-- 5. Sağım solum sobe -- 6. Ulusal kültür savaşı -- 7. Sosyaliz, asıl şimdi -- 8. Aydınlar savaşı -- 9. Kadınlar savaşı.

(OPEN ACCESS) This paper offers a novel substantive justification for mandatory electoral quotas—e.g., gender or racial quotas—and a new methodological approach to their justification. Substantively, I argue for a political egalitarian account of electoral quotas. Methodologically, based on this account and a political egalitarian grounding of political participatory rights, I offer an alternative to the External Restriction Approach to the justification of electoral quotas. The External Restriction Approach sees electoral quotas as at best justified restrictions on political participatory rights. I (...) argue for the Internal Restriction Approach instead, which can justify electoral quotas by specifying the pro tanto scope of political participatory rights rather than by justifying restrictions on the pro tanto scope of these rights. On this approach, adequately set electoral quotas do not even conflict with and are not balanced against political participatory rights, while electoral quotas—when justified—are pro tanto required rather than merely permitted. (shrink)

Thought experiments are widely used in the informal explanation of Relativity Theories; however, they are not present explicitly in formalized versions of Relativity Theory. In this paper, we present an axiom system of Special Relativity which is able to grasp thought experiments formally and explicitly. Moreover, using these thought experiments, we can provide an explicit definition of relativistic mass based only on kinematical concepts and we can geometrically prove the Mass Increase Formula in a natural way, without postulates of conservation (...) of mass and momentum. (shrink)

Epicurus on the Self reconstructs a part of Epicurean ethics which only survives on the fragmentary papyrus rolls excavated from an ancient library in Herculaneum, On Nature XXV. The aim of this book is to contribute to a deeper understanding of Epicurus' moral psychology, ethics and of its robust epistemological framework. The book also explores how the notion of the self emerges in Epicurus' struggle to express the individual perspective of oneself in the process of one's holistic self-reflection as an (...) individual psychophysical being. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a solution to the Capacity/Equality Puzzle. The puzzle holds that an account of the franchise may adequately capture at most two of the following: (1) a political equality-based account of the franchise, (2) a capacity-based account of disenfranchising children, and (3) universal adult enfranchisement. To resolve the puzzle, I provide a complex liberal egalitarian justification of a moral requirement to disenfranchise children. I show that disenfranchising children is permitted by both the proper political liberal and (...) the proper political egalitarian understandings of the relationship between cognitive capacity and the franchise. Further, I argue, disenfranchising children is required by a minimalistic, procedural principle of collective competence in political decision-making. At the same time, I show that political equality requires the enfranchisement of all adults, regardless of cognitive capacities, and that the collective competence principle does not ground adult disenfranchisement. This justifies the progressive legal trend that holds the capacity-based disenfranchisement of adults to be incompatible with liberal democratic principles. (shrink)

In 1959, Lao Sze-Kwang (1927 – 2012), a well-known Chinese Kantian philosopher and author of the New Edition of the History of Chinese Philosophy, published On Existentialist Philosophy introducing existential philosophers to Chinese readers. This paper argues that Lao misinterpreted Kierkegaard’s ultimate philosophical quest of “how to become a Christian” as a question of ‘virtue completion,’ because he failed to recognize and acknowledge Kierkegaard’s distinction between aesthetic, moral and religious passion. By describing and clarifying Lao’s misinterpretation, the paper then argues (...) that Lao’s trichotomy of the self fails to give due credit to the independence of religiousness from morality and aesthetics in Kierkegaard’s thought. (shrink)

The paper investigates the notion of friendship in Aristotle’s moral philosophy. The key issue here is what role Aristotle attributes to the ‘other’ as friend in the self-appreciation of the moral individual. The discussion proceeds in three main steps: first I chart the anthropological connections of the Aristotelian notion of friendship; then I delineate in detail the discussions of self-knowledge and self-cognition in the framework of Aristotle’s ontology and philosophy of perception; finally, I set out what consequences Aristotle’s repeated assertion (...) that ‘the friend is another self’ has for the self-understanding of the person. Through these steps I argue for the conclusion that the friend, as the ‘other’, plays an indispensable role, on the one hand in the formation of virtues which are required for right action, on the other in allowing the person to reach self-consciousness and freedom, both of them prerequisites for happiness in the full sense of the term. (shrink)

