In his magnum opus, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), Charles Taylor gives an exhaustive and teleologically interpretive history of the modern self. He, in fact, is in search of the core of the modern identity. By ‘identity’ Taylor means the ensemble of the understanding of what is to be a ‘human agent’, a ‘person’, a ‘self’. Taylor in generating the ontology of the self is greatly inspired by the understanding of Dasein in Heidegger. This paper (...) also focuses on how Taylor uses Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the self in several ways to give to modernity a base that is not Cartesian. Taylor’s central argument is ‘how the assertion of the modern individual has spawned an erroneous understanding (identity) of the self’, where one experiences a loss of horizon. He has turned our attention, more than anyone else, towards the communitarian constitution of the self, and pointed out the limitations of insights within liberal individualism. For Taylor, as for early Heidegger, the self is not neutral or atomic. The self exists only in terms of questions and constitutive concerns, and it is not amenable to arbitrary determination, but can be made sense of only in terms of its life as a whole at any moment. (shrink)

Fourfold is thought to be a defining theme of Heidegger’s later thought, and yet it remains to be one of the most controversial notions in Heidegger scholarship. Interpreting the fourfold has been a challenging issue. Some of them dismissed it as having no real philosophical weight, despite its overarching presence in many of Heidegger’s later literature. Some of them tried to interpret it without giving due attention to the intricacies at hand. In this paper, we argue that, Julian Young’s understanding (...) of the fourfold in terms of the twofold of nature and culture has certain drawbacks owing to its emphasis on the literal meanings. We also suggest an interpretative strategy to avoid the pitfalls of literal and metaphorical readings, in which Andrew Mitchell’s interpretation is a good case in point. Mitchell’s marvelous attempt to think the fourfold in terms of relationality, can be seen as a best ever effort, in that, it not only remedies many of the problems of previous interpretations, including that of Young but it also gives due consideration to the intricate relations between what Heidegger would call the technological standing reserve and the thing of the fourfold. We will also discuss how Young’s interpretative problems can be remedied, in the new light provided by Mitchell. Finally, we suggest that Mitchell’s reading should be complemented with an adequate account of the holy, in which, the holy is understood as a principle of unification and wholesomeness of the members of the fourfold, apart from understanding it purely in terms of the God, one of the members of the fourfold. (shrink)

A number of observations have led researchers to postulate that, despite being replication‐defective, human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) may have retained the potential to cause or contribute to disease. However, mechanisms of HERV pathogenicity might differ substantially from those of modern infectious retroviruses or of the infectious precursors of HERVs. Therefore, novel pathways of HERV involvement in disease pathogenesis should be investigated. Recent technological advances in sequencing and bioinformatics are making this task increasingly feasible. The accumulating knowledge of HERV biology may (...) also facilitate the definition and general acceptance of criteria that establish HERV pathogenicity. Here, we explore possible mechanisms whereby HERVs may cause disease and examine the evidence that either has been or should be obtained in order to decisively address the pathogenic potential of HERVs. (shrink)

Not long before the change of Government in Britain in 1997, the then Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, made a speech in which she praised British contemporary art, describing it as the most exciting and innovatory in the world. Unexciting as it seemed, her observation was profoundly innovatory, indeed in its small way historic. To my knowledge no British Cabinet Minister, still less a Conservative, has ever given an official seal of approval to what is conventionally regarded as avant-garde art. The (...) Labour Government has echoed its predecessor's praise at a higher volume, as if determined to out-do it. The sanctification by the state of works of contemporary art has now become part of the discourse of officialdom. (shrink)

A Dedekind algebra is an ordered pair (B, h), where B is a non-empty set and h is a similarity transformation on B. Among the Dedekind algebras is the sequence of the positive integers. From a contemporary perspective, Dedekind established that the second-order theory of the sequence of the positive integers is categorical and finitely axiomatizable. The purpose here is to show that this seemingly isolated result is a consequence of more general results in the model theory of second-order languages. (...) Each Dedekind algebra can be decomposed into a family of disjoint, countable subalgebras called the configurations of the algebra. There are ?0 isomorphism types of configurations. Each Dedekind algebra is associated with a cardinal-valued function on ? called its configuration signature. The configuration signature counts the number of configurations in each isomorphism type that occurs in the decomposition of the algebra. Two Dedekind algebras are isomorphic iff their configuration signatures are identical. The second-order theory of any countably infinite Dedekind algebra is categorical, and there are countably infinite Dedekind algebras whose second-order theories are not finitely axiomatizable. It is shown that there is a condition on configuration signatures necessary and sufficient for the second-order theory of a Dedekind algebra to be finitely axiomatizable. It follows that the second-order theory of the sequence of the positive integers is categorical and finitely axiomatizable. (shrink)

The nineteenth century saw frequent appeals to the idea of a redeemer personality, a heroic leader – musings which culminated in the cults devoted to Hitler and Stalin. This article shows that the self-assertion of leaders can stimulate the self-abasement of the followers on whom they depend (and vice versa), and discusses in what circumstances such an interplay becomes dominant in a society, and with what advantages and disadvantages for it.

In this chapter, the author finds problematic the distinction between “public philosophy” and philosophy done within the classroom or within academia, especially where this distinction implies an incommensurable difference, a pure separation, a clean break. The “public” is always already operative within the academically cloistered spaces of the classroom, and philosophical thinking is always already occurring outside the walls of academia. Philosophy is more than engaging in abstract thought experiments. The irony is that Euro‐American philosophical domination and canon formation take (...) place within the context of white hegemony and racist terrorism, the enslavement and brutalization of Black bodies, and the history of white colonialism. Philosophically engaging such issues as, say, whiteness, is not an add‐on to a syllabus that is otherwise raceless. Warren understands the importance of active racial coalition‐building but reminds progressive and liberal whites that white racism is always insidiously operating in their lives. (shrink)

In this response, George Ellis comments on the publications of Part IV. He responds first to James Woodward, Richard Healey, Jan Voosholz, Simon Friederich and Sach Mukherjee, before outlining his thoughts on Max Kistler’s piece.

Alexander George; Discussions: ‘Goldbach's Conjecture Can Be Decided in One Minute’: On an Alleged Problem for Intuitionism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Soc.

This article analyzes the organization and functioning of the Byzantine salt monopoly. Saltworks were owned by the state, but some were also owned by monasteries and laymen. State-owned saltworks were not run as state enterprises; rather, their operations were auctioned to private individuals by competitive bidding conducted by provincial governors. Auctions of saltworks could be combined with concessions of the salt sales tax or other rights to sources of local revenue (e. g. fisheries, wharfage). Concessionaires of saltworks often were obligated (...) to deliver salt free of charge and tax in perpetuity to influential monasteries because of long-standing local customs. The state had a fiscal, not a market monopoly on salt as the price of salt was determined by market forces. Still, topography and seasonality of production and trade could provide opportunities for exploitation of inter-spatial and intertemporal price differentials. Disaggregation of the salt market into definable producer–wholesaler, wholesaler–retailer, and retailer–consumer submarkets evinces the varying impact that market structure can have on the degree of competition and on the firms' pricing strategies. (shrink)