Managerialism is not mere ideology, a concatenation of ideas subsisting in an epiphenomenal superstructure (Überbau) that mirrors economic relations (Base) and masks interests, but a set of practices that, as an extreme manifestation of human resources management (HRM), seeks to constitute the life-world (Lebenswelt) of participants in many sectors of society. Increasingly, it is those at the extremes of elite wealth and marginal poverty who may fall outside its remit and become free to think beyond its parameters. As (...) inheritor of personnel management, HRM as practice and ideology fills a societal vacuum and comes to exercise the power of totalizing social construction. In an integral performance culture the Performative Absolute emerges in the imaginary; it is an immanent sublime that instantiates and regulates the social being of the individual. This apotheosis of the 'manager's right to manage' overrides boundaries between public and private spheres and dissolves the separation of powers. As 'human resource', the employee is subject to living sacrifice; this is an oblation that demands ethical and theological critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob DylanPeter CheyneThe Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan; 422 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous (...) write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalogue of types united in aesthetic thrill.Invented characters inhabit this book, as they do Dylan's songs. Most prominent are the personae he extemporizes from others' songs in barnstorming flights of fancy. Upheld by writerly performance rather than argument, they act out his view that "it's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important" (p. 9).The standout weird turn is the antihero he conjures from Webb Pierce's "There Stands the Glass" (1953). This is a country song about alcoholic consolation after a breakup, the toper hoping his love still thinks of him, in his misery. Simple, clichéd even, but Dylan invents a backstory hell of a Vietnam vet who "doesn't recall ever having a soul" and is "betrayed by politicians back home." Standard old-drunk fare, but then comes the nightmare of having "stuck a bayonet into babies' bellies and gouged out old men's eyes," "assassinated priests," and a concatenation of sins. "He rounds up the elderly, women and children, torches their huts" (p. 21). No bar-time happy hours for him; all those become "zero hour," "surrounded by the enemy" (p. 22). Dylan still protests the empire grotesque. Following each dark dive or wild fantasia is a straighter section that zooms out to more objective viewpoints, factoids, and historical analysis."You," ubiquitous and protean. "You," Dylan's projected center of subjective meaning. "You," his device, as he brings you along to reinvent a mood and mind frame, a world for each song. A thesis on mimesis, the second-person fantasies urge the reader to identify with the original first-person narrative, then fly it sky high. Dylan maintains that a successful song sings the listener into an alternative existence, a temporary self, through imagery and rhyme. This is just what Plato warned against, and what Dylan values: the art of making the listener mimetically become, for a few timeless minutes, what the writer and performer sing into being. In the ancient tussle between philosophers and poets, Dylan holds the agora through the harp. [End Page 254]Popular song as fiction is nothing unusual, but criticism as fiction? Is this critical license in extremis or is Dylan stressing the idea that music is always subjective? According to Dylan, songs earn their wings not just in the hearing but in how far and wide hearers can take them. While Dylan fabricates characters that weren't even dreamt of by the song performers, this book is also autobiographical throughout. The commentary relates as much of himself as the records he highlights. The book sustains a mood where the host impishly swaps masks all the while (as when he reveals, in a tiny chapter, that "Long Tall Sally" [1956] is about a one-story-tall woman from the Nephilim tribe in antediluvian Samaria). On Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), he writes, "Everybody assumes you're a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they're not." Here, many readers will flash back to young Zimmerman in Greenwich Village, desperate to pull off his move to the big city, "and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming" (p. 1). Through songs by selected others, Dylan recounts Dylan.Channeling small-hour talk radio, pulp Westerns, and hardboiled prose, the bourbon-scented mood evokes... (shrink)

In light of more contemporary interest in the concept of an immemorial past, this essay takes up the manner in which this idea figures in Merleau-Ponty’s works by turning to the famous reference to “a past that has never been present” in Phenomenology of Perception. In order to contextualize and think through what Merleau-Ponty means, I turn to a reference in the same text to “primary silence.” Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to disclose the differential between the concatenation of sensibility and (...) expression and what remains beyond the bounds of the sensible. The task of phenomenology, accordingly, is the disclosure of this primary silence, this primary non-sense. Finally, articulating that this differential never ceased to be a concern for Merleau-Ponty, and, turning to texts from the 1950s as well as to The Visible and the Invisible, we see the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the consistent effort to think through this question. (shrink)