In my paper, I try to summarize Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the method of political thinking, following them through their genesis. My fundamental assumption is that although she had been preoccupied with the issue before (at least from 1957), she became more seriously interested in it after the controversy following the publication of the Eichmann volume. It is generally known that Arendt believed to have found the pattern for the method of political thinking in Kant’s third critique, the one about (...) judgment; more precisely in the Kantian description of the reflective judgment. This served as a pattern for Arendt for what she sometimes called representative thinking or opinion. If, on the other hand, we examine Arendt’s referring thoughts in their genesis we also come to realize why that was the case. In my opinion, Arendt looked in Kant’s work for a form of political thinking that remained impartial, in other words, it was not committed to one political cause or another, yet did not break its relations to politics, remaining entirely political. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivist account of normativity. In particular, the aim is to see whether Gibbard’s theory is able to account for the normativity of reason-claims. For this purpose, I first describe how I come to targeting Gibbard’s theory by setting out the main tenets of quasi-realism cum expressivism. After this, I provide a detailed interpretation of the relevant parts of Gibbard’s theory. I argue that the best reading of his account is the one that takes (...) normativity to be carried by a controlled, coherent, comprehensive set of norms. Finally, I present a potential obstacle to Gibbard’s approach: the regress problem. The idea is to examine the structure of the non-cognitive state expressed and find it inadequate due to the possibility of an infinite regress in the justification of the norms whose acceptance it contains. I then end the paper with some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Can morality be so demanding that we have reason not to follow its dictates? According to many, it can, if that morality is a consequentialist one. We take the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given and are also not concerned with finding the best response to the Objection. Instead, our main aim is to explicate the intuitive background of the Objection and to see how this background could be investigated. This double aim (...) leads to different albeit connected threads of inquiry. We first outline the Objection, its different forms and how intuition figures in them. After this, we move on to consider the ongoing debate about the use of intuitions in (moral) philosophy with a focus on two challenges: what intuitions are and how we can detect them. To answer these challenges, we propose an account according to which moral intuitions are seemings that are characterized by being non-inferential, spontaneous, non-doxastic, phenomenologically distinctive, non-sensory, intrinsically motivating, and stable. Armed with these seven “markers” of moral intuition, we put a forward a complex experimental methodology and raise and respond to possible problems with it. (shrink)

(OPEN ACCESS) In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not (...) justify such support – although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care – but not necessarily surrogate voting. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein repeatedly called religion and faith “madness”, “folly”, etc. However, this does not mean that he considered it irrational or meaningless. Rather, he saw in it a way of thinking and speaking, a “language-game”, that was not explicitly rational, but nevertheless meaningful, and in which there were “entirely different connections” than normal between individual statements. Nor can the language of faith be regarded as conventional, according to Wittgenstein, even if approached from the point of view of the nature of (...) the statements it contains. If, for example, we think that theological statements are factual statements (as if they refer only to existing things or objects), then this language immediately becomes meaningless. The aim of my study is to analyze the “grammar” of this language (the language of faith or religion), using Wittgenstein’s notes from different times, paragraphs of his published works, comments made during university lectures, etc., and to describe the correct use of words in it. (shrink)

Universal por estar no direito e particular por estar fora do direito, o “sujeito” de referência deste trabalho é o “autista”. Esta escolha garantiu a definição do sistema social, que foi concebido segundo o modo como os autistas se viam ou eram vistos. O sistema teórico foi delimitado segundo tradições intelectuais que problematizam o “sujeito” de acordo com questões formuladas pelos campos empíricos. O esquema metodológico visa a conhecer o “sujeito” por dentro dos sistemas e entre eles. O objetivo teórico (...) é pensar o “sujeito” considerando que o universal do direito não resulta da pluralidade do “sujeito”. (shrink)

Early in the 1950s, Kierkegaard’s philosophy had already been introduced to the academic circle of Hong Kong, which was an in-betweener between Chinese and Western cultures. Nevertheless, while Kierkegaard was frequently discussed by the Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto school, Hong Kong Chinese philosophers (remarkably New Confucians) from the 1950s to the 2010s rarely appreciate Kierkegaard’s philosophy. This paper argues that these Chinese philosophers are uninterested in Kierkegaard because their major concerns are the preservation of traditional Chinese culture in Hong (...) Kong, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy seems to be irrelevant to their visions and missions, and Kierkegaard’s Christian ontology seems to be inconsistent with New Confucian ontology. (shrink)

