This paper examines the efforts of contractualists to develop an alternative to aggregation to govern our duty not to harm (duty to rescue) others. I conclude that many of the moral principles articulated in the literature seem to reduce to aggregation by a different name. Those that do not are viable only as long as they are limited to a handful of oddball cases at the margins of social life. If extended to run-of-the-mill conduct that accounts for virtually all unintended (...) (in the sense of undesired) harm to others—noncriminal activities that impose some risk of harm on others—they would rule out all action. Moreover, because such conduct poses an irreducible conflict between freedom of action and freedom from expected harm, it can be regulated only by principles that accept the necessity of making precisely the sorts of interpersonal trade-offs that contractualism is foundationally committed to reject: trade-offs in which the numbers count, such that a risk of serious harm to one person can be justified by small benefits to the many. (shrink)

In John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, the state of nature, and more particularly natural man, are created within the tradition of natural law. Several commentators, such as James Tully and Karl Olivecrona, have recognized this legacy in Locke's political thought.1 While providing an analysis of Locke's thought in relation to natural law, such studies, however, have not fully examined the global context within which both the Two Treatises and seventeenth-century natural law developed. Consequently the extent to which natural law (...) theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, were influenced by the colonial interests of their particular countries of origin has been largely overlooked. The development of natural law theory, which can be traced back to the time of Cicero and beyond, is transformed during the sixteen hundreds by the need to answer new questions posed, both on sea and land, by the expanding colonial empires of Europe. Thus, in considering the natural law theorists who influenced Locke, it will be necessary to examine how colonialism influenced both the questions which were posed and the answers that were given. (shrink)

Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women’s advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey (...) from 1977 through 2016, we show that gender attitudes have more than one underlying dimension and that these dimensions have changed at different rates over time. Using latent class analysis, we find that the distribution of respondents’ attitudes toward gender equality has changed over the past 40 years. There has been an increase in the number of egalitarians who support equality in public and private spheres, while the traditionals who historically opposed equality in both domains have been replaced by ambivalents who feel differently about gender equality in the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, successive birth cohorts are becoming more egalitarian, with Generation-Xers and Millennials being the most likely to hold strong egalitarian views. The feminist revolution has succeeded in promoting egalitarian views and decreasing the influence of gender traditionalism, but has yet to convince a substantial minority that gender equality should extend to both public and private spheres of social life. (shrink)

Essays by Jurgen Habermas on truth, objectivity, normativity, naturalism, and realism after the linguistic turn.

Elementary set theory accustoms the students to mathematical abstraction, includes the standard constructions of relations, functions, and orderings, and leads to a discussion of the various orders of infinity. The material on logic covers not only the standard statement logic and first-order predicate logic but includes an introduction to formal systems, axiomatization, and model theory. The section on algebra is presented with an emphasis on lattices as well as Boolean and Heyting algebras. Background for recent research in natural language semantics (...) includes sections on lambda-abstraction and generalized quantifiers. Chapters on automata theory and formal languages contain a discussion of languages between context-free and context-sensitive and form the background for much current work in syntactic theory and computational linguistics. The many exercises not only reinforce basic skills but offer an entry to linguistic applications of mathematical concepts. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language. (shrink)

Barbara Caine's fascinating analysis of feminism in England examines the relationship between feminist thought and actions, and wider social and cultural change over tow centuries. Professor Caine investigates the complex question surrounding the concept of a feminist 'tradition', and showshow much the feminism of any particular period related to the years preceding or following it. Though feminism may have lacked the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought, the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft was something which (...) all nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryfeminists had to come to terms with. Her story was a constant reminder of the connection between the demand for political and legal rights, and its conflation with the issues of personal and sexual rebellion. Like Wollstonecraft, every woman pioneer into the public arena faced assaults on her honouras well as on her intellectual position. The author also addresses the language of feminism: the introduction and changing meanings of the term 'feminist';the importance of literary representations of women; and the question of how one defines feminism, and establishes boundaries between feminismand the 'woman question'. She ends with a discussion of the new emphasis, post-1980s, on the need to think about 'feminisms' in the plural, rather than any single kind of feminism. analysis of feminist organizations, debates, and campaigns shows a keen sense of the relationship between feministthought and actions, and wider social and cultural change. The result is a fascinating study with a new perspective on feminists and feminist traditions, which can be used both as an introductory text and as an interpretative work. Professor Caine examines the complex questions surrounding theconcept of a feminist 'tradition', and shows how much the feminism of any particular period related to the years preceding or following it. Though feminism may have lacked the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought, the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft is seen here assomething which all nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists had to come to terms with. Her story was a constant reminder of the connection between the demand for political and legal rights, and its conflation with the issues of personal and sexual rebellion. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, every womanpioneer into the public arena was faced with assaults on her honour as well as on her intellectual position. Professor Caine also addresses the language of feminism: the introduction and changing meanings of the term `feminist'; the importance of literary representations of women; and the questionof how one defines feminism, and establishes boundaries between feminism and the `woman question'. She ends with a discussion of the new emphasis, post-1980s, on the need to think about `feminisms' in the plural, rather than any single kind of feminism. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...) in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

