From the early 1840s on, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine aroused the joint interest of Marx and Engels, who saw the English philosopher as one of the forerunners of socialism. Later, however, in the various editions (German, French, English) of Book 1 of Capital (1867/90), Bentham would be sarcastically branded by Marx as a “genius of bourgeois stupidity”. In their youth, both Engels and Marx had independently become interested in Bentham’s ideas, admiring some social-ethical themes, seen as heralding interesting developments (...) for the cause of the proletariat. On Engels’s suggestion, Marx included Bentham’s name, alongside those of the major 18th–19th century English and French exponents of protosocialism, in a planned Library of the most outstanding foreign socialist writers (1845), which however remained only a draft. From his first stay in England (1842/44), the young Engels had embraced in particular the famous utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” advocated by Bentham. Marx, on the other hand, after initially praising Bentham’s work, which he had read in a French translation during his exile in Paris (1844), harshly criticized the ambiguous implications of this principle. In fact, he believed thatbehind a misleading progressive façade, it constituted the philosophical equivalent of the later economic theory of labour productivity propounded by D. Ricardo in opposition to the theory of its mere quantitative extension put forward by A. Smith. In the London Manuscripts (1861/63) Marx will reveal the affinity betweenBentham’s principle of the happpiness of the greatest number of people, and Ricardo’s assumption of the ineliminable misery of the minority condemned to productive labour. Based on the collection of Marx’s and Engels’s texts (letters, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts, printed works), made available today thanks to the critical edition by MEGA1, this paper sets out to re-examine, im großen und ganzen, the main moments in their critique of Bentham’s Utilitarianism. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que l'utilitarisme? Philosophie du bourgeois, philosophie de l'homo oeconomicus, dénoncée, entre autres, par Marx, Nietzsche et Foucault? Ou la seule philosophie morale de taille à concurrencer le kantisme et l'une des bases de l'éthique appliquée contemporaine? L'utilitarisme a cherché à constituer une morale purement rationnelle, critique des croyances religieuses et des conventions sociales. L'exemple le plus illustre est celui de la justice pénale. Bentham, dans des textes révolutionnaires, soutient, à la suite de Beccaria, que la peine doit être (...) proportionnée au tort commis par le coupable, non au besoin de vengeance de la victime et de la société. Dans le premier volume de cette Anthologie, Bentham et ses précurseurs, la filiation entre Bentham et les philosophes des Lumières est établie. De Shaftesbury et Hume à Beccaria et William Paley, on pourra prendre la mesure des continuités, mais aussi du génie du fondateur de ce radicalisme philosophique. Surtout, le lecteur aura accès aux textes majeurs de Bentham qui n'avaient jamais été traduits, en dehors du Panoptique et des Sophismes anarchiques écrits directement en français. On pourra ainsi apprécier combien l'utilitarisme a été et demeure un outil d'analyse et de critique de la morale ordinaire. (shrink)

David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are often viewed as contributors to or participants in a common tradition of thought roughly characterized as ‘the liberal tradition’ or the tradition of ‘bourgeois ideology’. This view, however useful it may be for polemical or proselytizing purposes, is in some important respects historiographically unsound. This is not to deny the importance of asking what twentieth-century liberals or conservatives might find in the works of, say, David Hume to support (...) their respective ideological persuasions. It is only to insist that attempts to use selected arguments, or parts of arguments, from great eighteenth-century thinkers to shore up twentieth-century programmatic political positions must be categorically distinguished from attempts to understand what Hume, Smith, Bentham or Mill actually meant, or could imaginably have meant, to say. (shrink)

