Feasts and consumption are closely intertwined - indeed, a celebration can hardly be imagined without a certain amount of food and drink. However, the underlying decisions of what is consumed, who presents the goods and who is allowed to consume certain goods are important issues for the members concerned and reflect the expectations, identity and social fabric of the group. An analysis of the different kinds of consumption may therefore provide insight into processes of communication and sociation in festivals beyond (...) the surface of pure commensality. This paper examines the various forms of consumption in ancient Roman festivals and the social implications linked to each of them, ranging from a single person’s conspicuous consumption to the donation of goods by a generous individual (euergetism), from the (ideal) meal amongst equals to collective meals and public festivals, where different mechanisms of the distribution of food, drink and other goods offered the possibility to acknowledge, ignore or reverse the social status of the participants. (shrink)

Hermann Weyls "Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft" erschien erstmals 1928 als Beitrag zu dem von A. Bäumler und M. Schröter herausgegebenen "Handbuch der Philosophie". Die amerikanische Ausgabe, auf der die deutsche Übersetzung von Gottlob Kirschmer beruht, erschien 1949 bei Princeton University Press. Das nunmehr bereits in der 8. Auflage vorliegende Werk ist längst auch in Deutschland zum Standardwerk geworden.

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical (...) discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche. (shrink)

The Third Reich conceived of life as a struggle (Kampf) between competing forces. This view of life was based on a growing emphasis in German philosophy and culture upon voluntarism, or the power of the will as the ultimate metaphysical reality. For these Germans, God was dead. There was no transcendent or universal standard to provide life with direction, no grand design or rationality to explain the succession of events, only the groundless and endless struggle of forces competing to assert (...) their power and extend their dominion. These Germans found early inspiration for this idea in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, who spoke of life as possessing its own autonomous power in each of its individual members or monads. They saw this concept develop and become the one metaphysical truth in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche with their emphasis upon the “will to live” and the “will to power.” The two philosophers exerted particular influence upon the Nazis, who saw them as early exponents of their ideology. This influence is important in understanding the fundamental mentality of the Nazis, even if the metaphysics of voluntarism contained other possible forms of interpretation beyond what the Nazis represented in word and deed. To understand the relationship between Nazism and voluntarism, the article develops the philosophical background from Leibniz to Nietzsche and relates this development to its Nazi expression in Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Alfred Bäumler, and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

O apontamento-Lenzerheide, de 7 de junho de 1887 é considerado um texto central sobre o entendimento de Nietzsche a respeito do niilismo. Ele o redigiu num trem, na estação entre Chur e Sils Maria, depois de ter concluído o quinto livro de A Gaia Ciência, seu mais corajoso, profundo e sereno livro de aforismos, e, portanto, antes de ter redigido em Sils Maria, em poucas semanas, as três dissertações de Para a Genealogia da Moral. Entre ambas as coisas, parece que (...) ele tentou tornar claro para si o todo de seu pensamento, e, nesse processo, particularmente a conexão dos temas suscitados em Assim Falou Zaratustra: os temas do niilismo, do além-do-homem, da vontade de poder, do eterno retorno do mesmo e da ordem de escalonamento (Rangordnung). Na maioria das vezes, isto foi compreendido de um modo tal que Nietzsche, com isso, aproxima-se mais fortemente de um “sistema” como, em particular, Alfred Baumler e Martin Heidegger tentaram construí-lo. A nova edição do espólio de Nietzsche, na transcrição diferenciada da Seção IX da edição completa das obras de Nietzsche permite conhecer mais precisamente como Nietzsche se orientou em seu pensamento e como elaborou, passo a passo, seus pensamentos. Neste estudo, o apontamento de Lenzerheide é lido tendo em vista o processo de orientação que nele se realiza, e são tornadas claras as decisões de orientação que Nietzsche toma de parágrafo para parágrafo. Ao final, não resulta daí nenhum sistema, mas um distanciamento da “magia do extremo”, que Nietzsche primeiramente segue, ao longo de muitos parágrafos. Nietzsche medita (besinnt) sobre os pontos extremos de seu filosofar, e os retoma. Ele só faz isso aqui, no apontamento-Lenzerheide. Isso significa que, também com o niilismo, tem-se que viver comedidamente (maßvoll). (shrink)