A consideration of efforts to explain religion naturalistically, including a range of recent cognitive-evolutionary approaches. The book also examines recent efforts to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious teachings.

In a highly original rereading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan, together with works of Freud and others, Cassin shows how psychoanalysis, like the sophists, challenges the very foundations of scientific rationality. In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, the analyst, like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth.

Barbara Cassin, philosophe et philologue, directrice de recherche au CNRS a, notamment, dirigé le Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles . Elle explique, dans cet entretien, que les langues ne sont nullement interchangeables, comme l'a bien montré Humboldt au XIXe siècle : cette analyse s'applique tout autant aujourd'hui, à l'heure d'Internet et de Google. Il est donc aberrant et dangereux de faire du tout-à-l'anglais une panacée, sous prétexte qu'il s'agirait d'une solution à la fois plus simple, plus économique (...) et plus démocratique. C'est aberrant, car la pluralité des langues est un atout , de même que, par voie de conséquence, la traduction. C'est dangereux, car en cherchant à épurer les langues de leurs équivoques et la traduction de l'intraduisible, on appauvrit irrévocablement la pensée et l'on s'empêche par là même de comprendre le monde actuel dans toute sa diversité et donc de bénéficier de la mondialisation.Barbara Cassin, philosopher and philologist, director of research at CNRS, in particular, led the European Vocabulary of Philosophies. Untranslatable Dictionary . It explains in this interview, that languages ​​are not at all interchangeable, as clearly shown Humboldt in the nineteenth century   e: This analysis applies equally today, at the time of the Internet and Google . It is therefore absurd and dangerous to all-to-English panacea, under the pretext that this would be a solution to the simpler, cheaper and more democratic. This is absurd, because the multiplicity of languages ​​is an asset , as well as, consequently, translation. This is dangerous because trying to purify their ambiguous language and translating the untranslatable, is irrevocably impoverished thinking and we thus prevents an understanding of the contemporary world in all its diversity and therefore benefit from globalization. (shrink)

A familiar jurisprudential view is that a judicial decision functions as a legal precedent by laying down a rule and that the content of this rule is set by officials. Precedents can be followed only by acting in accordance with this rule. This view is mistaken on all counts. A judicial decision functions as a precedent by being an example. At its best, it is an example both for officials and for a target population. Even precedents outside of law function (...) as examples when they have conduct-guiding significance. Examples may be rule-like in their scope, but need not be. Their import is independent of their justification; this point has implications for coherence theories of precedent meaning. The content and scope of a legal decision’s extension is not set exclusively by officials. It is socially set and depends upon social salience. (shrink)

Machery (2009) has proposed that the notion of ‘concept’ ought to be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology. I raise three questions about his argument: (1) Is there a meaningful distinction between concepts and background knowledge? (2) Do we need to discard the hybrid view? (3) Are there really categories of things in the world that are the basis for concepts? Although I argue that the answer to all three is ‘no’, I agree with Machery's conclusion that seeking a (...) single characterization of concepts will not be fruitful for understanding cognitive representations and processes. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of gender and feminism in western political theory and practise. It provides students with both the theoretical and historical underpinnings of women's exclusion from politics, and the feminist response to this exclusion.

