A translation of Carl Schmitt's classic explanation of the nature and historical/sociological significance of political Catholicism.

Carl Schmitt kept diaries throughout his life, several of which he specifically selected for academic publication. These are the recordings made in the early years after World War II, when Schmitt lost all his positions. After his release from the prison he returned to his home in small town of Plettenberg, where he remained until his death. Schmitt ordered these diaries to be published only after his death, because, even several decades after the war, they remained ideologically dangerous. In (...) this issue we continue to publish fragments of translation of the “Glossarium”. In the fragments prepared for present publication, Schmitt argues on several important topics. First, he writes about utopia — paradise located in a remote, but achievable future. The ability to think future located at long distance decreases in modern times. Therefore, in the 19th century they have to move from utopia to positive science. Those who write on future must say that heaven can come tomorrow. Schmitt goes further to compare the utopian ideas of Thomas More with the utopias of the 19th century. More was not a cleric; he was just a clerk, an intellectual, a writer, not a priest. Schmitt questioned the rightfulness of the canonization of More and compared him with another Catholic thinker of that time, Fr. Vitoria. Another important topic — the problem of legality and legitimacy. Schmitt once again handles it in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948. These events he contrasts with the situation in Germany in 1929-1932. (shrink)

In this introductory essay, we outline the relationship between political dissensus and radical democracy, focusing especially on how such a politics might inform the study of business ethics. This politics is located historically in the failure of liberal democracy to live up to its promise, as well as the deleterious response to that from reactionary populism, strong-man authoritarianism, and exploitative capitalism. In the context of these political vicissitudes, we turn to radical democracy as a form of contestation that offers hope (...) in an affirmative, inclusive and sustainable alternative. On this basis we introduce the papers in the special issue as a collective exploration of the ethics and politics of radical democracy as manifesting in dissensus and the subversion of corporate and elite power by alternative democratic practices and realities. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some conditions forunderstanding teaching as an act ofresponsibility towards an other, rather than asan instrumental act identified throughepistemology. I first put the latter intocontext through a critical reading of teachingas it is inscribed in humanistic discourses oneducation. Within these discourses, I explorehow students are treated as objects ofknowledge that reinforce the teacher's ego. Icontend that the taking up of this positionmakes not only an ethical relation to thestudent impossible, but also disqualifies anytype of meaningful social (...) relation. Therefore Iargue that teachers have to give up theirposition on the safe side of knowledge andparticipate in the time of risk when meetingthe other means to take responsibility for thatother from a position of vulnerability.Moreover, it is precisely because of this riskthat teaching as an ethical relation becomespossible and where it begins to resound withpoetry. (shrink)

We consider modifications to the standard David Lewis signaling game and relax a number of unrealistic implicit assumptions that are often built into the framework. In particular, we motivate and explore various asymmetries that exist between the sender and receiver roles. We find that endowing receivers with a more realistic set of responses significantly decreases the likelihood of signaling, while allowing for unequal selection pressure often has the opposite effect. We argue that the results of this article can also help (...) make sense of a well-known evolutionary puzzle regarding the absence of an evolutionary arms race between sender and receiver in conflict-of-interest signaling games. (shrink)

Suppose that several individuals who have separately assessed prior probability distributions over a set of possible states of the world wish to pool their individual distributions into a single group distribution, while taking into account jointly perceived new evidence. They have the option of first updating their individual priors and then pooling the resulting posteriors or first pooling their priors and then updating the resulting group prior. If the pooling method that they employ is such that they arrive at the (...) same final distribution in both cases, the method is said to be externally Bayesian, a property first studied by Madansky . We show that a pooling method for discrete distributions is externally Bayesian if and only if it commutes with Jeffrey conditioning, parameterized in terms of certain ratios of new to old odds, as in Wagner , rather than in terms of the posterior probabilities of members of the disjoint family of events on which such conditioning originates. (shrink)

If moral responsibility requires uncaused action, as I believe, and if a reasons explanation of an action must be a causal explanation, as many philosophers of action suppose, then it follows that our responsible actions are ones we do for no reason, which is preposterous. In previous work I have argued against the second premise of this deduction, claiming that the statement that a person did A in order to satisfy their desire D will be true if the person, while (...) doing A, intended of that action that it contribute to satisfying their desire D, a condition that does not entail any causal connection between the explaining desire and the explained action. This claim has received trenchant criticism from Randolph Clarke. The main part of the present paper responds to Clarke’s latest objections. The rest of the paper addresses another worry about my account : does my non-causal sufficient condition hold as widely as it needs to if responsible, uncaused actions are as widespread as we would like to think? (shrink)

_Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers_ uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of philosophy. Their aim is not (...) to examine Wittgenstein’s personal moral convictions but rather to explore how a deep engagement with his work can illuminate some of the problems that medicine and biological science present. As Elliott explains in his introduction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy runs against the grain of most contemporary bioethics scholarship, which all too often ignores the context in which moral problems are situated and pays little attention to narrative, ethnography, and clinical case studies in rendering bioethical judgments. Such anonymous, impersonal, rule-writing directives in which health care workers are advised how to behave is what this volume intends to counteract. Instead, contributors stress the value of focusing on the concrete particulars of moral problems and write in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should be useful. Specific topics include the concept of “good dying,” the nature of clinical decision making, the treatment of neurologically damaged patients, the moral treatment of animals, and the challenges of moral particularism. Inspired by a philosopher who deplored “professional philosophy,” this work brings some startling insights and clarifications to contemporary ethical problems posed by the realities of modern medicine. _Contributors._ Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy. (shrink)

The paper explicates a version of dispositionalism and defends it against Kripke's objections (in his "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language") that 1) it leaves out the normative aspect of a rule, 2) it cannot account for the directness of the knowledge one has of what one meant, and 3) regarding rules for computable functions of numbers, a) there are numbers beyond one's capacity to consider and b) there are people who are disposed to make systematic mistakes in computing values (...) of functions they understand perfectly well. (shrink)

Jeffrey has devised a probability revision method that increases the probability of hypothesis H when it is discovered that H implies previously known evidence E. A natural extension of Jeffrey's method likewise increases the probability of H when E has been established with sufficiently high probability and it is then discovered, quite apart from this, that H confers sufficiently higher probability on E than does its logical negation H̄.

Infinite Time Register Machines are a well-established machine model for infinitary computations. Their computational strength relative to oracles is understood, see e.g. , and . We consider the notion of recognizability, which was first formulated for Infinite Time Turing Machines in [6] and applied to ITRM 's in [3]. A real x is ITRM -recognizable iff there is an ITRM -program P such that PyPy stops with output 1 iff y=xy=x, and otherwise stops with output 0. In [3], it is (...) shown that the recognizable reals are not contained in the ITRM -computable reals. Here, we investigate in detail how the ITRM -recognizable reals are distributed along the canonical well-ordering shrink)

We argue that Stanford’s picture of the evolution of externalised norms is plausible mostly because of the idealisations implicit in his defence of it. Once we take into account plausible amounts of normative disagreement, plausible amounts of error and misunderstanding, and the knock-on consequences of shunning, it is plausible that Stanford under-counts the costs of externalisation.

In this text I discuss two events in which I learned something important about life and about education in order to formulate in a precise manner two propositions for my pedagogical creed. In focus for both are the interrelatedness of theory and life. The stories are told through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Rancière’s thinking, but the stories also are shown to be essential in my understanding of their thinking. The first story is about learning ethics as a (...) consequence of meeting an old man on a remote island and the second story is about teaching, when a young girl in a situation of war taught me something important about political life. In a final section I discuss briefly what those theoretical/practical experiences and memories bring to my understanding of education. (shrink)