Traditional literature considers complex biometric sources such as words, letters and signatures for writer verification/identification. In this work the use of small segments of the handwritten stroke for writer verification is proposed. A grapheme is defined as the concatenation of smaller segments or fragments. Two models of grapheme are developed based on the idea that the segments are parts of a circle with or without direction. The average of Gray Level of the Perpendicular Line to the Skeleton and Local (...) Binary Pattern are adopted as descriptors. A database of 3,000 images of 50 writers, with 6 types of segments and with 10 samples per segment has been developed. A binary output support vector machine was applied as classifier. Thus, 50 classifiers were trained using 100 balanced data sets generated using subsampling of the majority class. Experiments are carried out with the proposed models, with an identity verification hit rate of 97 % on average. The positive results of experiments show that it is possible to achieve high precision in writer verification using segment of graphemes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:381 IMPRESSIONS, IDEAS, AND FICTIONS I. Introduction Under the heading of "fiction," Selby-Bigge's index to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature lists no fewer than seventeen distinct fictions. There is the fiction of perfect equality, of continued and distinct existence, of substance and matter, of substantial forms, accidents, faculties and occult qualities, the fiction of personal identity, and many others. The notion of a fiction is central in Hume's (...) philosophy. As the title of this paper suggests, I believe that fictions are so important that what is commonly called Hume's theory of impressions and ideas ought to be called the theory of impressions, ideas, and fictions. Although fictions are at the heart of a number of Treatise passages, they have 2 generally received very little sustained treatment. This paper is a start at filling a gap in Hume interpretation. I hope to lay the groundwork for a complete study of Hume's fictions. There are some obvious questions to be addressed in such a study: Is there just one type of fiction or are there many? Is there an essential feature or set of features shared by all fictions? Is the characterization of a view as involving a fiction always a criticism of that view? If fictions are in some sense false or wrong, what do they contrast with? What notions are true or correct? Does Hume's account of fictions mesh with an account of truth? If there is no account of truth, how can there be an account of fictions? These questions, by no means the only ones which can be raised, are related. They can be seen as hovering around the issue of whether Hume's notion 382 of a fiction is an ontological notion. Is calling something a fiction denying the existence of that thing? Does believing in fictions (e.g., believing that there are persons) amount to holding a false belief that something exists when in fact it does not? Should we read Hume as claiming, for example, that there are no substances because he calls substance a fiction? Answering 'yes' to these questions has obvious implications for the questions raised in the last paragraph. I believe that while the deflationist reading is not completely wrong, it is wrong enough to account for much confusion in Hume interpretation. Many readers of the Treatise think, for example, that in calling the self a fiction Hume is denying the existence of persons. This makes it completely mysterious why Hume talks about persons throughout the Treatise in a common-sense way, as if they do exist. Though I cannot investigate all the consequences of my interpretation of Hume's fictions for the numerous issues which involve fictions in the Treatise, it is my hope that clarifying Hume's notion of fiction will help shed light on those other notions, such as personal identity, which Hume calls fictions. I will offer an interpretation which attempts to locate some general features of fictions in the Treatise passages where Hume invokes them. Although there are different fictions, Hume has a core notion of fiction which is fundamentally epistemological rather than ontological. There will be space in this paper to look at only a few fictions, those which occur in or before "Of scepticism with regard to the senses." I believe, however, that the interpretation can be generalized. Finally, I will suggest how my interpretation provides answers to the above questions. 383 II. Fiction and Imagination It is tempting to think of Hume's notion of a fiction as an ontological notion because in contemporary usage, the notion of a fiction is ontologically loaded. Fictions are things we construct in our heads; they are the result of concatenating ideas in the imagination. Golden mountains and the Wicked Witch of the East are fictitious; they don't represent anything which exists. If Hume is using this notion of fiction, then he must be doing deflationary ontology. On this view, to call something a fiction is to demote it to the status of something thought up in one's imagination; it is to accord it the rank of something whose existence is not to be accepted. There is some support... (shrink)

Spinoza viewed the book of Ecclesiastes, in its original Hebrew and thus cleared of the interpretations imposed upon it in the guise of translation, as a powerful critique of the two most important variants of the superstition that taught human beings to regard both nature and themselves as degraded expressions of an unattainable perfection. The first was organized around the concept of miracle, the divine suspension of the actual concatenation of things, as if God were an earthly sovereign declaring (...) a state of exception. The second was the apparent opposite of this first, the idea that the concatenation of things has an origin and an end, that is, an order decreed by God. Spinoza reads Ecclesiastes through the lens of Epicurus and Lucretius, as if it were an attempt in the Hebrew idiom, an idiom in certain ways perhaps better suited for this task than either Greek or Latin, to shatter the decrees of destiny and to regard with pleasure those singular things (both human and non-human) that cannot and need not be made straight. (shrink)

