain unanswered, and devoting her next book to them. The Subject devoted much attention and analytical energy to filmic images, notably through suture theory, in which the technique of “shot-reverse shot” is central. This technique consists of successive images: first of a character looking at something, and then of what that character presumably sees. This would be the cinematic equivalent of what narratology calls transitions of focalization, likewise a technique used to “suture” image to diegetic character in order to stimulate identification. As in narratology, the question then arises: what exactly... (shrink)

Kant attacks the Leibnizians on various fronts but the objection that occurs most frequently in his writings is that they are committed to an untenable conception of the relation between sensible and intellectual representations. They regard the difference between intellectual and sensible representations as a merely ‘logical’ difference that concerns their form, namely, their different degrees of distinctness, while in truth it is a difference in kind that concerns their nature, origin, and content. In the first part of this essay, (...) I provide a detailed reconstruction of what exactly this objection amounts to, and show why Kant takes this misconception to be so significant that he keeps coming back to it over and over again. The misconception is so significant because virtually all of the other mistaken doctrines of the Leibnizians can be traced back to it. Several commentators have argued that Leibniz is not guilty of the confusion of sensible and intellectual representations that Kant accuses him of. But this does not automatically clear him from all the other errors that Kant takes to be closely connected with this confusion. In the second part of this essay, I take a look at Leibniz's theory of confused perceptions and examine whether he is committed to one of these errors, namely, the view that we could learn something about things in themselves by experience if our senses were acute enough or our powers of 'disfusing' perceptions were strong enough. (shrink)

This paper looks at the situation first described by Dreyfus :369–378, 2002) in his seminal paper, in order to find out whether and, if so, to what extent the use of Internet in education is still characterized by anonymity and commitment in today’s social media and ‘post-truth’ era. Current form of web technology provides an occasion for us to rethink what the Press and the Public, two main Kierkegaardian themes, actually consist in. The very ease and rapidity of how (...) information is shared and the blurring of the line between journalists and consumers have made it very difficult to find where the Public actually is so that one can conform one’s own thoughts and beliefs to it. In addition, an effect of social media is that the Public does not seem to be monolithic, but has splintered into many smaller groups, each one overlapping with one another in a highly complex way. In Kierkegaard’s time the Press consisted of nothing more than a rather small number of newspapers, but now we have countless number of sources of information, so much so that it is almost impossible to see where the Press actually is. This situation has a way of diluting Kierkegaard’s contention that it is the Press that anonymized the people, rending them faceless and eliminating their individuality. Furthermore, the effect of Facebook is such that, not only does one still retain much of one’s commitment, but the commitment can be very passionate. As Petrik et al. have pointed out, it is possible for someone to be passionately committed to something while remaining very active on the Internet. This shows that the direction can go both ways. On the one hand, fragmenting the Public can go along with lack of commitment and other ills that Kierkegaard mentioned. On the other hand, fragmenting the Public, thereby creating many smaller groups existing in the online world can also bring about specific and well-directed commitments than would be possible if the Public remained a single monolithic entity. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s insistence on lack of commitment by the Public seems to foretell the current malaise of what is known as ‘post-truth’. For Dreyfus the Internet is ultimately responsible for this. Indeed, however, both lack of commitment and too much commitment seem to be both responsible. A way out of this is proposed where a commitment to rational and critical thought is needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius's Letter to the EphesiansRyan Patrick Budd"The man whose delight is in the Lord's teaching knows the art of sitting still in the right place."—Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical PoetryIn this essay, I attempt to supplement the better analyses of St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (Ign. Eph.) 14.1 through 15.3 with structural insights. The main fruit (...) of the analysis will be to affirm the "mystical" meaning of Ignatius's concept of "hearing Christ's silence": the mature believer, who truly understands Christ's word, will be able to hear the silence of Christ—meaning, to understand Christ's hidden and mysterious Godhead—because Christ dwells within the believer as in a temple. The essay will proceed in three sections: First, a review of the more substantive commentaries on "silence" in Ign. Eph. 14–15; second, a presentation of a potential structure of the passage and a commentary on what that structure, if correct, would yield; and third, a very brief confirmation of the findings by reference to themes in St. Paul's own Epistle to the Ephesians.Scholarly Commentary on Ignatius and "Silence"In discussing Ign. Eph. 14–15, scholars have come to a wide variety of views, for almost as many reasons, as to what Ignatius means when he says the following: [End Page 451]It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not be. Teaching is good, if the one speaking should do. There is, then, one Teacher, who "spoke and it came to be," and even the things he has done silently are worthy of the Father. The one truly hearing the word of Jesus can also hear his [Jesus's] silence, that he might be fully made, that he might act through what he says and be understood through his (the believer's) silence.(15.1–2)1There are, however, two predominant camps into which one could group the different scholarly opinions: the first camp holds that Ignatius merely is speaking about integrity, the correspondence between words and deeds;2 the second camp holds that he is enunciating a kind of Christian mysticism.3 Two prominent members of the second camp, Virginia Corwin and Gregory Vall, though quite distinct in their views of the bishop of Antioch, provide reasoning that I find decisive in favor of recognizing that Ignatius—while certainly emphasizing a true correspondence between words and deeds—carries the point further than simple moralizing.Virginia Corwin's "Reserve of Deity" and the Believer's Knowledge of ChristCorwin, in her analysis of the passage, points toward a "reserve" existing "behind" the visible works of Christ, which is to be identified with his invisible, and thus "silent," Godhead, which one who truly hears his word can also "hear." She acknowledges, however, that Ignatius first recognizes Christ as an example of a truly effective teacher due to the absolute [End Page 452] correspondence between his words and his acts. She writes, "Christ... is a teacher unlike most, since there is no contrast at all between his profession and his actions.... He has an absolute clarity and a complete lack of any hypocrisy."4 The result of this recognition is not to stress ethical integrity, however important: it is to argue that, because of the correspondence between Christ's words and his silent acts and his even more silent person, the one who knows his words can come to a deep, profound, and infallible knowledge of who he is, himself.Corwin argues that there is something more about this Teacher than the mere—though impressive—integrity of his message:But it is not only the integrity of the teacher that distinguishes him, but his unique power: "He spoke and it came to pass"; at these words to the minds of both the writer and the hearers of the letter must have occurred the image of the mighty acts of creation.... It is precisely because the words of Jesus are in a sense mighty acts that they must be seen in the larger perspective.5Which "larger perspective" she means... (shrink)