Many psychological studies of categorization and reasoning use undergraduates to make claims about human conceptualization. Generalizability of findings to other populations is often assumed but rarely tested. Even when comparative studies are conducted, it may be challenging to interpret differences. As a partial remedy, in the present studies we adopt a 'triangulation strategy' to evaluate the ways expertise and culturally different belief systems can lead to different ways of conceptualizing the biological world. We use three groups (US bird experts, US (...) undergraduates, and ordinary Itza' Maya) and two sets of birds (North American and Central American). Categorization tasks show considerable similarity among the three groups' taxonomic sorts, but also systematic differences. Notably, US expert categorization is more similar to Itza' than to US novice categorization. The differences are magnified on inductive reasoning tasks where only undergraduates show patterns of judgment that are largely consistent with current models of category-based taxonomic inference. The Maya commonly employ causal and ecological reasoning rather than taxonomic reasoning. Experts use a mixture of strategies (including causal and ecological reasoning), only some of which current models explain. US and Itza' informants differed markedly when reasoning about passerines (songbirds), reflecting the somewhat different role that songbirds play in the two cultures. The results call into question the importance of similarity-based notions of typicality and central tendency in natural categorization and reasoning. These findings also show that relative expertise leads to a convergence of thought that transcends cultural boundaries and shared experiences. (shrink)

Koonin, in an article in this issue, claims that CRISPR–Cas systems are mechanisms for the inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics, and that the operation of such systems comprises a “Lamarckian mode of evolution.” We argue that viewing the CRISPR–Cas mechanism as facilitating a form of “directed mutation” more accurately represents how the system behaves and the history of neoDarwinian thinking, and is to be preferred.

In _Nonsense upon Stilts¸_ first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked. (...) But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on ‘rights-based’ political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the Rule of Law are inadequate and require fleshing out. The main value of the ideal of rule of law for liberal political theory lies in the notion of predictability, which is essential to individual autonomy. The author examines this connection and argues that conservative theories of rule of law claim too much. Liberal theory equates the rule of law with legality, which is only one of the elements necessary for a just social order.

Many contemporary proponents of hylomorphism endorse a version of hylomorphism according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of complex relation or structure. Structural approaches to form, however, seem not to capture form’s traditional role as the guarantor of diachronic identity, since more “dynamically complex” material objects, such as living organisms, seem to undergo, and survive, various structural changes over the course of their existence. As a result, some contemporary hylomorphists have looked to alternative, non-structural (...) approaches to form. One of the leading non-structural approaches is the powers approach, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of power continuously activated in the object or in its material parts. In this paper, I begin by offering an overview and assessment of this powers approach to form. I argue that while the powers approach captures some crucial elements for understanding the nature of more dynamically complex material objects, when we press on the details of the view we find that it actually points to a related, but importantly distinct, third approach to understanding form, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of activity or process in which the material object or its parts are continuously engaged. I call this third approach “Hyloenergeism”. In the second half of the paper, I consider what such a view of material objects might look like and what its principal virtues might be. (shrink)

There are all sorts of ways in which one can dirty one’s hands in politics. The classic problem is that of the political leader who finds he has to act immorally for the sake of the greater good. But some dirty-hands problems are more mundane. They arise out of the fact that one acts in politics alongside others, particularly in a democracy, and so one is not always in control of the values and principles that are being put into play. (...) This happens sometimes because of the need for compromise; or through procedures like majority decision. Some of these cases have an interesting historical dimension. They reflect the fact that politicians have to act against the background of decisions made by their predecessors. Laws routinely remain in force, for example, despite the demise of the political factions that enacted them: so a politician may have to keep faith with and faithfully administer a legal decision he condemns. I argue that this is best understood not as the balancing of disparate personal convictions, but of his having to act in the name of the whole society. The sense of “dirty hands” arises from the juxtaposition of the politician’s own convictions with the requirements of his particular role as speaking for an entity larger than himself. (shrink)

