Descartes notoriously characterizes substance in two ways: first, as an ultimate subject of properties ; second, as an independent entity. The characterizations have appeared to many to diverge on the definition as well as the scope of the notion of substance. For it is often thought that the ultimate subject of properties need not—and, in some cases, cannot—be independent. Drawing on a suite of historical, textual, and philosophical considerations, this essay argues for an interpretation that reconciles Descartes's two characterizations. It (...) proposes that both characterizations invoke a type of independence that obtains just in case there is no relation to another entity that holds by the nature of the entity in question. Even though the ultimate subject of properties is sometimes not independent in other respects, it satisfies this independence-by-nature condition. (shrink)

This book tells the story of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. It will prove valuable to philosophers, scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy.

Descartes’s metaphysics posits a sharp distinction between two types of non-finitude, or unlimitedness: whereas God alone is infinite, numbers, space, and time are indefinite. The distinction has proven difficult to interpret in a way that abides by the textual evidence and conserves the theoretical roles that the distinction plays in Descartes’s philosophy—in particular, the important role it plays in the causal proof for God’s existence in the Meditations. After formulating the interpretive task, I criticize extant interpretations of the distinction. I (...) then propose an alternative at whose core is the idea that whereas the indefinite is a structural, iterative notion, designating the absence of an upper bound, the infinite is an ontic notion, signifying being in general, or what is, without qualification. (shrink)

Many historical and philosophical studies treat infinity as an exclusively quantitative notion, whose proper domain of application is mathematics and physics. The main aim of this paper is to disentangle, by critically examining, three notions of infinity in the early modern period, and to argue that one—but only one—of them is quantitative. One of these non-quantitative notions concerns being or reality, while the other concerns a particular iterative property of an aggregate. These three notions will emerge through examination of three (...) central figures in the period: Locke, Descartes, and Leibniz. (shrink)

Introduction: Dummett's Key Traits Following what has been suggested in the preface, in order to understand Dummett's perspective as fully as possible ...

In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1922 - the annus mirabilis of modernism - alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's The Garden Party and Woolf's Jacob's Room. Bertolt Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau's Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and music (...) by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein's later ideas - in their fragmented form as well as their “ear-opening” contents - deliver it most precisely. Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. Yet it would be wrong to argue that Wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. For Wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. It needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. It is such a vision of the linkage between Wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume. (shrink)

This study examined the representation of women in the world press, through the coverage of two very different events during 1995: The 50th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, and the 4th Conference on Women in Beijing. Using the first level of the agenda-setting approach as well as the second level we analyzed the content of more than 10,000 stories which appeared in the news around the world. The findings show that women's (...) presence is still not felt in the world's press, that is, they are not there in great frequency or quantity, regardless of the event, and even when they are present, they are associated more with the private than with the public sphere. Second level agenda-setting research would suggest that this might simply reinforce existing stereotypes. (shrink)

The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04–2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI pattern, as evidenced by the accelerating growth curves. However, there was much semantic variability among (...) the 10 indirect objects, and most had no semantically similar antecedents in the same construction. The results indicate that facilitation of learning of early syntax is most probably not mediated by semantic similarity. (shrink)