If the rhetorical and economic investment of educators, policy makers and the popular press in the United States is any indication, then unbridled enthusiasm for the introduction of computer mediated communication (CMC) into the educational process is wide-spread. In large part this enthusiasm is rooted in the hope that through the use of Internet-based CMC we may create an expanded community of learners and educators not principally bounded by physical geography. The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically (...) upon whether students and teachers are truly linked together as a``community'' through the use of Internet-based CMC. The paper uses the writings of Kierkegaard, and Hubert Dreyfus's exploration of Kierkegaardian ideas, to look more closely at the prospects and problems embedded in the use of Internet-based CMC to create "distributed communities" of teachers and learners. It is argued that from Kierkegaard's perspective, technologically mediated communications run a serious risk of attenuating interpersonal connectivity. Insofar as interpersonal connectivity is an integral component of education, such attenuation bodes ill for some, and perhaps many instances of Internet-based CMC. (shrink)

Computers have changed not just the way we work but the way we love. Falling in and out of love, flirting, cheating, even having sex online have all become part of the modern way of living and loving. Yet we know very little about these new types of relationship. How is an online affair where the two people involved may never see or meet each other different from an affair in the real world? Is online sex still cheating on your (...) partner? Why do people tell complete strangers their most intimate secrets? What are the rules of engagement? Will online affairs change the monogamous nature of romantic relationships? These are just some of the questions Professor Aaron Ben Ze'ev, distinguished writer and academic, addresses in this book, a full-length study of love online. Accessible, shocking, entertaining, enlightening, this book will change the way you look at cyberspace and love forever. (shrink)

The article looks at how the Internet can be imagined as a kind of psychedelic technology – in the sense of ‘manifesting’ new realities – through the lens of different ideas associated with Deleuze and Guattari. It considers a darker strain of their ideas and their reception, initially looking back to discussions from earlier cybertheory before taking as its case study the production of ‘microfascist’ subjectivities on the notorious website 4chan – arguably the point of origin of both (...) the ‘alt-right’ and ‘QAnon’. To unpack this case study, the article develops the idea of ‘weird mediation’ (in dialogue with Gilbert Simondon), as well as considering some ‘shamanic’ aspects from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought (in dialogue with Carlos Castenada), which together offer insights and warnings about the power of mind manifesting technologies. (shrink)