Los conceptos de democracia y de gobierno representativo están inevitablemente conectados y vinculados entre ellos, y uno de los principios fundamentales de la democracia representativa es el principio de mayoría. Este articulo es una aproximación a la teoría de John Stuart Mill sobre el gobierno representativo en relación con el principio de mayoría y bajo su perspectiva elitista. Mill consideró el sistema representativo el modelo político más eficaz, aunque quiso subrayar los puntos críticos y los posibles desvíos negativos de la (...) democracia y, en particular, el riesgo de una dictadura de la mayoría y el contextual aislamiento político de las minorías. El filósofo inglés propuso un ideal de democracia basado sobre el mandato representativo que supone la independencia del representante si bien una independencia restringida y condicionada. Por otra parte, insistió sobre la importancia de que cada ciudadano fuese educado en la conciencia pública y se dejase influenciar por los hombres más cultos y iluminados de la comunidad. (shrink)

This paper critically comments on Katharina Felka's book "Talking about numbers". I question her assumption that specifying sentences are a semantically unified class. The paper is part of a symposium on the book (in German).

"The Tale of Zen Master Bho Li is the story of an eight-year-old orphan who becomes a beloved Zen Master. Meet the cast of memorable companions who assist him on his captivating life's journey: The Firethroat - an exotic little bird that saves him from a life threatening circumstance ; Soyu Sei - the Dangerous Granny whose wise and tender guidance civilizes the feral child he'd become without taming his wild heart ; Master Wu - abbot of Silent Thunder Zen (...) Monastery, whose successor he would become ; and Master Bho Li's three most problematic disciples: Sei Wot, Noh Hui, and Wai Mi, from each of whom he learns an important lesson. (shrink)

The article is in two parts with the first part showing that the material in the New Zealand Business Roundtable documents is consistent with the contemporary, international, libertarian ideology. The second part draws parallels between this material and the characteristics shown by religious movements, including a claiming of autority from past prophets, a belief in an overarching Power, a missionary zeal to convert others, a canon of texts, a ‘theodicy’, a sense of bonding among believers, a ‘doctrine’ of humanity, and (...) the use of ritual language. The article concludes that the documents show a self-supporting belief system built on a fallacious theoretical premise. (shrink)

Questions of evidence—including the idea, still central to what could be called informal epistemology, that our beliefs and claims are duly corrected by our encounters with autonomously resistant objects —are inevitably caught up in views of how beliefs, generally, are produced, maintained, and transformed. In recent years, substantially new accounts of these cognitive dynamics—and, with them, more or less novel conceptions of what we might mean by “beliefs”—have been emerging from various nonphilosophical fields as well as from within disciplinary epistemology. (...) Because of the distinctly reflexive nature of these developments—that is, new conceptions of concepts, revised beliefs about belief, invocations of evidence said to challenge the operation of evidence, quasi-logical refutations of the authority of logic, and so on—the deployment of positions and arguments becomes extremely difficult here, as does even the description of the relevant events in intellectual history. Indeed, since we are dealing here not merely with shifts of, as it is sometimes put, “vocabulary,” but, often enough, with clashes of profoundly divergent conceptual idiom and syntax, every major term and discursive move is potentially implicated in the problematic itself, and, thereby, open to radical questioning and liable to charges of question-begging.The aim of the present essay is twofold: first, to suggest the more general interest and significance, beyond the fields in which they are being developed, of these emerging reconceptions of belief; and, second, to frame that suggestion in an account which, since it cannot escape the rhetorical difficulties just mentioned, foregrounds them. A number of related themes—notably, symmetry, circularity, reciprocality, and ambivalence—recur throughout and, at various points, are drawn together in accord with the account itself. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, and director of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultural Theory. Her current work examines contemporary models of cognition and communication. (shrink)

Divination has been practiced as a way of knowing and communicating for millennia. Diviners are experts who embrace the notion of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. They excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions and human psychology. During a divination, they construct usable knowledge from oracular messages of various sorts. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience. Their (...) divinatory acts involve complementary modes of cognition associated with these rather different symbolic forms. In representational symbolism, intentional reference, within a relatively controlled inductive reality, is paramount, while in presentational symbolism, implicit experiential immersion, within a free‐flowing context, is grasped intuitively. Wherever a theory of divination has been elicited from diviners, there is a clear recognition of the overlapping of inductive, intuitive, and interpretive techniques and ways of knowing. In order to arrive at a theory of practice for divination, as a form of practical consciousness or knowledge within different modes of cognition, one must take what diviners say and do seriously. Recent scientific studies reveal that consciousness is connected both to electrical information in the brain and nervous system and to electronic semi‐conduction in body tissues. Brain consciousness is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it. This validates the experience of mind‐body consciousness diviners have used for millennia in their performances. (shrink)