During the last 20 years, philosophers from different quarters and with very different approaches have begun to theorize human rights in an outpouring of authored and edited books and journal articles. In addition, among policy makers and in the legal arena—the so called workings fields of human rights—there have been noteworthy investigations of human rights that tackle philosophical issues. In this book, Anat Biletzki brings a systematic approach to the multitudinous philosophical analyses of human rights, offering a cohesive overview (...) and analysis of this diverse but now very active field. She explores both the conceptual and historical treatments of human rights and the roots of its practice and examines its derivation from classical theories of rights all the way to existing uses. The book is "contemporary" in two senses: it investigates the most current human rights issues and it addresses emerging criticism of human rights, now arising in various sectors. A long introduction provides background information on the history of human rights, a synopsis of modern-day documents, and an articulation of basic questions. This is followed by a section on the philosophical groundings of human rights, proceeding from a philosophy of rights, to specific theories of human rights, to the questions of universalism vs. relativism. The third sections focuses on specific philosophical issues in human rights, including cultural relativity, economic rights, women’s rights, group, indigenous, and minority rights, security, and sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. And a final section on critiques of human rights has separate chapters on postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, and human rights discourse and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) 59-73 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Hobbes: Telling the Story of the Science of Politics Anat Biletzki Science and storytelling First, the traditional commonplaces: Science does not tell stories. Disciplines purporting to be sciences eschew their storytelling aspects in favor of axiomatic, deductive, demonstrative, or whatnot essentials of science. Those deeming the story itself essential give up (happily or less willingly) the label (...) of science and locate themselves under other institutionalized labels such as Humanities. 1 Then there are the disciplines that wobble on the fence, desiring, for various reasons that are more readily analyzed by historical sociologists, the epithet of Science, yet not always achieving such recognition. Chief players in this game are history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. And if my rendition of this conflict between pretensions and performance seem blatantly pejorative, let me rephrase it: their own practitioners--historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists--believe the issue of their scientific status a problem of no small import. It is, indeed, the question "Are we a science?" that figures in the most fundamental debates concerning the purpose, essence, and methodology of these disciplines.By use of a case study, I will try to support a seemingly conciliatory thesis: social sciences are, by definition and therefore of necessity, on the fence. On one side of the fence lies Science, the monolithic framework that enslaves its method to a grand purpose--knowledge of reality. On the other lies Humanism, a far less easily defined area about which I would hesitate to use the word framework, but through which one meets a no-less-grandiose focus--knowledge of the human. Why then does it seem natural to foster storytelling on the humanistic side of the fence? Or, alternatively, one can ask about the "why not" of narrative in the sciences.Narrative is storytelling; and stories are about heroes; and heroes conduct their actions in a place through a time. So these three building blocks-- [End Page 59] hero, time, and place--point to a pattern of knowledge that, it seems obvious, cannot, and definitely should not, belong to science in its idealized form. There is, of course, a stronger thesis deriving from the intricacies in (post?)modern discussions: that even the exact and natural sciences use narrative while still remaining sciences. This idea--that science does countenance narrative and, indeed, may even use it beneficially--thereby becomes forceful, since science, with its universalistic airs, pretends to ignore heroes in specific times and places.What of the social sciences? Their claim to science is based on that same universalistic end coupled with an attempt to develop a methodology to fit that end. The rub lies in the subject matter of the social sciences, the human being and society. A strictly positivistic view of such subject matter, or even a generally scientific one, must abstract from any and all "humanistic" traits of the human being and society and objectively treat them on a par with any other "neutral" (some might say, even material) object of research. My weak thesis merely claims that such abstraction is inherently impossible and, furthermore, that an attempt at such abstraction waylays the ultimate end of these "sciences." 2 Yet, such a thesis must contribute more than it eliminates. If the social sciences cannot live up to the original scientific ideal of one side of the fence, and if their product can be valued as more than (or at least different from) a mere story on the other side, a more fruitful characterization than just "sitting on the fence" is called for. It is here that narrative makes its essential contribution: narrative is that pattern of knowledge which can encompass the social sciences, given their necessary turn to the human being. Looked at from the receiving end, the social sciences have no option but to turn to narrative in order to buttress their scientific ideal of explanation. The phenomena they claim to explain are human and social phenomena and, as such, cannot be distanced from narrative. 3I shall try to illustrate my... (shrink)

This essay defends two theses regarding the explanation, or ground, of modality in the early modern period. First, for philosophers in the period, essences ground a range of important modal facts. Second, as the period progresses, we witness increased skepticism about certain modal facts, due to a growing skepticism about the scope or existence of essences. These theses are supported by examination of three case studies: Descartes’ treatment of substance and mode (which forms the core of his ontology); Malebranche’s treatment (...) of causation (which bears on his defense of occasionalism); and Locke’s treatment of necessary connections among properties (which is related to his accounts of individuals and kinds). It is shown that in each case, claims about necessity and possibility take center stage, and that in each case, the status of these claims hinges on the status of claims about essences. (shrink)

In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language development, unusual in its combination of Chomskian linguistics and learning theory. Stimulating and accessible, it is an important new work that challenges many of our usual assumptions about syntactic development.