If code is law then standards bodies are governments. This flawed but powerful metaphor suggests the need to examine more closely those standards bodies that are defining standards for the Internet. In this paper we examine the International Telecommunications Union, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. We compare the organizations on the basis of participation, transparency, authority, openness, security and interoperability. We conclude that (...) the IETF and the W3C are becoming increasingly similar. We also conclude that the classical distinction between standards and implementations is decreasingly useful as standards are embodies in code – itself a form of speech or documentation. Recent Internet standards bodies have flourished in part by discarding or modifying the implementation/standards distinction. We illustrate that no single model is superior on all dimensions. The IETF is not effectively scaling, struggling with its explosive growth with the creation of thousands of working groups. The IETF coordinating body, the Internet Society, addressed growth by reorganization that removed democratic oversight. The W3C, initially the most closed, is becoming responsive to criticism and now includes open code participants. The IEEE SA and ITU have institutional controls appropriate for hardware but too constraining for code. Each organization has much to learn from the others. (shrink)

In his book The Conscious Mind David Chalmers introduced a by now familiar distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are those concerned with the question of how the mind can process information, react to environmental stimuli, and exhibit such capacities as discrimination, categorization, and introspection (Chalmers, 1996, 4, 1995, 200). All of these abilities are impressive, but they are, according to Chalmers, not metaphysically baffling, since they can all be tackled by means (...) of the standard repertoire of cognitive science and explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. This task might still be difficult, but it is within reach. In contrast, the hard problem—also known as the problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995, 201)—is the problem of explaining why mental states have phenomenal or experiential qualities. Why is it like something to ‘taste coffee’, to ‘touch an ice cube’, to ‘look at a sunset’ etc.? Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it at all feel like anything? Chalmers’s distinction confronts us with a version of the so-called ‘explanatory gap’. On the one hand, we have certain cognitive functions, which can apparently be explained reductively, and on the other hand, we have a number of experiential qualities, which seem to resist this reductive explanation. We can establish that a certain function is accompanied by a certain experience, but we have no idea why that happens, and regardless of how closely we scrutinize the neural mechanisms we don’t seem to be getting any closer at an answer. In his book, Chalmers also distinguished two concepts of mind: a phenomenal concept and a psychological concept. The first captures the conscious aspect of mind: Mind is understood in terms of conscious experience. The second concept understands mind in functional terms as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:18 HUME AND THE STANDARD OF TASTE David Hume's critical theories, although fragmentary, have drawn increasingly serious attention in the twentieth century, yet even in 1976 Peter Jones, in reassessing Hume's aesthetics, can describe one of the most substantial of his critical essays, "Of the Standard of Taste," as underrated. Jones praises it as "subtle and highly complex," but while I agree with that judgment I also find the (...) essay quite puzzling. I am struck by certain features which look like structural weaknesses and by what seem to be inconsistencies, even contradictions, in Hume's argument. But perhaps the gravest difficulty facing interpretation of this essay is the irony which Hume seems to use, for this raises the question of just how seriously we are to take some of the more conventional views contained in "Of the Standard of Taste." I can begin to illustrate my uneasiness by considering Hume's use of a tall tale from Don Quixote, Part II, chapter xiii. Hume introduces this in a lighthearted way as part of his definition of delicacy of taste. It is the story of Sancho Panza's two kinsmen, who are such sensitive judges of wine that they can detect the taint of iron and leather imparted to a hogshead by the presence in it of a key on a thong. Now there are some interesting differences between Hume's version of this tale and the original. For example, where Hume has the two tasters deliberate over their wine before pronouncing it good, except for the slight taste of leather or iron, Cervantes says the first merely tried it with the tip of his tongue and the second just sniffed it, without tasting any at all. Further, Hume says "both 2 were ridiculed for their judgment," but there is no such 19 reaction mentioned in the original. Lastly, Hume calls the cause of the taint of iron "an old key," where 3 Cervantes describes it as "little." In short, while in the original interest is in the sensitivity of the taste of Sancho' s kinsmen for its own sake, Hume's emphasis is more on the relation of their taste to that of other people. He makes the procedure of tasting the wine as normal as possible and he gives prominence to the reactions of other people. Hume both tones down the more fabulous aspects of the story, making it less extraordinary and hence a better starting-point for a generalization about taste, and makes more explicit the conflict of opinion about the wine. He is using the story not just to define delicacy of taste but also to relate it to the problem of aesthetic judgment and the standard of taste. This is confirmed by the application Hume makes of his example. First, he uses the analogy between physical and aesthetic taste to claim that delicacy in both consists of the ability to detect minute effects and make fine discriminations. But the crucial question is what serves, like the key on the thong in the story, to confirm to outsiders that a man's aesthetic judgment is in fact more delicate than his neighbours'. Hume's answer is "the general rules of beauty... to produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong; which justified the verdict of Sancho' s kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them" (273). But of course producing a general rule is not exactly like finding a physical key on a thong, and Hume's use of the word "avowed" here, which he repeats later, raises the difficulty of how the principles of art become accepted, and by whom. But, that apart, there is something odd about the discussion since the avowed principle is used, with support from examples, to 20 convince a bad critic that he is wrong, on the grounds that his judgment does not accord with the general judgment. This is the opposite of Sancho's story, in which his kinsmen were in a minority, derided, adds Hume, by the dull majority, and only vindicated by the discovery of the tainting key and thong. The aesthetic equivalent of... (shrink)