The Poet's "Caressive Sight": Denise Levertov's Transactions with Nature The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in (...) the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick has famously stated that the conflict between self-interest (prudence) and morality cannot be resolved: a dualism of practical reason is thus established. As is well-known, Sidgwick was distraught with this conclusion thinking that only the existence of God can resolve the dualism. Contemporary thinkers prefer to avoid this way out and argue either that. egoism is not rationally justifiable, or that self-interest and morality always point in the same direction, or that properly understanding the conflict also shows that (...) the dualism can be avoided. We take a different route. We agree with Sidgwick that some part of practical reason might indeed be discordant but we provide examples when what appears to be discord is in fact harmony on a higher level. We call these sets of. conflict cases pockets of harmony. We first show how these pockets form and what shape they take before moving on to considering their scope. At this point we confront a possible objection using an adapted version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Once this objection is out of the way, we conclude with a discussion of exactly what we have shown: what is the nature of our solution, and how it relates to recent skeptical positions taking their inspiration from Sidgwick’s dualism. (shrink)

From a juridical standpoint, Kant ardently upholds the state's right to impose the death penalty in accordance with the law of retribution. At the same time, from an ethical standpoint, Kant maintains a strict proscription against suicide. The author proposes that this latter position is inconsistent with and undercuts the former. However, Kant's division between external (juridical) and internal (moral) lawgiving is an obstacle to any argument against Kant's endorsement of capital punishment based on his own disapprobation of suicide. Nevertheless, (...) Kant's basic conception of autonomy underlies both of these otherwise distinct forms of lawgiving, such that acts of suicide and capital punishment are rendered equally irrational within his overall framework. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide ed. by Caleb M. CohoeAttila HangaiCaleb M. Cohoe, editor. Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Hardback, $99.99.Guiding readers through Aristotle's science of the soul, this volume covers many major topics of De Anima (DA) and addresses specific questions, including perennial interpretive problems. The self-contained chapters approach the text either by illuminating its context or by (...) elucidating key psychological concepts. While some contributions refer to relevant [End Page 318] positions by Aristotle's predecessors or contemporary philosophers, connections drawn to other Aristotelian texts predominate. Throughout, the emphasis is on philosophical questions. The result is a first-rate philosophical guide through this densely written treatise, which allows experienced readers of DA to deepen their understanding of Aristotelian psychology. Since most chapters approach interpretive issues from new angles and presuppose familiarity with the existing scholarship, beginners may want to start elsewhere.In Reeve's reading (chapter 1), Aristotle pursues dialectic in DA to define the soul as the first principle for the science of life. He construes dialectic as "going through puzzles and solving them by appeal to endoxa" (21), and equates it with induction from perceptual experience to knowledge of principles and causes. Contesting this view, Carter (chapter 2) argues that the physicist's method is not dialectical because the predecessors' views, conflicting as they are, do not constitute endoxa. Through close readings of DA II.2–5, he shows that Aristotle investigates earlier theories to assess how well they explain the main functions of the soul. One pertinent theory takes the soul to be attunement (harmonia). Shields (chapter 4) elucidates Aristotle's case for hylomorphism as an advance over the harmonia theory. Although harmonia (as the proper arrangement of parts) implies normativity, it falls short of rendering the soul as a final cause with its own good, so it cannot explain the unity of the body. Frey's chapter 5 on the soul's unity deals with this latter function. The problem of unity stems from the fact that each level in the hierarchy of souls—nutritive, perceptual, rational—can be defined independently, yet a posterior soul presupposes the existence of all prior ones. The key Frey uses to understand unity is potential presence. Just as a triangle is present potentially in a quadrangle—for division of the latter yields triangles—so too is the nutritive soul present potentially in the perceptual soul, although not due to a separating act. This, however, has counterintuitive implications: animal nutrition would be the function of a perceptual soul; furthermore, the nutritive soul of the embryo (in Frey's biological example) would first be present potentially (as undeveloped) and, once actualized (when developed), would revert to potentiality (at the development of the perceptual soul). Frey's other proposal is more promising. It turns on the notion of natural continuity: having an internal cause for a characteristic change with a unitary goal. Thus, the soul's unity for Frey (despite his reservations) seems to boil down to teleology: the soul sets a goal achieved through the manifestation of species-specific life functions. Invoking the biology of animal reproduction, Gelber (chapter 6) complements the teleological unity regarding the nutritive soul-part with the unity constituted by the continuity of the processes of nutrition, growth, and reproduction, namely, unity by material and efficient causes.Among the three contributions on reason (nous), Scheiter (chapter 3), examining its separability, breaks with the traditional interpretation and takes Aristotle to show (in DA III.4 and I.3) that reason is independent not only of bodily organs but of any magnitude (megethos). This envisages DA III.4–8 as an investigation into how reason functions as a different kind of capacity. It turns out, according to Kelsey's insightful chapter 11, that reason's actuality—insight (noēsis)—is the same as its intelligible object (noēton), and so intelligibility depends on separation from matter by the actuality of reason, making all and only the immaterial things intelligible and intelligent. Cohoe (chapter 12) draws the conclusion: human reason for Aristotle—being the defining part of the human soul, most... (shrink)