이 글은 『지성 교정론』의 미완의 이유로 제기된 다양한 가설들 가운데 방법이라는 기획 자체의 문제를 다룬다. 스피노자는 가상의 반박자의 입을 빌려 방법의 기획에 다음과 같은 치명적 문제를 제기한다. 첫째, 올바른 방법을 마련하려면 그것을 마련할 올바른 방법이, 또 이를 발견할 올바른 방법 등등이 필요하지 않은가? (무한퇴행의 문제) 둘째, 방법의 출발점인 주어진 참된 관념의 참됨은 어떻게 보증하는가? (진리의 보증 문제) 셋째, 진리는 스스로 참됨을 드러내는데 인식 과정과 별도로 방법이 왜 필요한가? (방법의 필요 문제) 스피노자는 인식에 대한 방법의 내재성과 진리의 자기현시를 통해 앞의 두 (...) 물음에 답함과 동시에, 스스로를 베이컨 및 데카르트의 입장과 차별화한다. 단 마지막 문제는 내가 보기에 충분히 답변되지 않았으며, 나는 여기에 논고가 미완으로 남은 이유가 함축되어 있다고 본다. 곧 방법 논의는 한편으로는 관념들의 발생적 원인에 대한 논의로 대체되어야 했고, 다른 한편으로는 진리의 자기현시를 가로막는 편견이나 정념의 치유에 대한 논의로 대체되어야 했다. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. CostelloeSaul TraigerTimothy M. Costelloe. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 312. Hardback. ISBN: 9781474436397. $107.00.If anything about Hume’s philosophy can be characterized as widely accepted, it is that the imagination is front and center in Hume’s account of the mind. The aim of (...) Timothy Costelloe’s book is to fully develop the observation, that the imagination, as Hume understands it, is “the canvas of the mind.” Costelloe amply demonstrates that the imagination is a broad canvas, ranging from Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics, to his aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, history, philosophy of religion, and his general conception of philosophy itself. Seven substantial chapters cover these areas, and show how Hume takes the imagination to play a pivotal role in each.One of the many strengths of this book is that Costelloe responsibly mines the secondary literature, carefully explaining the interpretations he seconds and those he finds wanting. The attention to the relevant secondary literature is apparent from the start, where Costelloe laments the surprising dearth of book-length treatments of Hume on the imagination, but helpfully highlights both the lesser known Hume-centric monographs on the imagination by Furlong and Wilbanks, as well as more widely read interpretations.The introductory chapter makes important distinctions and introduces some main concepts. Hume differentiates the imagination’s “combinatory power” from its “creative power.” While the uninhibited ability to concatenate ideas might also be seen as a creative act, Costelloe sees the creative power where the imagination [End Page 173] “generates a class of ideas—‘fictions’ of a certain sort—independent of experience and according to its own inner logic” (21). This characterization makes sense when viewing the imagination’s function as directed towards a goal, such as achieving coherence or creating an aesthetically pleasing effect. Costelloe suggests that achieving an aesthetically pleasing effect is an element in any exercise of the imagination’s creative power. The imagination creates easy transitions among ideas where there were none, where doing so is pleasurable, or aided by the passions.Costelloe introduces his account of Hume’s fictions as errors of the imagination whereby ideas are formed in a manner different from the standard derivation from antecedent impressions. He insists, helpfully, that fictions are not illusions, but rather errors of a different kind. Though both involve error, fictions, unlike illusions, are not described in terms of jest or irony (30).Though he acknowledges that Hume does not describe any fictions as “artificial,” Costelloe finds it helpful to draw a distinction between natural and artificial fictions. Natural fictions are generated without reflection. Artificial fictions, such as those created by poets and philosophers, issue from “the voluntary act of imagination” (31). Costelloe holds that artificial fictions “are rarely taken to refer to objects with real existence and that any professed belief is really a matter of people being persuaded of something and taking the ideas in question as having real referents, thus only lending themselves to their existence for one reason or another” (31). This is a bit unclear. Certainly, poetic fictions are voluntary creations not intended to refer to real objects. But substance, and the double existence of ideas and external objects, as philosophical fictions, surely both involve belief and the corresponding existential commitments on the part of the philosophers who are committed to them. It is also difficult to see the purported contrast between belief and taking ideas to have real referents.Chapter 2, on metaphysics, is the longest chapter in the book, and it addresses the fictions of the imagination in Hume’s account of space and time, continued and distinct existence, liberty and necessity, and personal identity. Costelloe is sensitive to the worry that classifying Hume’s subject in Book 1 of the Treatise as metaphysics may appear to be slighting the central epistemological concerns and failing to appreciate Hume’s nascent cognitive psychology. Such worries fall away as Costelloe explores the roles that the imagination plays in the formation of our conception of duration without change, and the identity... (shrink)