Using relevant encyclicals issued over the last 100 years, the author extracts those principles that constitute the underpinnings of Catholic Social Teaching about the employment relationship and contemplates implications of their incorporation into human resource policy. Respect for worker dignity, for his or her family's economic security, and for the common good of society clearly emerge as the primary guidelines for responsible human resource management. Dovetailing these three Church mandates with the economic objectives of the firm could, in essence, alter (...) the firm's nature because profit motivations would be constrained by consideration for worker and societal welfare. Integration of Church teaching with current corporate goals should therefore impact greatly on a variety of human resource policies. (shrink)

The proto-code of ethics and conduct for European nurse directors was developed as a strategic and dynamic document for nurse managers in Europe. It invites critical dialogue, reflective thinking about different situations, and the development of specific codes of ethics and conduct by nursing associations in different countries. The term proto-code is used for this document so that specifically country-orientated or organization-based and practical codes can be developed from it to guide professionals in more particular or situation-explicit reflection and values. (...) The proto-code of ethics and conduct for European nurse directors was designed and developed by the European Nurse Directors Association’s (ENDA) advisory team. This article gives short explanations of the code’ s preamble and two main parts: Nurse directors' ethical basis, and Principles of professional practice, which is divided into six specific points: competence, care, safety, staff, life-long learning and multi-sectorial working. (shrink)

My goal is to define intending. I defend the view that believing and desiring something are necessary for intending it. They are not sufficient, however, for some things we both expect and want (e.g., the sun to rise tomorrow) are unintendable. Restricting the objects of intention to our own future actions is unwarranted and unhelpful. Rather, the belief involved in intending must be based on the desire in a certain way. En route, I argue that expected but unwanted consequences are (...) not intended, examine the two senses of "desire," distinguish intending from being willing, and relate intending to a variety of other propositional at? titudes. (shrink)

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, (...) a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)

This paper addresses problems related to transferring market concepts to non-market domains. More specifically it is about fallacies following from the use of the commodity concept in environmental valuation studies. First of all, the standard practice tends to misconstrue the ethical aspects related to environmental choices by forcing them into becoming ordinary trade-off problems. Second, the commodity perspective ignores important technical interdependencies within the environment and the relational character of environmental goods. These are all properties that have made many such (...) goods escape the commoditisation pressure of markets in the first place. Further, it is shown that these interdependencies are the source of some of the ethical dilemmas observed. Finally, inherent characteristics of the environment tend to make the concept of the margin, so indispensable to economic calculus, either difficult or irrelevant to define. The commodity 'fiction' twists the perception of the environment from systems preservation to items use or transformation. This is a problem of increased importance as we approach potential systems perturbations. (shrink)

Moral education through service learning at post-secondary level is an important but under-researched field. Most existing studies center on its learning outcomes like academic progress, personal development, communication, and leadership skills, with only a few evaluating the moral development of college students participating in service-learning projects. The lack of study on moral development in service learning indicates a need for clarification of the theoretical underpinnings of service learning, John Dewey's ideas on moral growth, in particular his model of moral imagination (...) and the implications thereof, for current service-learning research and practice. We argue that Dewey's work here can help strengthen .. (shrink)

Because metaphysics aims for absolute generality, its primary job is to tell us what are the fundamental particulars, of which one may say that is ultimately all there is, and yet be assured of an unabridged version of reality. It should be clear that such a search for the fundamental particulars is totally different from the enterprise of determining which particulars are basic from the point of view of particular-identification, which though it has recently been labeled "metaphysics," albeit "descriptive metaphysics," (...) might less confusingly be called "descriptive epistemology.". (shrink)

As is well known, some paradoxes arise through inadequate analysis of the meanings of terms in a language, an adequate analysis showing that the paradoxes arise through a lack of separation of an object theory and a metatheory. Under such an adequate analysis in which parts of the metatheory are modelled in the object theory, the paradoxes give way to remarkable theorems establishing limitations of the object theory.Such a modelling is often accomplished by a Gödel numbering. Here we shall use (...) a somewhat different technique in axiomatic set theory, from which we shall reap a few results having the effect of comparing the strength of various axiom schema of comprehension for sets and classes. Similar results were obtained by A. Mostowski [7] using Gödel numbering. (shrink)

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of (...) the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume. (shrink)

In order to cure the social sciences of many of their inveterate diseases, it seems to me extremely important and useful to support and develop in some measure A.S. Tsipko's ideas on the doctrinal preconditions of our difficulties and failures in the building of socialism, ideas that have provoked such wide-ranging responses.