In 1971 Jürgen Habermas delivered the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University. These pivotal lectures, entitled "Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology," anticipate The Theory of Communicative Action and offer an excellent introduction to it. They show why Habermas considers the linguistic turn in social philosophy to be necessary and contain the first formulation of formal pragmatics, including an important discussion of truth.In these lectures and two additional essays, Habermas outlines an intersubjective approach to social theory that takes the concepts (...) of meaning and communication to be central. In doing so, he situates his project relative to other influential accounts of how meaning is constituted, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Wilfrid Sellars, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He examines the nature of social interaction and its connection to communication, developing a linguistic conception of convention and intentionality. He also offers an account of social and individual pathologies using the concept of systematically distorted communication. Taken together, these analyses contribute significantly to current debates in the philosophy of action and language. (shrink)

"Australian Feminism: A Companion covers feminist theory, politics, and scholarship, feminist involvement in many facets of government and welfare, and feminist approaches to culture and to daily life. It provides both general and specialist readers with information concerning every aspect of the development of feminism in Australia. The distinctive features of Australian feminism, including its diversity, its engagement with the state, its openness to new ideas, and its connections with ideas and developments overseas, are fully explored."--BOOK JACKET.

Technology assessment (TA) as aninstitution was introduced nearly thirty yearsago as an instrument to render possible themaking of responsible decisions concerning newtechnological options. Another recentdevelopment however has been the introductionof participatory technology assessment (pTA),mainly connected to the growing insight thatthe evaluation of technological options withrespect to their risks and benefits, is not –only – a scientific question. This paper willfocus on the questions, to what degree theideas of technology assessment and thePrecautionary Principle are connected and how.Without naming it explicitly, the (...) PrecautionaryPrinciple is put to debate in the``TA-arrangement on the cultivation oftransgenic herbicide resistant crops,''organized by the Science Centre, Berlin. Fromthe perspective of ethical clarification, someunique features concerning theconceptualization of the discoursive procedureand reconstruction of the argumentation processin order to come to results have to beanalyzed. Finally the performance and resultsof the pTA-arrangement are reflected in thelight of the Precautionary Principle andconclusions are drawn. (shrink)

Der Totalitarismus wollte den Menschen auf ein Gattungswesen reduzieren. Hannah Arendts politische Theorie hingegen basiert auf einem Verständnis vom Menschen als Person, der sich im Handeln und Sprechen in seiner Einmaligkeit enthüllt und zusammen mit anderen eine gemeinsame Welt schafft. Barbara Bushart legt in ihrer rechtstheoretischen Untersuchung dar, wie Rechtsdogmen und -techniken die Pluralität sowohl zu realisieren helfen als auch zu zerstören wissen. Die Fokussierung auf die Interdependenz von Recht und der Verwirklichung menschlicher Potenziale ergänzt dabei die wachsende Forschung (...) zum Arendt'schen Rechtsverständnis um eine bisher vernachlässigte Facette. (shrink)

This study documents and characterizes a phenomenon in naturally‐occurring conversation which I have termed interactional reconstruction. Interactional reconstruction involves retroactive reinterpretation of an earlier utterance (or set of utterances) on the basis of a more recent utterance (or set of utterances). This work is meant to serve two functions: first, to enrich our theories of human communication; and second, to explore directions and implications for theories of meaning and discourse modeling within cognitive science.