Day to day, we are used to living in a world of beings with well-defined edges. This world is ruled by dialectical modes of engagement that reinforce the individual being in the context of other beings. Concepts like the Freudian Other serve to confirm the place and the boundaries of a subject. Congruently, reaching beyond the reality, myths negotiate the relationship of the individual with the sublime. The dialectically conceived world does not provide a sufficiently complex conceptualization of our existence (...) today. In searching for an alternative ontology, I am looking at structures that place human and informational multiplicity at their core. The type of individuation arising from a complex system does not form a subject, but instead crystallizes as an entity akin to a demon. In order to interact with such forces, one turns to sorcerous methodologies, which facilitate the transgression into many. In exchanging the vertically conceived subject for a horizontally defined multiplicity, one enters into a pact with the demon. I am interested in artistic expressions of such alliance and the role of a network user as a sorcerer dealing with the demon. (shrink)

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps jurisprudes more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law[1]. But law is at least partially a social matter, its content at least partially determined by social practices. And how can something social and descriptive in this down-to-earth kind of (...) way be normative?[2] This is presumably a problem for any theory of law, but it is especially acute for legal positivism, according to which (roughly speaking) all there is to facts about legality are such descriptive social facts. If this is so, the thought goes, the task of accommodating the law’s normativity immediately becomes both more daunting, and more urgent[3]. Unfortunately, though, it is entirely unclear what the problem of the normativity of law is supposed to be. Indeed, I suspect that there is no one problem here, as different people seem to have in mind different problems when they use this unhelpful phrase[4]. At least one family of issues people seem to have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law is a host of issues pertaining to the reason-giving force of the law. The law, it is sometimes said, gives reasons for action, and a theory of law should accommodate this obvious fact. But even when we focus just on questions regarding the reason-giving force of the law (and from now on I will restrict myself to just those, leaving other things people may have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law for another occasion), it is still not clear what the problem is. Indeed, my main purpose in this paper is to make some progress in understanding the relevant question here. And my conclusion is going to be somewhat skeptical: Once we are clear on what reason-giving in general consists in, and on what reason-giving powers the law actually has, there is not much by way of a problem here that needs to be solved, not a deep and interesting phenomenon here that theories of law need to accommodate, and that therefore places adequacy constraints on plausible theories of the nature of law.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Emotion in Buddhist Philosophy (and a Close Look at Remorse and Regret)Maria HeimIt is an honor to guest-edit a special issue for the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy for its inaugural issue, and even more to be invited to write a somewhat longer article than is typically the privilege of the guest editor. It was thought that something of a broader statement of the state of (...) the field in this emerging subfield of philosophy might itself be useful in situating current work and aspirations for future endeavors.That the study of emotions in Buddhist philosophy is still in its infancy is somewhat surprising given that Buddhist texts offer 2,500 years of exceedingly fine-grained analyses and reflections on experience.1 It could be that scholars have been thrown off by the word "emotion" itself, given that the English term does not map easily onto Buddhist categories. No single term in any Buddhist language does exactly what "emotion" does. Of course, "emotion" does not map precisely onto premodern Western categories of experience (affections, passions, sentiments, and so on) either, and has a notably shallow history even in European contexts, dating in something like its current usage only to the early nineteenth century (see Dixon 2003 for this history). And if "emotion" fits only awkwardly with Buddhist categories, it should occasion no surprise that many of the debates and dichotomies preoccupying Western philosophy on emotions—is emotion affective or cognitive? Physical or mental? Socially constructed or universal? Are emotions feelings? Evaluations? Motivations?—ill fit the debates and discussions that Buddhist texts offer about experience. The modern [End Page 2] Western categories and terms of the discussion may well inhibit Buddhist philosophical participation in these debates.I have found that this predicament is best met by calling into question the putative universalism of the English term and the assumption that "emotion" names a natural or ontological category. Increasingly, philosophers and neuroscientists are casting doubt on the notion that emotion is a natural kind (Rorty 2004; Griffiths 2004; Barrett 2006, 2017). That emotion is not easy to distinguish from feelings, motives, moods, and propositional attitudes, and that lists of emotions, when elaborated, seem hardly to fall into a generic family of phenomena, suggesting that its boundaries and borders are not carved in nature. This has implications for how "emotions" are to be studied in the lab, as Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests; the natural-kind view "underlies the major questions, the experimental designs, and the interpretation of empirical findings that characterize emotion research as a domain of scientific inquiry," even while the empirical evidence increasingly suggests that this view is the "result of an error of arbitrary aggregation" (Barrett 2006). For reasons piling up in the empirical literature, it is coming to look less and less likely that the English term emotion carves nature at the joints.2This situation can help us shake free of "emotion" early on, even if we may not be able to part entirely with it. A special issue on "the philosophy of emotion" gestures toward the kinds of phenomena these papers take up, even if they vary in the extent to which they find "emotion" to be analytically useful when interpreting Buddhist texts. Indeed, stepping away from assumptions of English-language universalism clears the deck for looking at very different, but no less meticulous and reflective, ways of carving up experiences of the very sort we do get in Buddhist texts. The way forward, in my view, is to permit English words like emotion, affect, and feeling to open the door to the kinds of phenomena we might want to investigate. We can at the same time resist tightly defining what these English terms mean, defending the borders around them, or closely tethering Buddhist conceptions to them. Working with Buddhist categories and meta-categories suggests ways to treat experiences that are, from the ground up, different than the modern West. These in turn can interrupt its supposed universalism and offer fresh questions and interventions.For example, Emily McRae's paper in this issue on kleśas—dysfunctional mental states—offers a Buddhist intervention for how philosophers might reconfigure and aggregate experience differently... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 224-225 [Access article in PDF] Ross Harrison. Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth-Century Political Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. v + 281. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The title of Ross Harrison's book is taken from Macduff's line in Macbeth, "[c]onfusion now have made his masterpiece," in reference to the discovery of a murdered king. Regicide (...) was a particularly unsettling crime in the day of Shakespeare, as Harrison reminds us, since kings were often associated with divinity (2). And perhaps it was their obvious and fragile mortality, as witnessed by the killing of King Charles I, that served to further unsettle what had previously been taken for granted in the modern world—the very foundations of the state. Today, Jürgen Habermas informs us from the perspective of critical theory that we live in a "postmetaphysical condition," where we can no longer count on the apparatus of Christian natural law or Platonic Ideas to justify the state and its laws. Practically, the difficulty in Iraq of bringing together the various religious perspectives of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians, and others suggests that different religions or even varying interpretations of the same religion provide formidable barriers to the foundation of political systems. How do we bring people of different worldviews and perspectives together into one state? The great virtue of Harrison's book is the reminder that this is not a new problem. Rather, it resides at the core of the greatest challenges for political philosophy in any age. This challenge inspires what Harrison calls "some of the greatest and most important political philosophy ever written" (1).Thomas Hobbes is the first to receive extensive attention. Harrison provides a careful step-by-step analysis of Hobbes's reasoning in Leviathan. His affection for Hobbes is thinly veiled, as he parenthetically refers to Leviathan as "the greatest work of the greatest political philosopher" (62). Much of his account is standard, as he skillfully walks the reader from Hobbes's fascination with science to the sweeping authority of the sovereign. What is particularly worthy of note is his attention to the matter of foundations in Hobbes. Here his characterization reminds us of the eternality of Hobbes's central problem: "... how in a sceptical age to make statements of human reason that can depend on something fixed, or generally agreed" (64). Having found God superfluous to the question, according to Harrison, Hobbes ultimately employs prudence in relation to self-interest to be this fixed object. Since prudence—particularly its response to threats of violence—is the one element shared by all peoples, regardless of their religious or moral commitments, it makes the most sturdy foundation of political reasoning.The second object of extended attention is John Locke. And as was the case with his treatment of Hobbes, Harrison again looks to the foundations. As most readers of Locke are aware, the law of nature plays a central role in his thought, and if one is to get to the foundations of his politics, then one must unravel its mysteries. Locke makes solving these mysteries difficult for readers by denying the existence of innate ideas in the Essay. Locke makes his own task of grounding his theory difficult by doing just the same—denying the existence of innate ideas. Grounding natural law is made even more troublesome by his apparent appeals to these very same innate ideas on two occasions in the Second Treatise (§11, §136). It is perhaps in his own confusion that, according to Harrison, he "falls back, [End Page 224] after all, on revelation" (180). This is particularly unsatisfactory for Harrison, since revelation is characterized by the indeterminacy that led to the political conflict between Protestants and Catholics in modern England and eventually to the works of Hobbes and Locke in the first place.Shorter chapters are devoted to Grotius, Pufendorf, and the less-celebrated sixteenth-century figure, John Ponet. Ponet is found to appeal... (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, those (...) institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading (...) the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theology of Play and the Play of Theology in Thomas AquinasDavid L. Whidden IIISTUDENTS OF THOMAS AQUINAS have argued over many issues in the last 150 years or so; in fact, it is nearly impossible to get out of the very first question of the Summa Theologiae without entering into a century-long debate about the status of sacred doctrine as an Aristotelian science. We ponder whether theology meets (...) the requirements of a scientia and argue about just how to understand the task of theology in the face of Aquinas’s concern about theology as a scientia. Part of this ongoing argument is shaped by the philosophical and epistemological needs of theologians attempting to justify their positions in an academic world driven by the secular and scientific norms of the Enlightenment. Additionally, some interest in theology as a scientia is driven by the desire to provide a philosophically acceptable alternative to secular forms of reason—thus Leo’s XIII’s promotion of Thomistic philosophy.The interest in theology as a science was shaped by the historical work of Chenu in his influential articles on the topic and then by almost every other important Thomist in the last fifty years.1 Theology as a scientia is such a pressing topic that it would almost be fair to say that Thomists have developed their own scientia of theology as a scientia. [End Page 273]Beyond the modern and, perhaps, postmodern concerns driving this interest, there are good reasons to pay attention to Aquinas on the status of theology. If we focus on theology as a scientia, it is because Aquinas invites us to do so by taking up this question in one form or another at the beginning of his major theological syntheses. We are, after all, only following his lead and pondering with him just what we are thinking about, and how we are thinking, when we think about God.Within the Thomistic corpus there is, however, a minority report with regard to the status of theology. In his prologue to his commentary on Boethius’s Hebdomads, Aquinas looks at theology in a very different way, one that can supplement our understanding of sacred doctrine in its role as both an intellectual and an affective enterprise. In this commentary Aquinas journeys into a different territory and explores theology, not as a scientia, but as a kind of play—a play that evokes delight and pleasure in the one who pursues wisdom.My approach will be first to describe Aquinas’s theology with regard to regular play—the kind of recreational activities we all engage in, whether they are physical or verbal. He takes up the question of the morality of play in several places and in a way that will inform our understanding of what he means when he describes theology as play. With this understanding of regular play in place, we will then explore theology as play, based on the supposition that there is something analogical between regular play and theology as play. I will finish with some reflections on how this might contribute to our present understanding of theological work.IWhile he scatters comments about play across his corpus and mentions it in all of his theological syntheses, Aquinas gives sustained attention to play in two places: first, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, and second, in question 168 of the Secunda secundae (in the treatise on temperance) of the Summa theologiae. From the outset one will notice that one of [End Page 274] the difficulties in thinking about play with Aquinas is that the Latin word for play, ludo, is multivalent, difficult to translate, and so can sometimes mean recreational games, sometimes word play, and sometimes making fun of or deriding someone.2 Even the context does not always make it clear exactly how Aquinas is talking about play.In these two sustained treatments of play Aquinas is concerned with two main issues: first, the purpose of play; second, the morality of games and how they can be approached virtuously—with proper order. That is, he is concerned with the why and the how of games.Aquinas pursues these issues in his commentary... (shrink)