In this paper, we study on the ways the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change communicates scientific knowledge on climate change to policymakers in the Summary for Policymakers of the Fifth Assessment Report ; the most recent Assessment Report issued by the IPCC. We investigate implicit argumentation with a special focus on the ways the summary may direct the orientation of the discourse towards the evasion of climate action while appearing to be pro-action on the surface. The results of a systematic (...) analysis of polyphonic constructions in the language of the text indicate that implicit argumentation represents climate action inevitably subordinate to economic goals. In a number of constructions, the discourse reconstructs pro-economic-growth-based frames in contrast to prioritising environmental values when encouraging political action in the context of climate change. Through such language use, the discourses mediated by an institution of such high societal importance and authority as the IPCC arguably have a considerable impact in maintaining conservative climate policies and delaying, even hindering, a transition into a carbon-neutral society. Thus, we conclude that even the most authoritative climate-science-policy institutions should reconsider their use of linguistic representations in terms of implicit argumentation in their communication in order to encourage climate action in a more straightforward manner. As long as the most authoritative actors in science-policy discourse on climate change continue to reinforce cognitive frames evading urgent action to mitigate climate change, it is questionable whether we can expect the policymakers to have the courage to take ambitious action even if the figures in the natural-scientific evidence sections of the reports were demonstrating clear worsening trends. (shrink)

Hungarian right-wing populists have been applying decolonial rhetoric in their conspiracy theories over the past three decades. Understanding their resistance against the ‘civilising' mission of ‘the West' – or recently ‘Brussels' – needs specific tools. By applying standpoint theory, our interest is in the domestication of globally existing conspiracy theories. Instead of imposing an external rationale upon conspiracy theory thinking, we seek to understand the conspiracy thinking from its' own epistemological standpoint/positioning. Extending our analysis of the recently successful political party (...) Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement) we analyse their election program, titled Virradat (Dawn), and how an East-Central European, semi-peripheric standpoint can be revealed from the text through the conspiracy theories utilized by the party. Our claim is that the utilisation of conspiracy theories in East-Central Europe can be interpreted as discursive tools of the resistance of a well-planned colonisation. We show how decolonial rhetoric is present in their election program and how it is tied to conspiracy theories which may be globally known, yet having their own, specific Hungarian features, deeply embedded in the country’s history and its radical- and far-right, populist political culture. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the narrative aspect of Seneca’s idea of self-transformation. It compares Seneca’s viewpoint with some modern notions of the narrative self to highlight some parallels and significant differences between the ancient and modern conceptions and it establishes the reading of some parts of De Brev. Vit. in the context of other passages as concerned with the narrative self. The paper argues, amongst other points, that in Ep. 83.1–3, Seneca extends the practice of meditatio (ethically directed self-examination) by (...) incorporating the construction of a narrative self into this process, in dual roles, as examiner and examined. It concludes that Seneca expected us to avail ourselves of a similar self-assessment based on a dialogue with philosophical texts. (shrink)

In landscape ecology spatial descriptors (or indices) can be used to characterize habitats. Some of these descriptors can be used for habitat's ranking; this ranking is very important for conservation purposes. We would like to show that two traditional descriptors, namely the compactness and interior-to-edge ratio can give contradictory results. Being the second one is a more relevant descriptor, we would like to propose to avoid the further use the compactness in habitat's ranking.