We examined the question—is the intention of completing a simulated motor action the same as the intention used in processing overt actions? Participants used motor imagery to estimate distance reachability in two conditions: Imagery-Only and Imagery-Execution . With IO only a verbal estimate using imagery was given. With IE participants knew that they would actually reach after giving a verbal estimate and be judged on accuracy. After measuring actual maximum reach, used for the comparison, imagery targets were randomly presented across (...) peripersonal- and extrapersonal space. Results indicated no difference in overall accuracy by condition, however, there was a significant distinction by space; participants were more accurate in peripersonal space. Although more research is needed, these findings support an increasing body of evidence suggesting that the neurocognitive processes driving motor imagery and overt actions are similar. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt unterhielt zeitlebens eine beeindruckend umfangreiche Korrespondenz. Seine Briefpartner waren höchst unterschiedlich. Es zählten dazu sowohl Künstler, wie Gelehrte aller Art, insbesondere juristische Kollegen als auch sonstige Persönlichkeiten.Ein Teil seiner Korrespondenz, nämlich die mit Ernst Jünger und mit Armin Mohler wurde in den letzten Jahren bei Klett-Cotta bzw. dem Akademie-Verlag veröffentlicht. In unserem Hause erschienen 1989 Briefe an Carl Schmitt, die der langjährige frühere Leipziger Studentenpfarrer Werner Becker in den Jahren 1923-1978 an Schmitt gerichtet hatte. Die Schreiben (...) Schmitts, die sich leider nicht mehr erhalten haben, erschließen sich insoweit, als Becker darin auf vorangehende Schreiben Schmitts inhaltlich eingeht. Im Dezember 2003 erschien in der Festschrift für Werner Krawietz unter dem Titel »Legalität, Legitimität und das Politische - Ein Briefwechsel« eine von Florian Simon aus unserem Verlagsarchiv zusammengestellte Korrespondenz Schmitts, die dieser in den Jahren 1931-1933 mit Ludwig Feuchtwanger, in den Jahren 1913-1936 wissenschaftlicher Leiter unseres Hauses, geführt hat.In Spanien war einer von Schmitts intensiven Briefpartnern, der 1915 geborene Römischrechtler Prof. Dr. Álvaro d'Ors. Er kannte Schmitt anfangs nur mittelbar und zwar über seinen Vater, den Philosophen und Essayisten Eugenio d'Ors. Dieser war mit Schmitt seit 1929 befreundet und hatte ihm in seiner Schrift Glosario mit der Darstellung seines Rangs und Originalität seiner Denkweise ein Denkmal gesetzt. 1944 lernten Álvaro d'Ors und Schmitt sich auch persönlich kennen, bei Gelegenheit eines Vortrags von Carl Schmitt »Vitoria und sein Ruhm«, den dieser an der Universität von Granada hielt. An diese war Álvaro d'Ors kurz zuvor zum Ordinarius für Römisches Recht berufen worden.Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schmitt und d'Ors setzt 1948 ein und endet 1983, zwei Jahre vor dem Ableben Schmitts. Der Briefwechsel war begleitet von einer Reihe von Begegnungen in Deutschland, aber mehr noch in Spanien, und zwar insbesondere in Santiago, wohin d'Ors später berufen worden war. Dort lebte seit 1959 auch Schmitts einzige Tochter Anima, nach Ihrer Eheschließung mit Alfonso Otero, Ordinarius für Rechtsgeschichte an der dortigen Universität.Der hier nun vorgelegte Briefwechsel zeigt, wie sehr die theoretischen und praktischen Interessen beider Juristen miteinander verwoben, aber dennoch ihre Denkansätze und Ergebnisse sehr verschieden waren. Der Briefwechsel führt uns durch einen für beide Partner überaus fruchtbaren Dialog zu grundlegenden Aspekten des Denkens beider Autoren: der Nomos der Erde, die Einheit der Welt, Ausnahme und Norm, Legalität und Legitimität und politische Theologie.In sorgfältigen und umfangreichen Anmerkungen der Herausgeberin werden dem Leser Zusammenhänge und Hintergründe erschlossen sowie die in den Briefen erwähnten Persönlichkeiten vorgestellt, die dem deutschen Leser weitestgehend unbekannt sind. Die Briefe mit den Anmerkungen geben einen aufschlußreichen Einblick in das Denken der Briefpartner und insbesondere Carl Schmitts. Sie sind zugleich ein spannendes Zeitdokument und ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte Deutschlands und Spaniens. (shrink)

It is often taken for granted that notions of health and disease are generally applicable across the biological world, in that they are not restricted to contemporary human beings, and can be unproblematically applied to a variety of organisms both past and present. In the historical sciences it is also common to normatively contrast health states of individuals and populations from different times and places: e.g., to say that due to nutrition or pathogen load, some lived healthier lives than others. (...) However, health concepts in contemporary philosophy of medicine have not been developed with such cross-lineage, non-human, or diachronic uses in mind, and this generates what I call the ‘new normal’ problem. I argue that the new normal problem shows that current naturalistic approaches to health are worryingly incomplete. Using examples drawn from evolutionary archaeology and the human fossil record, I outline an alternative, function-based strategy for naturalizing health that might help address the new normal problem. Interestingly, this might also reconstruct a certain uniqueness for humans in the philosophy and science of health, due to the deep history of obligate enculturation and cultural adaptation that archaeology demonstrates. (shrink)

The work done so far on the understanding of mathematical (proof) texts focuses mostly on logical and heuristical aspects; a proof text is considered to be understood when the reader is able to justify inferential steps occurring in it, to defend it against objections, to give an account of the “main ideas”, to transfer the proof idea to other contexts etc. (see, e.g., Avigad in The philosophy of mathematical practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). In contrast, there is a rich (...) philosophical tradition dealing with the concept of understanding and interpreting texts, namely philosophical hermeneutics, represented, e.g., by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger or Gadamer. In this tradition, “understanding” generally refers to the integration in a comprehensive (historical, existential, life-worldly,...) context. In this article, we take some first steps towards exploring the question how the ideas from philosophical hermeneutics presented in Gadamer’s “Truth and Method” apply to mathematical texts and what (if anything) can be learned from these for the didactics and presentation of mathematics. (shrink)