We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

We draw from ego depletion and leader–member exchange theories to provide nuanced insight into why abusive supervision is indirectly associated with supervisor-directed destructive voice. A multi-wave, multi-source field study demonstrates evidence that abusive supervision has a positive conditional indirect effect on supervisor-directed destructive voice through subordinates’ relational ego depletion with their supervisors that is stronger for higher LMX differentiation contexts than lower LMX differentiation contexts. We make novel theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions by providing a parsimonious explanation for why relational (...) aspects of supervisory treatment drain subordinates’ capacities for controlling their volitional actions during interactions with their supervisors and how this relationship impacts subordinates’ supervisor-directed destructive voice. Overall, our study extends the application of ego depletion and LMX theories to the examination of abusive supervision and destructive voice in order to meaningfully inform researchers’ attempts to build cohesive streams of research in these areas and practitioners’ attempts to promote ethical workplace environments. (shrink)

In The Metaphysics of Truth, Doug Edwards offers a sustained case against deflationism about truth and in favour of his preferred pluralist theory of truth. Here, I take up three of the main components of that case. The first is Edwards' account of the distinctive metaphysical commitments of deflationism. His views about this issue have changed over the past few years, and I detail these changes as well as a concern for the views that he develops in the book. Second, (...) I take up the argument that Edwards offers for thinking that deflationism is, in a certain sense, internally unstable. I explain why this argument is inconclusive, outlining three responses to it on behalf of the deflationist. Third, I consider Edwards' novel argument for truth pluralism, which acts as an indirect argument against deflationism. After sorting out some interpretive nuances related to the use of definite descriptions in this argument, I show how the deflationist can resist it. Having responded to Edwards' critique of deflationism, I close by briefly explaining why I take the methodology of deflationism to be especially promising, insofar as it underscores the significance of empirically-informed inquiry about truth. (shrink)

This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes that we view mathematics as a system of conventions and norms that is designed to help us make sense of the world and reason efficiently. Like any designed system, it can perform well or poorly, and the philosophy of mathematics has a role to play in helping (...) us understand the general principles by which it serves its purposes well. (shrink)

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies is the third entry of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook in Asian Philosophy series. Editor Sor-hoon Tan begins the Handbook with a historical journey starting from Hegel's insistence that "Chinese philosophy" is not really philosophy; through Hu Shih's and Fung Yulan's groundbreaking attempts in the early twentieth century to revise traditional Chinese thought using Western methods; and up to more current discussions on the question of whether there is such a thing as "Chinese philosophy." (...) Methodology, Tan insists, lies at the center of this debate, and being committed to the employment of sound methods can be of existential importance for the field of... (shrink)

Hypnosis is considered a unique tool capable of modulating cognitive processes. The extent to which hypnotic suggestions intervenes is still under debate. This study was designed to provide a new insight into this issue, by focusing on an unintentional emotional process: attentional bias. In Experiment 1, highly suggestible participants performed three sessions of an emotional Stroop task where hypnotic suggestions aiming to increase and decrease emotional reactivity towards emotional stimuli were administered within an intra-individual design. Compared to a baseline condition (...) (without hypnotic suggestion), a significant increase in attentional bias was found when a hypnotic suggestion to increase emotional reactivity was administered. In contrast, the bias was eliminated when a suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity was administered. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of session repetition on attentional bias across three successive experimental sessions without hypnosis, and showed that the emotional Stroop effect did not vary across sessions. Hence, session repetition could not account for part of the modulation of attentional bias in Experiment 1. Taken together, the results suggest that specific hypnotic suggestions can influence elicitation of unintentional emotional processing. The implications are discussed regarding the locus of intervention of hypnotic suggestion in cognitive and emotional processes. (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning (...) as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

We describe a formalization of asymptotic O notation using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant.

The primrose path and prisoner's dilemma paradigms may require cognitive (executive) control: The active maintenance of context representations in lateral prefrontal cortex to provide top-down support for specific behaviors in the face of short delays or stronger response tendencies. This perspective suggests further tests of whether altruism is a type of self-control, including brain imaging, induced affect, and dual-task studies.