In his article ‘Better Communication Between Engineers and Managers: Some Ways to Prevent Many Ethically Hard Choices’1 Michael Davis analyzes the causes of the disaster in terms of a communications gap between management and engineers. When the communication between (representatives of) both groups breaks down, the organization is in (moral) trouble. Crucial information gets stuck somewhere in the organization prohibiting a careful discussion and weighing of all (moral) arguments. The resulting judgment has therefore little (moral) quality. In this paper I (...) would like to comment on some of Michael Davis’s interesting and thought-provoking insights and ideas. A company which implements Davis’s recommendations at least shows some sensitivity to organizational moral issues. But it might miss the point that moral trouble can also result from a common understanding between managers and engineers. Organizational members sometimes tend to be myopic with regard to safety issues. This paper: 1. describes different meanings of safety Managers and engineers, as Davis mentions, are sometimes willing to compromise quality, but do sacrifice safety. It is my contention that safety—in the sense of putting people’s lives on the line—will always be compromised, and that the discussion is about the ways to negotiate the risks./li 2. focuses on a shared understanding of the situation and its implications for safety Using examples from a case study I did on behalf of a commercial airline,2 I will try to show that it is not always the communications gap between managers and engineers which poses a risk to the stakeholders involved, but a common understanding of the situation. 3. focuses on a ‘timely concatenation of both active and latent failures’ as a cause for accidents I will argue that—in spite of our efforts to strengthen ethical consciousness and organizational practices—there will always be accidents. They are part of the human condition, since we cannot completely control the complexity of the situations in which they occur. One can, however, make them less costly. (shrink)

This paper deals with Tarski's first axiomatic presentations of the syntax of deductive system. Andrzej Grzegorczyk's significant results which laid the foundations for the formalization of metalogic, are touched upon briefly. The results relate to Tarski's theory of concatenation, also called the theory of strings, and to Tarski's ideas on the formalization of metamathematics. There is a short mention of author's research in the field. The main part of the paper surveys research on the theory of deductive systems (...) initiated by Tarski, in particular research on the axiomatization of the general notion of consequence operation, axiom systems for the theories of classic consequence and for some equivalent theories, and axiom systems for the theories of nonclassic consequence. In this paper the results of Jerzy Supecki's research are taken into account, and also the author's and other people belonging to his circle of scientific research. Particular study is made of his dual characterization of deductive systems, both as systems in regard to acceptance and systems in regard to rejection . Comparison is made, therefore, with axiomatizations of the theories of rejection and dual consequence, and the theory of the usual consequence operation. (shrink)

This paper relates to Lyotard's philosophy of a différend. The paper has a dual purpose. The first is to explain what is meant by a différend and also a petit différend. The intention here is to preserve both the intrinsic validity and ethico-political value of the concept in cases where its legitimacy might easily be denied. This feeds into the second and main purpose of the paper, which is to testify to a petit différend in quality of care, so that (...) care may be taken in how the term ‘quality of care’ is actually used. It is here that the implications of a petit différend in quality of care are opened up from the perspective of cared-for and professional carers, respectively. It will be shown that the idea of quality of care is open to multiple interpretations, and therefore to disputes that judgement cannot resolve to the satisfaction of all parties. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy is difficult to define since it is not so much a specific doctrine as a loose concatenation of approaches to problems. As well as having strong ties to scientism -the notion that only the methods of the natural sciences give rise to knowledge -it also has humanistic ties to the great thinkers and philosophical problems of the past. Moreover, no single feature characterizes the activities of analytic philosophers. Undaunted by these difficulties, Avrum Stroll investigates the "family resemblances" (...) between that impressive breed of thinkers known as analytic philosophers. In so doing, he grapples with the point and purpose of doing philosophy: What is philosophy? What are its tasks? What kind of information, illumination, and understanding is it supposed to provide if it is not one of the natural sciences? Imbued with clarity, liveliness, and philosophical sophistication, Stroll´s book presents a synoptic picture of the main developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics in the past century. It does this by concentrating on the individual thinkers whose ideas have been most influential. Major themes in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy include: · the innovation of mathematical logic by Gottlob Frege at the close of the nineteenth century and its independent development by Bertrand Russell; · the impact of advancements in science on the world of philosophy and its importance for understanding such doctrines as logical positivism, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and eliminative materialism; · the refusal by such thinkers as Wittgenstein, Moore, and Austin to treat logic as an ideal language superior to natural languages; and · a conjecture about which, if any, of the philosophers discussed in the book will enter the pantheon of philosophical gods. Along the way, Stroll also covers the theories of Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, John Searle, Ruth Marcus, and Patricia and Paul Churchland. Stroll´s approach to his subject treats the critical movements in analytic philosophy in terms of the philosophers who defined them. The notoriously complex realm of analytic philosophy emerges less as an abstract enterprise than as a domain of personalities and their competing methods and arguments. The book´s inventive presentations of complex logical doctrines relate them to the traditional problems of philosophy, seeking the continuity between them rather than polemical distinctions so as to bring the true differences of their respective achievements into sharper focus. (shrink)