Different summarized shape indices, like mean shape index (MSI) and area weighted mean shape index (AWMSI) can change over multiple size scales. This variation is important to describe scale heterogeneity of landscapes, but the exact mathematical form of the dependence is rarely known. In this paper, the use of fractal geometry (by the perimeter and area Hausdorff dimensions) made us able to describe the scale dependence of these indices. Moreover, we showed how fractal dimensions can be deducted from existing MSI (...) and AWMSI data. In this way, the equality of a multiscale tabulated MSI and AWMSI dataset and two scale-invariant fractal dimensions has been demonstrated. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the ontology of practical reasons. We draw a critical comparison between two views. According to the first, practical reasons are states of affairs; according to the second, they are propositions. We first isolate and spell out in detail certain objections to the second view that can be found only in embryonic form in the literature – in particular, in the work of Jonathan Dancy. Next, we sketch possible ways in which one might respond to (...) each one of these objections. A careful evaluation of these complaints and responses, we argue, shows that the first view is not as obviously compelling as it is thought by Dancy. Indeed, it turns out that the view that practical reasons are propositions is by no means unworkable and in fact, at least under certain assumptions, explicit considerations can be made in favour of a propositional construal of reasons. (shrink)

There are a number of well-established concepts explaining decision-making. The sociology of wise practice suggests that thinking preferences like the use of intuition form a cornerstone of administrators’ virtuous practice and phronesis is a likely candidate to explain this behaviour. This contribution uses conceptual and theoretical resources from the behavioural sciences, management science as well as philosophy to account for individual level differences of employees regarding thinking preferences in administrative professions. The analysis empirically investigates the behavioural dimension of the preference (...) for intuition vs the preference for deliberation to cast light on three different intuitive markers present among individuals who also prefer to use deliberation. We explore possible explanations for the differences and similarities of our global sample of 2227 workplace respondents who conceptually represent phronetic practitioners. The results show that many phronetic practitioners prefer the intuitive marker of unconscious thought, besides using deliberation. (shrink)

Elsewhere we have responded to the so-called demandingness objection to consequentialism – that consequentialism is excessively demanding and is therefore unacceptable as a moral theory – by introducing the theoretical position we call institutional consequentialism. This is a consequentialist view that, however, requires institutional systems, and not individuals, to follow the consequentialist principle. In this paper, we first introduce and explain the theory of institutional consequentialism and the main reasons that support it. In the remainder of the paper, we turn (...) to the global dimension where the first and foremost challenge is to explain how institutional consequentialism can deal with unsolved global problems such as poverty, war and climate change. In response, following the general idea of institutional consequentialism, we draw up three alternative routes: relying on existing national, transnational and supranational institutions; promoting gradual institutional reform; and advocating radical changes to the status quo. We evaluate these routes by describing normatively relevant properties of the existing global institutional system, as well as by showing what institutional consequentialism can say about alternatives to it: a world government; and multi-layered sovereignty/neo-medieval system. (shrink)

The question is whether we can even speak about alterity in our current world, whether the meeting of the other is possible at all, and if it is, whether it should be discussed in an ontical-ontological, an ethical (Lévinas), or a social (Baudrillard) framework. In the ecstasy of communication (Baudrillard), the Other appears not as an autonomous person carrying an existential message, but as one of the elements of the system bridging the gap between the communicating parties. As soon as (...) the world becomes a transparent network, the Other loses his transcendent character and is reduced to an insignificant hub in the network that unites the world. We cannot speak of authentic alterity in such a network-like world, as otherness has become an element within an arbitrarily shaped electronic system. An authentic Other is not even possible, since alterity can always be arbitrarily modeled with the necessary technological instruments in the playing field of production. Hence, the Nietzschean dictum God is dead receives a new interpretation in this context. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show that the diachronic temporality introduced in the second major work of Levinas is profoundly influenced by the genetic dimension of the Husserlian account of time. It is argued that the different phenomena of this genetic-diachronic temporality, like the past which was never present, the originary retention, and the unpredictable present, are sustaining not just the central idea of Otherwise than being, that of an originary ethical subject, but alsothe description of the relation with the other, (...) and the phenomenology of language present in this work. (shrink)

The paper examines the value system of the English Third Way. It argues that, contrary to its critics, the Third Way is not an empty ideology but has content, though this content is not brand new. The Third Way, I claim, is more like a rhetorically defined area, which is delimited by existing values that however leave room for interpretation. The Third Way is a framework that is delineated by two clusters of value: opportunity-equality-justice and responsibility-community-authority. On the basis of (...) the detailed analysis of these values, I draw up possible ideologies of the Third Way. I then argue that what best fits present-day Hungarian social-democracy is an interpretation that is social-liberal in character. (shrink)