I personally ascribe tremendous importance to the problem of socialization and education: I know of no more important problem. The training of personnel equipped with a high level of specialized qualifications, a scientific worldview, and firm Communist convictions is one of the most important questions of our development. No amount of time is too much to give to its discussion, solution, and philosophical analysis. The convening of this kind of round table, at which representatives of various spheres of scholarship and (...) practice have assembled and at which it is possible to compare and harmonize the most diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary problem, is a very good undertaking. It would seem that this is the essential point of departure for discussing unsolved questions of education and socialization. But it is necessary to look ahead. One would wish to have something like a permanent conference of this kind, regularly functioning and planning its work. (shrink)

This book presents a thorough study and an up to date anthology of Plato’s Protagoras. International authors' papers contribute to the task of understanding how Plato introduced and negotiated a new type of intellectual practice – called philosophy – and the strategies that this involved. They explore Plato’s dialogue, looking at questions of how philosophy and sophistry relate, both on a methodological and on a thematic level. While many of the contributing authors argue for a sharp distinction between (...) sophistry and philosophy, this is contested by others. Readers may consider the distinctions between philosophy and traditional forms of poetry and sophistry through these papers. Questions for readers' attention include: To what extent is Socrates’ preferred mode of discourse, and his short questions and answers, superior to Protagoras’ method of sophistic teaching? And why does Plato make Socrates and Protagoras reverse positions as it comes to virtue and its teachability? This book will appeal to graduates and researchers with an interest in the origins of philosophy, classical philosophy and historical philosophy. (shrink)