Many current problems surrounding science revolve around the complex epistemological framework that shapes a new vision of knowledge about reality. The traditional epistemological positions are characterized by the explanation of nature by means of concatenated facts; that is, as bricks attached to each other giving shape to the edifice of science. A conception of this nature showed that the idea of certainty was nothing more than a mere illusion, opening the way, on the contrary, to the idea of the uncertainty (...) of knowledge based on the descriptions of quantum physics, also a product of the non-reductionist conception of reality, thus criticizing the specular representation. This article addresses the main problems surrounding the critical conceptions that the emerging epistemology reveals about knowledge, pointing towards a much more complex vision of reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Just Share: Justice and Fairness in Resource Allocation*Pat Milmoe Mccarrick (bio) and Martina Darragh (bio)Each of us has some basic sense of what the words “fair” or “just” or “fairness” or “justice” mean. Each of us probably also has an idea of what is “fair” in health care. The attempt by the state of Oregon in the mid-1980s to quantify this notion made a previously private exercise a (...) public one. This transition has been chronicled in the bioethics literature that focuses on resource allocation. These works examine both theories of justice and concepts of “health”; the fair distribution of health resources has been of continuing interest since the beginning of bioethics in the 1960s. Early writing on justice includes authors Tom L. Beauchamp, Robert H. Blank, James F. Childress, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Paul T. Menzel, Paul Ramsey, and Robert M. Veatch (VII).During the 1980s, bioethicists such as Daniel Callahan and Norman Daniels proposed thinking of health care decisions not as moments of personal crisis but as choices that span a lifetime, possibly involving tradeoffs in other areas of one’s life, e.g., education. The Oregon experience added another dimension to the discussion. The initial rank-ordering of health services by cost produced a skewed list—for example, surgery for life-threatening conditions ranked below minor, elective procedures. For the project to make sense, the ranking algorithm could not be based on cost alone, but rather on a combination of costs and benefits both to individuals and to the community—“concatenations of individual and group goods” (I, Jecker and Jonsen 1995). Various metaphors have been used in the literature to facilitate discussion of this shift from individual to individual/community trade-offs: medical services as a “commons” (I, Asch 1995, Jecker and Jonsen 1995, Michels 1994); resource allocation as a “lifeboat” (I, Campbell 1995; III, Kaveny 1994); medical care as “shares” in a community health (III, Nelson 1992, Ford and Kissick 1995; II, Anderson 1993); and rationing as traveling through the desert with one jug of water for two people (a story from the Halachah literature) (I, Zoloth-Dorfman 1995). [End Page 81]Such metaphors do not promote any one “theory of justice” but rather draw from the work of a number of bioethicists as well as from theological, sociological, economic, and business literature. The five major conceptions of justice that are referenced most frequently are: “(1) a libertarian conception, which takes liberty to be the ultimate political ideal; (2) a socialist conception, which takes equality to be the ultimate political ideal; (3) a welfare liberal conception, which takes contractual fairness or maximal utility to be the ultimate political ideal; (4) a communitarian conception, which takes the common good to be the ultimate political ideal; and (5) a feminist conception, which takes a gender-free society to be the ultimate political ideal” (I, Sterba 1995).The use of new metaphors also draws on expanded concepts of “health.” “As health care is currently practiced, the most powerful symbols for public and professional alike are those that promise the defeat of time” (I, Campbell 1995). When medical care is perceived as an unrelated series of individual cures, the fact that health care resources are finite cannot be addressed.Reflections concerning the difficulties in limiting the use of health care resources have an ancient lineage and reveal a tight bond with the obsession to postpone death at all costs. Plato in Book 3 of the Republic recognizes the quandary of infinite expectations and finite resources that characterizes the challenge of health care choices. (I, Engelhardt 1996)The proliferation of expensive medical technologies and the loss of autonomy by health care professionals further complicates perceptions of the crucial issues at hand. Some have said that Americans place too much emphasis on individualism to address these issues. Daniels et al. believe that this is too pessimistic a view and that the American commitment to protecting equal opportunity for all provides a firm basis for developing a public consensus on what is fair in health care (III, Daniels, Light, and Caplan 1996). Finally, several authors suggest that the nature of all four principles of medical ethics, not justice alone, must be... (shrink)

