An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. -/- In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality (...) nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but, Betti contends, among these entities there are no facts. -/- Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Betti examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, which she distinguishes as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. She criticizes compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong's truthmaker argument. She then criticizes propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what she calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. Betti argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language. (shrink)

Background Previous research on informed consent for research in psychiatric patients has centered on disorders that affect comprehension and appreciation of risks. Little has been written about consent to research in those subjects with Borderline Personality Disorder, a prevalent and disabling condition. Discussion Despite apparently intact cognition and comprehension of risks, a borderline subject may deliberately choose self-harm in order to fulfill abnormal psychological needs, or due to suicidality. Alternatively, such a subject may refuse enrollment due to transference or the (...) desire to harm him or herself. Such phenomena could be precipitated or prevented by the interpersonal dynamics of the informed consent encounter. Summary Caution should be exercised in obtaining informed consent for research from subjects with Borderline Personality Disorder. A literature review and recommendations for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The “American Dream” and “Working Class Promise” ideologies are ubiquitously dispersed in American society. These ideologies posit values of equality and opportunity. In this paper, I deconstruct these two ideologies in order to examine the effects these ideologies have on income inequality, social inequality, and social immobility. I argue these ideologies create a paradox in society whereby the more these ideologies are believed, the more the ideologies exacerbate income inequality, social inequality, and social immobility.

Peter Dews explores some of the most urgent problems confronting contemporary European thought: the status of the subject, the ethical dimensions of Critical ...

This is a book about speech and the silencing of speech; about who gets to speak and who does not; about who is listened to and who is ignored. In this down-to-earth analysis of the democratic principle of freedom of speech, Betty McLellan insists that, if this prized democratic principle is to have any continuing credibility, free speech must be free for all.

This timely book by philosopher Peter Dews explores the idea of evil, one of the most problematic terms in the contemporary moral vocabulary. Surveys the intellectual debate on the nature of evil over the past two hundred years Engages with a broad range of discourses and thinkers, from Kant and the German Idealists, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Levinas and Adorno Suggests that the concept of moral evil touches on a neuralgic point in western culture Argues that, despite the widespread (...) abuse and political manipulation of the term ‘evil’, we cannot do without it Concludes that if we use the concept of evil, we must acknowledge its religious dimension. (shrink)

We argue that the meaning of smiles is interpreted from physical/contextual cues, and simulation may simply reinforce the information derived from these cues. We suggest that, contrary to the claim of the SIMS model, positive and negative smiles may invoke similar simulation processes. Finally, we provide alternative explanations for the role of eye contact in the processing of smiles.

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.

[Lifeworld, Metaphysics and the Ethics of Nature in Habermas. ].

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 2 Seiten: 206-210.

German philosophers and political thinkers of the last century – Jaspers, Arendt and Strauss prominent among them – express shared frustration with the modern situation and candid assessments of its dangers. Jaspers reflects on the atomic age and the modern dissolution of values; Arendt criticizes the bureaucratic machinery of modern society as anti-political; and Strauss expresses distrust of modern logics of science and history as tending towards historical forgetfulness. In this paper, I examine the formative effects of these tendencies in (...) relation to emotional and epistemic considerations of identity and the social and cultural relations which frame them. I argue that, in their audacity to engage with modern crisis in global terms, Jaspers, Arendt and Strauss provide thoughtful perspectives on a thoughtless age, perspectives not only German but germane. (shrink)

INDIAN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY- A Study in Contrasts By BETTY HEIMANN. Originally published in I937. Contents include: 1. INTRODUCTION 13 2. THEOLOGY 2Q 3. ONTOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY 46 4. ETHICS 63 5. LOGIC 79 6. AESTHETICS 98 7. HISTORY AND APPLIED SCIENCE Il6 8. THE APPARENT RAPPROCHEMENT BETWEEN WEST AND EAST 131 EPILOGUE 147 INDEX OF PROBLEMS TREATED 149. INDIAN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: ONE ceuvre dart est un coin de la creation vu d travers un temperament, (...) says Zola and we may be justified in applying this aphorism when we venture on a some what similar survey and attempt an artificial selection from World-Philosophy throughout the ages. My aim, however, is not to elaborate any finished outline of all the philosophical conceptions that have arisen in East and West up to the present day, but merely to indicate the essential and fundamental tendencies and principles. In tracing the sources of Western Philosophy to Plato and Aristotle, and still earlier to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece, I became convinced that all translations are, to a greater or less degree, modes of interpretation. I studied the Classics, therefore, from the linguistic standpoint, and this procedure ultimately developed into a philosophical method intimately associated with the psychological aspects of Philology. In pursuing this task I discovered at the same time the specifically material basis of all Western thought. In other words in my regress from the history of modern Philosophy to the dawn of Greek speculation, or to repeat to the pre-Socratics, I found myself able to trace the main trends of Western Philosophy to the prior era of the Greek Sophists, whose outstanding role as the actual founders of Western thought is, in my opinion, too frequently underestimated. Their basic dogma which has held good in the West ever since was, Man is the Measure of all things. At this point an equally important feature must be emphasized for throughout this age of the Sophists there persists the profound contrast between the typically Western, and the equally distinctive Eastern, intellectual and spiritual atmospheres. In this connection, still further, I was deeply impressed by the far-reaching divergence of the Western anthropological tendency from the older cosmic out look upon Man as being part and parcel of the Universe And this radical antithesis is to be dis cerned in contemporary Greek drama. For Aeschylus, the Marathonomaches, creates all his immortal tragedies in the genuinely cosmic mood. Every in fraction of cosmic order, with no single exception, must generate its own inevitable reaction, and also its punishment, in order that the primal cosmic harmony may once more be restored... (shrink)