The paths or ways to the transcendental reduction are a pivotal phenomenological notion in Husserl’s philosophy. The metaphor of path, in fact, alludes to the demonstrative proofs of transcendental phenomenology. Nonetheless, Husserlian scholarship has not yet been able to end the disputes surrounding this topic, and as a result, competing interpretations continue to prevail. Since existing theories about the paths have not yet been cataloged or analyzed in their global context, I intend to classify the main existing theories about the (...) paths and evaluate the trend established by Iso Kern. Thus, this paper answers the following questions: how many kinds of theories about the paths are there? And, how plausible is the trend and approach initiated by Kern? In order to evaluate each theory, I will compare the interpretation with its exemplary cases. The key contribution of this investigation is therefore twofold: to distinguish with unequivocal concepts the two main trends of hermeneutical theories in play and to evaluate the plausibility of the aforementioned Kernian one. The paper also attempts to show that the hermeneutical approach initiated by Kern has no contextual examples for its conceptual scheme and should consequently be abandoned in favor of an alternative solution. (shrink)

Purpose. To examine the existential anthropology of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in order to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing the universal-spiritual, as human in human being, apart from the individual-existential in him, and to reveal the hierarchical correlation of biosocial, existential and spiritual spheres in personality. Theoretical basis. Within existential philosophy the author differentiates two separate traditions and proceeds from the insufficiency of the distinction of existential sphere, proposed by phenomenological tradition, showing the necessity of its correlation with the (...) spiritual sphere as a sphere of humanity, proposed by non-phenomenological tradition of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski. Originality. The author presents the anthropological conception of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in which human personality is understood as unity of individual-existential and universal-spiritual, which requires a special trans-empirical field of culture, which contains senses, images and symbols of humanity. Also, the author presents the recent developments of existential thinkers in distinguishing existential and spiritual dimensions, both not reducible to the physical and social dimensions. Conclusions. In both existential traditions, the specifically human was founded as a trans-biological and trans-social phenomenon, which appears as indefinable and non-predetermined. But in first tradition, humanity is understood as an existence, as a unique individuality, "project", variant of humanity, equivalent to other variants, and universal is understood as a community of human condition in the world. While in the second tradition, the universal is understood as spiritual. Thus, horizontal level of our private existence, as the process of movement from birth to death, is supplemented by vertical of human, universal ideals and images. Humanity appears as a task, on the way to which human being transcends beyond the limits of his individual "self" to the "super-individual", through inclusion into spiritual community, into universal culture. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the functional anatomy of volition, as revealed by modern brain imaging techniques, in conjunction with neuropsychological data derived from human and non-human primates using other methodologies. A number of brain regions contribute to the performance of consciously chosen, or ‘willed', actions. Of particular importance is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , together with those brain regions with which it is connected, via cortico-subcortical and cortico-cortical circuits. That aspect of free will which is concerned with the voluntary selection (...) of one action rather than another critically depends upon the normal functioning of DLPFC and associated brain regions. Disease, or dysfunction, of these circuits may be associated with a variety of disorders of volition: Parkinson's disease, ‘utilization’ behaviour, ‘alien’ and ‘phantom’ limbs, and delusions of ‘alien control’ . Brain imaging has allowed us to gain some access to the pathophysiology of these conditions in living patients. At a philosophical level, the distinction between ‘intentions to act', and ‘intentions in action’ may prove particularly helpful when addressing these complex disturbances of human cognition and conscious experience. The exercise and experience of free will depends upon neural mechanisms located in prefrontal cortex and associated brain systems. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructing Constructivism” by Hugh Gash. Upshot: The concept of “constructivist teaching” seems unattainable for two reasons: a philosophical and an empirical one. Also, Hugh Gash’s survey is not so much about radical constructivism in education, but a review of different connected ideas labeled “constructivism” that have dominated the educational field.

Open peer commentary on the article “Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design” by Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace & Joyce Yee. Upshot: The experimental conference format described by Durrant et al. is intended to create an open platform for dissemination and knowledge creation. The field of open design, in which designers create structures to support creative action by others, offers relevant insights and alternative approaches. For example: while it is logical to see openness as open (...) choice, it can be productive to instead think of openness as constructed through a balance of structure and choice. (shrink)