We surveyed 223 APA members to investigate the roles of therapists' sex, theoretical orientation, interpersonal boundaries, and clients' sex in predicting therapists' assessments of the ethicality of nonerotic dual relationships with their clients. Results indicated that therapists' sex, interpersonal boundaries, and theoretical orientation influenced ethical judgments of these relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Philosophy and Rhetoric I hope a future for the journal that not only continues to publish scholarship that reflects seriously on the productive possibilities of putting the unique understandings of the human condition delivered by philosophy into contact with the singular insights into the power and perils of speech, writing, and gesture offered up by rhetoric. I also wish for it printed pages on which scholars engage thoughtfully the challenges posed by worlds and loss of (...) worlds. Never before in my lifetime has this task seemed so urgent and so necessary. This article is delivered in that spirit.On 13 July 2013 a jury of six women in Sanford, Florida, returned a verdict of not... (shrink)

We reviewed literature to understand when a spatial map for time is available in the brain. We carefully defined the concepts of metrical map of time and of conceptual representation of time as the mental time line (MTL) in order to formulate our position. It is that both metrical map and conceptual representation of time are spatial in nature. The former should be innate, related to motor/implicit timing, it should represent all magnitudes with an analogic and bi-dimensional structure. The latter (...) MTL should be learned, available at about 8–10 years-old and related to cognitive/explicit time. It should have uni-dimensional, linear and directional structure (left-to-right in Western culture). We bear the centrality of the development of number cognition, of time semantic concepts and of reading/writing habits for the development of ordinality and linearity of the MTL. (shrink)

This chapter seeks to characterize the voice of the poet within the Iliad, and to show that a better understanding of the poet’s voice helps to explain several distinctive and puzzling features of Iliadic narrative. The chapter looks at the poet’s relationship to the Muses, and his temporal and spatial self-positioning within the world of the Trojan war, all of which illustrate the divine perspective he offers on that war.

In this paper I show that one of the most fruitful ways of employing paradoxes has been as a philosophical method that forces us to reconsider basic assumptions. After a brief discussion of recent understandings of the notion of paradoxes, I show that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of paradoxes in this sense, against the background of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ way of argumentation: in contrast to Heraclitus, Zeno’s paradoxes do not ask us to embrace a paradoxical reality; and in (...) contrast to Parmenides, Zeno shows common assumptions to be internally problematic, not just in light of Eleatic positions. (shrink)

We consider the Turing degrees of prime models of complete decidable theories. In particular we show that every complete decidable atomic theory has a prime model whose elementary diagram is low. We combine the construction used in the proof with other constructions to show that complete decidable atomic theories have low prime models with added properties. If we have a complete decidable atomic theory with all types of the theory computable, we show that for every degree d with 0 0, (...) T has a d-decidable model omitting the nonprincipal types listed by L. (shrink)

Background: The aim of the study is to clarify the beliefs and numerous doubts about the possible identification of personality in handwriting. The purpose of the described studies was to show an association between personality traits and handwriting features. The author aimed to verify whether or not there are any specific characteristics of writing in relation to personality traits. | Method: Two different studies have been described. A different number of subjects participated in the investigations and different techniques for personality (...) assessment were used; however, the same set of handwriting features was analyzed in each study. In the first study the NEO-FFI was used, while the EPQ-R was used in the second study. The graphic characteristics of the handwriting samples were examined by forensic experts. | Results: The correlations between the personality traits and handwriting features were counted. The results showed that there were few significant correlations between handwriting parameters and personality traits, as measured by the NEO-FFI and EPQ-R. | Conclusions: No writing characteristics were specific to personality traits. There is no evidence for assessment of personality on the base of handwriting. (shrink)

Feminists may overlook the way that our practices of reading and writing serve as discursive technologies of power, particularly if we fail to acknowledge the dominance of the invisible subject position of the (middle-class, heterosexual) white woman. Under such circumstances, specific seemingly neutral rhetorical strategies can serve as potent tools of dominance, infusing the reading situation with strategies of subordination that go unremarked because they are authorised by tradition and convention. I examine here the use of a specific rhetorical device (...) in a specific context, the evocation of a comment by Judith Butler that I call The Case of the Et Cetera, as it appears in six critiques of intersectionality by European scholars and one by a North American scholar relying on the European narrative. I argue that Butler’s comment is used to deploy a pattern of rhetoric that I call managing intersectionality. This move depoliticises intersectionality by making it the property of a white managerial subject position that is treated as racially unmarked. My target is the metadiscursive regime that authorises this uninterrogated reinscription of racialised hierarchy in feminist academic argument. (shrink)