Griffith's first book that introduces the reader to the issue of the human condition and his biological explanation of it. It describes how the anger and selfishness felt by humans is the result of a conflict between two factions within ourselves -- the gene-based instinctive self struggling against the nerve-based intellect's need and responsibility to understand existence. The conflict caused humans to live with an undeserved sense of guilt that understanding now ameliorates.

The present edition of 'Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence' supersedes 'Of Laws in General,' edited by H.L.A. Hart and published by the Athlone Press in 1970, as a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham." --P. xi.

The paper argues that dreams consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of (...) dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider three responses to the question "What is truth?," investigating their ramifications in philosophy and public life.

This chapter contains section titled: Images of Legislation Legislation in Legal Theory Analytics of the Legislative Process Interpreting and Applying Legislation A Forum of Principle? References.

From ancient times to the beginning of the nineteenth century, mathematics was commonly viewed as the general science of quantity, with two main branches: geometry, which deals with continuous quantities, and arithmetic, which deals with quantities that are discrete. Mathematical logic does not fit neatly into this taxonomy. In 1847, George Boole [1] offered an alternative characterization of the subject in order to make room for this new discipline: mathematics should be understood to include the use of any symbolic calculus (...) “whose laws of combination are known and general, and whose results admit of a consistent interpretation.” Depending on the laws chosen, symbols can just as well be used to represent propositions instead of quantities; in that way, one can consider calculations with propositions on par with more familiar arithmetic calculations. Despite Boole’s efforts, logic has always held an uncertain place in the mathematical community. This can partially be attributed to its youth; while number theory and geometry have their origins in antiquity, mathematical logic did not emerge as a recognizable discipline until the latter half of the nineteenth century, and so lacks the provenance and prestige of its elder companions. Furthermore, the nature of the subject matter serves to set it apart; as objects of mathematical study, formulas and proofs do not have the same character as groups, topological spaces, and measures. Even distinctly mathematical branches of contemporary logic, like model theory and set theory, tend to employ linguistic classifications and measures of complexity that are alien to other mathematical disciplines. The Birth of Model Theory, by Calixto Badesa, describes a seminal step in the emergence of logic as a mature mathematical discipline. As its title suggests, the focus is on one particular result, now referred to as the L¨owenheim-Skolem theorem, as presented in a paper by L¨owenheim in 1915. But the book is, more broadly, about the story of the logic community’s gradual coming to the modern distinction between syntax and semantics, that is, between systems of symbolic expressions and the meanings that can be assigned to them.. (shrink)

The metamathematical tradition that developed from Hilbert’s program is based on syntactic characterizations of mathematics and the use of explicit, finitary methods in the metatheory. Although G¨.

Let B be a p-uniformly convex Banach space, with p≥2. Let T be a linear operator on B, and let Anx denote the ergodic average ∑i.

Almost from the inception of Hilbert's program, foundational and structural efforts in proof theory have been directed towards the goal of clarifying the computational content of modern mathematical methods. This essay surveys various methods of extracting computational information from proofs in classical first-order arithmetic, and reflects on some of the relationships between them. Variants of the Godel-Gentzen double-negation translation, some not so well known, serve to provide canonical and efficient computational interpretations of that theory.

ABSTRACT Populism raises questions about the extent to which public opinion should be a legitimate foundation for executive power. In the United States, it is often thought, such a foundation was established at the beginning of the twentieth century through the creation of a newly “representative” modern presidency. This new presidency, it is held, acts as an agent of populist majorities to undermine constitutional and legal norms. In fact, however, the argument for presidential representation is a long-standing element of politics (...) in the United States. It is appealed to, recurrently, by what might be called the party of opinion against its natural opponent, the party of law. (shrink)

First in a new series for beginning students of British politics Only series of texts introducing students to key institutions and an understanding of the links between theory and practice in British politics.

Wisnewski provides a concise introduction to Heidegger’s work through the lens of his best-known book, Being and Time. This insightful, new text guides students through Heidegger’s challenging ideas to help them understand his writings as a whole and his influence on modern thought.