My aim in this chapter is to survey some of the most important developments in thinking about essence in the early modern period, highlighting ways in which thinkers in the period gradually depart from the medieval Aristotelian tradition. In this tradition, essence is thought of as selective, explanatory, and kind-determining. Whereas in the beginning of the early modern period some figures (such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Conway) still adhere to this traditional view, later figures (including (...) Benedict de Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, and John Locke) reject it. (shrink)

This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advance a modality of sustainable film theory and practice we call “permacinema.” As an alternative approach to looking and labour, permaculture exhibits a suite of cinematic concerns, and offers a model for cinematic creativity that is environmentally accountable and sensitive to multispecies entanglements. Through the peaceable gestures of cultivation and restraint, permacinema proposes an ecologically attentive philosophy of moving images in accordance with permaculture’s three ethics: care (...) of earth, care of people, and fair share. We focus on work by Indigenous artists in which plants are encountered not only as raw material or as aesthetic resource but as ingenious agents and insightful teachers whose pedagogical and creative inputs are welcomed into the filmmaking process. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies we hope to situate permacinema in the wider project of cinema’s decolonization and rewilding. (shrink)

Privacy is a sociocultural perception, depending on the dominant values of a society, sociocultural heritage, and contemporary technological developments. This article focuses on privacy perception among adolescents based on a European school survey (PRACTIS), and presents comparative results of an exploratory study conducted among over 1,428 adolescents in six countries. The results reveal that adolescents attribute high value to privacy and are prepared to actively oppose if an online corporation is challenging their personal interests. However, they tend to trade off (...) privacy for other perceived benefits. Adolescents’ privacy perception and data protection are affected by cultural diversity, age, gender, and most of all their various social network sites activities and their attitudes toward importance of sharing and controlling personal information. (shrink)

This article situates Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Animal Side in the continuum of Continental philosophy on animality and animal ontology. Exploring Bailly’s linking of thought and vision and his insistence on the pivotal role of animals in the emergence of European art and image-making, I argue that the political dimension--a central implication of Bailly’s text--calls for further attention and development. This points to a broader concern within contemporary Continental theory on the subject of animals: the need to connect new human and (...) animal ontologies with ethical, political, and normative models for the effective articulation of post-anthropocentric collectivities. (shrink)

the meditations on first philosophy presents us with an alleged proof for the existence of God that proceeds from the existence of an idea of an infinite being in the human mind—an idea of God—to the existence of God himself. Insofar as we have an idea of an infinite being, an idea with “infinite objective reality,” we can legitimately ask whence it came to us. The only possible cause of this idea, claims Descartes, is an infinite being, namely, God. The (...) occurrence of just this idea in the proof is essential. In fact, Descartes maintains that any such causal proof for God’s existence crucially relies on this idea: “it seems to me that all these proofs based on his effects are reducible to a single one; and also .. (shrink)

El presente artículo explora los retos políticos que plantea la democracia directa. En el pensamiento político de Locke la democracia representativa consiste en el compromiso de mantener la estructura económica de laisser-faire, mientras que la democracia directa rousseauniana que demanda homogeneidad acaba por no ser muy democrática. La cuestión en juego es si puede haber un régimen político capaz de acoger tanto una participación inclusiva como la diversidad existente de los participantes. Se presentan dos respuestas diferentes a esta pregunta a (...) través de las obras de Jean-Luc Nancy y Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

In this article I suggest a way of overcoming the traditional dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by pointing at some similarities between apparently disparate philosophical approaches, viz. those of Michael Dummett and Jürgen Habermas. The comparison revolves around the so-called 'paradox of analysis', which poses a dilemma concerning philosophical propositions: these are allegedly shown to be either trivial or unsecured. Both Dummett and Habermas offer ways out of the dilemma, through recognition of the intersection of analysis with life. A (...) transcendentally characterized conception of language is conceived by both as the only way to overcome the haunting objective -subjective distinction. Thus they offer fresh insights into the nature of meaning and truth, and the place these occupy within philosophical systems. Both philosophers take the notions of justification and procedural rationality to be primary in the order of philosophical explanation. Meaning is not conceived in terms of representation and truth conditions, but in terms of validity claims. Truth is not viewed as independent and static, but as historically conditioned and constantly unfolding. As a result, even the statements of logic, and certainly those of philosophy, find a place between the alleged emptiness of analyticity and the robust empirical character of science. This common ground represents, I believe, one of the new faces of post-analytic -and hence also post-continental -philosophy. Parts of it are shared by other contemporary philosophers, such as Derrida and Brandom. What marks this new Weltanschauung is the way it surpasses the current eliminativist trends in philosophy. (shrink)