According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, humans have evolved reasoning abilities for argumentative purposes. This implies that some reasoning skills should be universals. Such a claim seems to be at odd with findings from cross-cultural research. First, a wealth of research, following the work of Luria, has shown apparent difficulties for illiterate populations to solve simple but abstract syllogisms. It can be shown, however, that once they are willing to accept the pragmatics of the task, these participants can (...) perform at or near ceiling. Second, historical, sociological and anthropological research has been used to claim that some Eastern cultures have not developed argumentation. These claims are the result of oversimplifications and of a selective view of the data. A closer looks reveals instead very elaborate forms of argumentation, in Chinese culture particularly. Third, cross-cultural psychologists have carried out an extensive research program aimed at showing that Easterners do not rely on the principle of non-contradiction and that they use holistic rather than analytic thinking. A review of these experiments shows that no qualitative difference emerges in the way Easterners and Westerners deal with argumentation and that in the proper context both populations can easily have recourse to holistic or analytic thinking. It is possible to conclude from this critical review that the reasoning skills involved in argumentation seem to be universal even though they can be used in different ways in various cultural contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Metaphysics of Causality and NoveltyStephen BickhamI find myself in agreement with most of the points of Crosby's position that there are new things and new events in the world. Like him, I hold that determinists are mistaken, and I believe that time flows one way only. I appreciate Crosby's amendment of Whitehead's category of the ultimate from creativity to creativity/destructiveness or, translating Spinoza's term, nature naturing. And finally (...) I applaud his clever, and I think successful, argument that the production of novelty, rather than being incompatible with causal action, is, indeed, a requirement for any such process. Most of the meat of philosophy, however, lies not in agreements but in their contraries. While I do have significant disagreements with Crosby, I want to state at the beginning that these deal with issues in Philosophy that I find among the most perplexing, and so I hope I can expound them with at least a modicum of clarity.The major, underlying concern I have with Crosby's argument centers not on the concept of novelty nor on whether such occurs, but on the concept of causality. It is in relation to causality that Crosby attempts to prove his case on the existence of novelty. He maintains that not only is novelty not opposed to causality, but novelty itself is a necessary condition for causality to exist at all. Very importantly, I believe he proves his point. However, if causality is a totally confused notion, then, in my opinion, proving that novelty is necessary for causality to exist proves much less than Crosby intends. If I am correct, Crosby's argument is vitiated to a good extent because of its connection with causality at all.To see how this plays out, we can look at the simplest statement of this principle, "Everything that exists must have a cause." But note that this tries to make causality clear by invoking the frustrating and paradoxical notion of "thing." What is a thing, which is supposed to require a cause for its existence? [End Page 64] I present a piece of sandstone. Is it a thing? Here is a grain of sand on the surface of the piece. Is it a thing? The sandstone was taken from a ledge. Is the ledge a thing? The ledge is part of a deposit. Is the deposit of sandstone a thing? What happens to the causality principle if we try to eliminate (not an easy thing) this suspect category of thing (or something)?Maybe it is every event that must have a cause. But this gets us no closer to freedom from metaphysical quicksand. The first definition in my dictionary of event is, "Something that happens"(emphasis mine). And if we consider the notion of event on its own ground, so to speak, we run up against the following questions, among others: How much time is necessary for an event? Is a hiccup an event? A hiccup in the middle of a concert? Was the Chicago Fire an event? The battle of Antietam? The Civil War? The settling of the West? The Industrial Revolution?I am not concerned here with what is usually regarded as the essential puzzling issue of causality, that is, the nature of the causal relation. I am only struggling, and vainly I fear, with the preliminary issue of what the things are that are said to require causes. And I'm pessimistic that we will get very far in the task of specifying with precision just what these things—or occurrences or processes or fundamental entities or whatever—are.Perhaps another approach, a different angle, might be utilized. Must it not be that there is a fundamental truth or insight, or at least a strong, legitimate motive for holding that every thing (or event, etc.) must have a cause? This is a position held by virtually everyone at the level of common sense, and by the great majority, even, of skeptically minded philosophers. Rather than trying either to stipulate what the entities involved in causality are or wrestle with the issue of what the causal relationship itself is, let's try to understand why... (shrink)

“Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.”“Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”There is a lot at stake in the current and forthcoming debates over what/why/how the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the US were unpredictable. These debates are crucial to both our assessments of backward-looking culpability and in the related but even more socially important task of guiding decisions about how to rebuild society after the pandemic subsides. The more we treat the (...) harm as unexpected—a fluke—the more we bolster the argument that no major structural changes need to be made to the US health system. I come to this question as one of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What inspires action in Global Health?Daniel Palazuelos"Why do all of you want to go to the middle of nowhere and take care of the sickest people even though you won't have half the tools necessary to make the slightest difference?" he asks.I'm sitting in the Intensive Care Unit workroom enjoying one of those rare, calm moments during residency when this question suddenly breaks my peace. A co-resident, my friend (...) from Latin America, makes this inquiry without even looking up, as he clicks nonchalantly through some Internet pages. I look at him and try to understand him within his context; he was born and raised in [End Page E6] what is traditionally considered a "resource-poor setting," but through talent, hard work, luck and privilege he was accepted into one of the best residency programs in one of the best U.S. hospitals. Unprepared, I give some anemic responses about social responsibility and global citizenship.He looks at his screen and clicks on a couple of links. Suddenly, he turns to me and exclaims, "I get it! You guys are going because then you can put your PWAB on your CV!" I give him a blank look.He stands and goes over to the dry erase board to write: "PWAB—Picture With an African Baby."I'm amused for a moment, and then suddenly hurt. What does this mean? Is he questioning our intentions, our moral resolve? I look over to his computer and see that he's been flipping through the "Global Health Residency" pages of all the local residency programs, or the Facebook pages of colleagues who have recently returned from work abroad. My hurt morphs into incredulity—all the pages have a picture of a beaming, healthy doctor holding a beautiful, newly happy, previously sick, African baby. And then, the code bell goes off, and the admissions start. Reflection time is over.Years later, now that I have become a junior faculty member within the same residency program, I divide my year between global health projects in rural Mexico and Guatemala, the classrooms of a U.S. medical school, and the patient rooms of a teaching hospital. The number of undergraduate and medical students who approach me because they want advice about how to work in global health is staggering; their emails fill my inbox and their faces grace my office hours. External observers have even compared the unprecedented rise of this type of interest to "a veritable tsunami," and we often take for granted that this is because the field is "inspiring" (Mallampati & Heintz, 201, p. 22). We still don't know, however, what all this inspiration becomes once it touches down on-site. For many students, the experience with talented mentors on-site opens up for them a life-long career that aims to address the greatest challenges of our day. The PWAB, however, implies that for an important number of other students, global health is becoming a social capital commodity: an edu-vacation, something to make your mother proud, win a mate, maybe even just another mandatory rotation needed to spice up the application for a career in a highly competitive subspecialty.If students are the future of this field, then the way that global health educators like myself manage this issue may ultimately determine the objectives and scope of countless potential projects hoping to help the billions of people barely surviving abject poverty. I have a career in global health that is more than a hobby because of the clear vision and strong leadership of my mentors and our university (Farmer, 2011). When I was hired as faculty, they worked with me to find the right full-time equivalent (FTE) split so that I could both make a living as an attending, and also still have time to teach, think, research, and manage a project abroad pro bono. But it's from this point that my question begins: once the students are inspired, and the investment made, what inspires good, sustained, pragmatic action in global health?A big part of the answer to this question will depend on how we define global health. Global health is growing, but... (shrink)

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and the Making (...) of Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct a hypothetical genealogy of the U.S. national motto “in God we Trust” by comparing the juridical and theological concept of “depositum”. According to Philo of Alexandria, the deposit was the most sacred institutional act of ancient social life, because it had both a religious and a sociological function. According to the Epistulae to Timothy the term ‘deposit’ defined the legacy of the Christian faith of which the disciple of St. Paul was entrusted. (...) His task was to manage this legacy and to spread it among the others. Hence the deposit defined at the same time a contract based upon good faith and a symbolic space of “security”, namely a container that protected an unchangeable content: the oral knowledge transmitted by Christ to the Apostoles and, indirectly, to St. Paul. The depositum was also the procedure through which the word of Christ would acquire all its potential. On the other hand, the contract defined as “depositum” by Roman law was characterized by a centrality of the so-called bona fides and by the distinction between regular and irregular deposit. This means that the principle of good faith should lead the conducts of the manager whose task is exactly to look after an object called Christian faith. How can we interpret the word ‘trust’ according to the juridico-political remarks? The purpose of this chapter is to explain all these related issues. (shrink)

A descriptive norm is a behavioral rule that individuals follow when their empirical expectations of others following the same rule are met. We aim to provide an account of the emergence of descriptive norms by first looking at a simple case, that of the standing ovation. We examine the structure of a standing ovation, and show it can be generalized to describe the emergence of a wide range of descriptive norms.