This volume integrates aspects of the Poetics into the broader corpus of Aristotelian philosophy. It both deals with some old problems raised by the treatise, suggesting possible solutions through contextualization, and also identifies new ways in which poetic concepts could relate to Aristotelian philosophy. In the past, contextualization has most commonly been used by scholars in order to try to solve the meaning of difficult concepts in the Poetics. In this volume, rather than looking to explain a specific concept, the (...) contributors observe the concatenation of Aristotelian ideas in various treatises in order to explore some aesthetic, moral and political implications of the philosopher's views of tragedy, comedy and related genres. Questions addressed include: Does Aristotle see his interest in drama as part of his larger research on human natures? What are the implications of tragic plots dealing with close family members for the polis? What should be the role of drama and music in the education of citizens? How does dramatic poetry relate to other arts and what are the ethical ramifications of the connections? How specific are certain emotions to literary genres and how do those connect to Aristotle's extended account of pathe? Finally, how do internal elements of composition and language in poetry relate to other domains of Aristotelian thought? The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context offers a fascinating new insight to the Poetics, and will be of use to anyone working on the Poetics, or Aristotelian philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known prior intentions that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively unexplored in the philosophical literature. The first lacuna concerns how to make sense of the apparently joint cooperative activities (...) of agents that lack the capacities for planning and “mindreading” that one must have in order to be a party to a shared intention. The second lacuna concerns how participants are able to coordinate their actions “online”—that is, during action execution as a joint activity unfolds—without recourse to plans that specify in advance what they should do. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the first lacuna, while chapters 4 and 5 focus on the second. In chapter 2, I focus on why participants must have mutual or common knowledge of each other’s intentions and beliefs in order to have a shared intention: Why must these attitudes be “out in the open”? I argue that, if participants lack the concept of belief, then one of the two main motivations for the common knowledge requirement—to filter out certain cases that intuitively aren’t cases of genuine joint activity—actually dissipates. Furthermore, a kind of “openness” that only requires of participants that they have the concept of goal but not that of belief can satisfy the other main motivation, to make sense of the idea that joint activities are non-accidentally coordinated. In chapter 3, I offer an account of a kind of joint activity in which agents such as young children and some non-human primates could participate, given what we know about their socio-cognitive capacities. In chapter 4, I argue that ‘shared intention’-accounts are unable to say much about spontaneous or skilful joint action because of the following widely accepted constraint on what one can intend: while an agent might intend—in the sense of commit to a plan—that “we” do something together, an agent cannot intend to perform “our” joint action. I reject this constraint and argue that some joint actions are joint in virtue of each participant having what I call ‘socially extended intention-in-action’ that overlap. In chapter 5, I review empirical work on subpersonal enabling mechanisms for the coordination of joint action. The review provides clues to what it is that enables participants to successfully coordinate their actions in the absence of plan-like intentions or beyond what such intentions specify. While what I address are lacunas rather than problems, an upshot of this thesis is that leading philosophical accounts of joint activity may have less explanatory scope than one might otherwise be led to believe. The accounts of joint activity and joint action that are presented in this thesis are arguably applicable to many of the joint activities and joint actions of adult human beings. The account also helps us avoid the false dichotomy between a very robust form of joint activity and a mere concatenation of purely individualistic actions—a dichotomy that accounts such as Bratman’s arguably invite us to adopt. (shrink)

The existence of causal explanations in science has been an issue of interest in Western philosophy from its very beginnings. That is the reason this work, following an idea of Mario Bunge, makes a historical review of this matter. The modern treatment of this subject takes place since the postulation by Popper and Hempel of the D-N model of scientific explanation, whose viability is scrutinized here from different points of view in the current philosophy of science. The main object of (...) this paper is to present two arguments against the possibility of causal explanations in theoretical physics. The first one concerns the existence, in certain cases, of inter-theoretical incompatibilities, and the second refers to the need to resort, in other cases, to concatenations of laws of different theories and disciplines. The final conclusion will be the defence of a form of theoretical explanation, which follows the Popper-Hempel model, but devoid of any ontological and metaphysical connotations. (shrink)

There is a sense in which it is trivial to say that one accepts intention- (or convention-) based semantics.[2] For if what is meant by this claim is simply that there is an important respect in which words and sentences have meaning (either at all or the particular meanings that they have in any given natural language) due to the fact that they are used, in the way they are, by intentional agents (i.e. speakers), then it seems no one should (...) disagree. For imagine a possible world where there are physical things which share the shape and form of words of English or Japanese, or the acoustic properties of sentences of Finnish or Arapaho, yet where there are no intentional agents (or where any remaining intentional agents don’t use language). In such a world, it seems clear that these physical objects, which are only superficially language-like, will lack all meaning. Furthermore, it seems that questions of particular meaning are also settled by the conventions of intentional language users: it’s nothing more than convention which makes the concatenation of letters ‘a’^‘p’^‘p’^‘l’^‘e’ mean apple, rather than banana, in English.[3] So, understood as the minimal claim that intentional agents, who have a practice of using certain physical objects (written words, sounds, hand gestures, etc) to communicate certain thoughts, are a prerequisite for linguistic meaning, the idea that semantics is based on both intention and convention seems indisputable. I will label a theory which recognises this preconditional role for speaker intentions an A-style intention-based semantics and we will explore one such account in §1. (shrink)