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is (...) often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another. (shrink)

Orientalism in Louis XIV's France presents a history of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century France, mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India.

This paper is presented as a performance between the two authors who are discussing the notion of daydreaming as a transitional space between their research interests in dreams and the semantic associations of conscious thought. The first half concerns the logical, rational awake mind when applied to an understanding of daydreaming as a bridge between one state and another. It investigates the idea of the interactive interface as a parallel with the daydream where both enable a middle ground, or safe (...) space for crossing-over. The difficulty highlighted through the performative reading of the paper is to keep focus without slipping into the interstitial state of a daydream. The paper gently drifts towards the second half, which explores understanding of dreamstates and the neuroscientific models of the unconscious brain. (shrink)

The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A computational history (...) of ideas must be built upon a sound theoretical foundation for its methodology, and the only such foundation is given by the use of models , i.e., fully explicit and revisable interpretive frameworks or networks of concepts developed by the historians of ideas themselves. (ii) Data Organisation. Interpretive models in our sense must be seen as topic-specific knowledge organisation systems (KOS) implementable (i.e. formalisable) as e.g. computer science ontologies. We thus require historians of ideas to provide explicitly structured semantic framing of domain knowledge before investigating texts computationally, and to constantly re-input findings from the interpretive point of view. In this way, a computational history of ideas maximally profits from computer methods while also keeping humanities experts in the loop. We elucidate our proposal with reference to a model of the notion of axiomatic science in 18th -19th century Europe. (shrink)

How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. (...) As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’. (shrink)

Introduction, by J. D. Bettis.--An introduction to phenomenology: What is phenomenology? by M. Merleau-Ponty.--The phenomenology of religion: The meaning of religion, by W. B. Kristensen.--A naturalistic description: Religion in essence and manifestation, by G. van der Leeuw.--A supernaturalistic description: Approaches to God, by J. Maritain.--A projective description: The essence of Christianity, by L. Feuerbach.--Religion as a faculty: On religion, by F. Schleiermacher. The Christian faith, by F. Schleiermacher.--Religion as a dimension: Religion as a dimension in man's spiritual life, by P. (...) Tillich.--Religion as a social function: Magic, science, and religion, by B. Malinowski.--Religion as structure and archetype: The sacred and the profane, by M. Eliade.--Religion as encounter: I and thou, by M. Buber. (shrink)

Betty Powell; XII*—Descartes' Machines, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

Le monde occidental s'interroge aujourd'hui sur la passion de la mort qui pousse de jeunes terroristes au suicide et au crime. Le présent essai traite d'une autre fascination, non moins troublante : celle qui travaille sourdement les grands textes de notre modernité. Après Alexandre Kojève, l'écriture de Georges Bataille, de Maurice Blanchot, de Jacques Derrida ou de Jacques Lacan, laisse transparaître un lyrisme de la destruction, un engouement pour l'abîme, qu'il faut savoir reconnaître sous la rigueur de la pensée. D'où (...) vient cette esthétique du malheur? Quels enjeux recouvre-t-elle? Au fil d'une minutieuse lecture, l'auteur s'attache à dénuder un complexe de valeurs et d'affects qui remontent aux origines symboliques de notre civilisation. On entrevoit peu à peu que cette revendication de la mort pourrait bien n'être que le signe inversé de la grande protestation humaine, de sa soif d'infini et de son désir d'être. Betty Rojtman, née à Paris, a dirigé le département de littérature française à l'université hébraïque de Jérusalem. Elle situe sa recherche au carrefour de la pensée contemporaine et de l'exégèse juive traditionnelle. Parmi ses publications : Feu noir sur feu blanc. Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (1986); Une grave distraction (préface de Paul Ricoeur, 1991) ; Une rencontre improbable (2002) et Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (2007). (shrink)

This book returns the reader to an agenda for addressing equity in schools, emphasizing the need to reexamine past reform efforts and the work ahead for educational leaders in reshaping schools and schooling.

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.