Retomo, en este artículo, la conocida distinción platónica entre doxa y epistêmê, hecha principalmente en el Menón y la República. Pero subrayo con énfasis particular la diferencia de criterios, de un diálogo a otro. Mientras que en el primero predomina el criterio lógico de la estabilidad de epistêmê y la inestabilidad dóxa, debida respectivamente a la concatenación (desmós) y la falta de concatenación de sus elementos, el segundo enfatiza el criterio ontológico de los objetos:la misma cosa no puede ser aprehendida (...) por la ciencia y la opinión, pues la primera concierne al ser absoluto, identificado con las Formas platónicas, y la segunda a algo que es intermedio entre el ser absoluto y el no-ser absoluto. Después de objetar que Platón no logra demostrar su división tripartita de la realidad, sostengo que la diferencia de criterios aquí analizada se debe a la ausencia de la Teoría Platónica de las Formas en el Menón. Palabras clave: Platón; Doxa; Epistêmê; Distinción; CriteriosI return in this paper to the well-known Platonic distinction between doxa and episteme, drawn mainly in Meno and Republic. However, I stress now the difference in criteria from one dialogue to the other. While in the first prevails the logical criterion of stability of epistêmê and unstableness of dóxa, owing respectively to the concatenation (desmós) and the lack of concatenation of their elements, the second emphasizes the ontological criterion of objects: the same thing cannot be apprehended by science and opinion, for the former concerns to absolute being, identified with Platonic Ideas, while the latter to something which is halfway between absolute being and absolute not-being. After objecting that Plato fails to demonstrate his tripartite division of reality, I claim that the difference of criteria hereby analyzed is due to the absence of Plato’s Theory of Ideas in Meno. KeyWords: Plato; Doxa; Epistêmê; Distinction; Criteria. (shrink)

Keystream sequences should look as random as possible, i.e. should present no logical pattern to be exploited in cryptographic attacks. The generalized self-shrinking generator, a sequence generator based on irregular decimation, produces a family of sequences with good cryptographic properties. In this work, we display a detailed analysis on the randomness of the sequences resulting from the concatenation of elements of this family. We apply the most important batteries of statistical and graphical tests providing powerful results and a new (...) method to construct sequences with good cryptographic properties. (shrink)

There are (at least) four numbers of physical and cosmological significance, whose inferred values, when expressed in mass units, cluster in a window below 1 eV. There are: the neutrino mass, the neutrino chemical potential, the cosmological constant, and the size of two extra dimensions (if the fundamental scale of gravity is 1–10 TeV). In this note, we imagine ways in which these four numbers could all be connected.

Voegelin's magisterial account of medieval political thought opens with a survey of the structure of the period and continues with an analysis of the Germanic invasions, the fall of Rome, and the rise of empire and monastic Christianity. The political implications of Christianity and philosophy in the period are elaborated in chapters devoted to John of Salisbury, Joachim of Flora, Frederick II, Siger de Brabant, Francis of Assisi, Roman law, and climaxing in a remarkable study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's mighty (...) thirteenth-century synthesis. Although _History of Political Ideas_ was begun as a textbook for Macmillan, Voegelin never intended it to be a conventional chronological account. He sought instead an original comprehensive interpretation, founded on primary materials and taking into account the most advanced specialist scholarship—or science as he called it—available to him. Because of this, the book grew well beyond the confines of an easily marketable college survey and until now remained unpublished. In the process of writing it, Voegelin himself outgrew the conceptual frame of a "History of Political Ideas," turning to compose _Order and History_ and the other works of his maturity. _History of Political Ideas_ became the ordered collection of materials from which much of Voegelin's later theoretical elaboration grew, structured in a manner that reveals the conceptual intimations of his later thought. As such, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe the working methods and the intellectual evolution of one of our century's leading political thinkers. In its embracing scope, _History of Political Ideas_ contains both analyses of themes Voegelin developed in his later works and discussions of authors and ideas to which he did not return or which he later approached from a different angle and with a different emphasis. _The Middle Ages to Aquinas_ has withstood the test of time. What makes it still highly valuable is its thoroughly revisionist approach, cutting through all the convenient clichés and generalizations and seeking to establish the experiential underpinnings that typified the medieval period. (shrink)

In Chapter 9 of the first book of the Metaphysics Aristotle criticizes “those who posit the Ideas as causes”. His second group of criticisms urges that “the ways in which we try to prove that the forms exist” are unsatisfactory, and he enumerates five such ‘ways’. Alexander of Aphrodisias, in his commentary on the passage, offers to explain in more detail what the five ways were and why each is a cul-de-sac. Gail Fine’s On Ideas is a commentary (...) on this section of Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle. (shrink)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “For anyone wanting to understand the twists and turns of the history of ideas, this book will be indispensable.”―John Gray, New York Times Book Review The Sense of Reality was the last new collection of essays published by Isaiah Berlin in his lifetime. All informed by Berlin’s lifelong fascination with the history of ideas, these engaging studies range widely: the subjects explored include realism in history; judgment in politics; the (...) history of socialism; the nature and impact of Marxism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics; Russian notions of artistic commitment; and the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, taking its cue from the impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece. Now with a new foreword by Timothy Snyder and a new appendix comprising a previously unpublished essay on the great Russian critic Vissarion Belinksy and a previously uncollected lecture on utopianism, The Sense of Reality is a rich and illuminating collection from one of the most seductive writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter.

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into (...) a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

The article discusses the main anthropological ideas in diaspore’s prose in the context of existing traditions and postmodern stylistic characteristics. It also highlights characteristic features of the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose. The latter contains the views on the literary character as personality, as well as the world and place of humans in it. Importantly, the research follows the concepts of Christian theology, superhuman, rationalism, and postmodernism. It also emphasizes the axiological matrices of humans and their worldviews. The scientific value of (...) the article lies in disclosing anthropological models that correspond to axiological functionality. Using the prose of the Ukrainian diaspora and the art of words, the authors of the article attempt to find how to overcome the crisis of human and society. The proposed approach allows finding the place of humans in this world and give their lives meaning. It shows that the world is beautiful and cannot exist on its own, given that it acts as one’s awareness. At the same time, the anthropological concept is considered a system. Furthermore, the authors have applied a system of theoretical-methodological approaches to the problem in question. It was important to identify the main theoretical principles of the research, describe anthropological ideas of prose and highlight anthropological ideas in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose in the context of existing traditions and postmodern postulates. (shrink)

This article draws parallels between the representations of the classics of Eurasianism and their contemporaries, namely N. K. Roerich, H. I. Roerich and Y. N. Roerich, on the peculiar mid-world that is formed by Russia within and around it. It is indicated that the concept of interrelation of biogeosystems with peoples and civilizations inhabiting them, defined by the Eurasian term “developmental site”, is familiar from natural-philosophic concepts of the earlier period. In the era of the development of the ideas (...) of noospherism, it obtained natural-scientific substantiation and new interpretation not only in L. N. Gumilyov original theory of ethnogenesis, but also in representations of the Russian cosmism, which can be correlated with the scientific-philosophical, literary-artistic heritage of the Roerichs. Unlike geosophy of the Eurasians, the holistic views of Roerichs imparted a rather synthetic character to the historical science. At the same time, Y. N.Roerich distinguished geopsychology as a research instrument for cross-civilizational dialogue. One of the most remarkable episodes in implementation of the Eurasian vision by the Roerichs was their Central Asian expedition and peacekeeping activity, associated with unification of the peoples of Eurasia on the basis of broad cooperation. The article demonstrates the possibility of synthesizing Eurasian theories, spiritual-ethical teachings, and natural scientific research within the framework of integral philosophy for elaboration on the concept of sustainable development. Besides the need for international cooperation, the cultural-philosophical heritage of the Roerichs, which includes “Living Ethics or the Teaching of Life”, infeasibility of evolution of mankind detached from the planet and Cosmos also received its ontological substantiation. Such an in-depth consideration of the fate of Eurasia by the Roerichs, associated with the civilizational foundations of the crossing “Russia — Mongolia — China — India” and the leading role of Siberia in the future, allows filling the gaps in the construction of the classics of Eurasianism and utilize sociocultural potential of Eurasia to the fullest. (shrink)

Minds, Ideas and Objects is a collection of conference papers on the topic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of ideas or “sensory experience, thought, knowledge and their objects.” At least half the twenty-three papers are by well-known historians of philosophy who seldom disappoint, and there is some equally thought-provoking work among the rest. Some papers say little that is surprising, and some, including good ones, fail to convince, but few are weak. It is perhaps to be expected that (...) coverage of the period is uneven, but chance has played some odd tricks, giving us one paper each on Leibniz and Hume and none on Spinoza, whereas Berkeley excites the attention of six contributors, one more even than Kant. Most philosophers discussed are narrowly canonical, with just a page on Cudworth and only four even on Reid, but there are a couple of welcome articles on the vastly rewarding, until recently seldom studied Arnauld-Malebranche debate. Günter Zöller’s “The Austrian Way of Ideas,” summarizing the views on intentionality of Brentano and his pupils, Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reminds us of the close continuities between early-modern and twentieth-century concerns. (shrink)

In the second half of Book One of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle reflects on the application of the formalized logic has developed in the first half, focusing particularly on the non-modal or assertoric syllogistic developed in the first seven chapters. These reflections lead Alexander of Aphrodisias, who was a great exponent of Aristotelianism in the late second century, to explain and sometimes argue against subsequent developments of Aristotle's logic and alternatives and objections to it, ideas associated mainly with his (...) colleague Theophrastus and with the Stoics. The other main topic of this part of the Prior Analytics is the specification of a method for discovering true premises needed to prove a given proposition. Aristotle's presentation is sometimes difficult to follow, and Alexander's discussion is extremely helpful to the uninitiated reader. In his commentary on the final chapter translated in this volume, Alexander provides an insightful account of Aristotle's criticism of Plato's method of division. (shrink)

Many writers have paid tribute to its power: Shakespeare urged his audiences to use it to create a setting; Hobbes asserted that "imagination and memory are but one thing; " for Wordsworth it was "the mightiest leveler known to moral world; " and to Baudelaire it represented "the queen of truth. " Imagination as artistic, poetic, and cultural predicate remains one of the most influential ideas in the history of Western thought. It has been simultaneously feared as a dangerous, (...) uncontrollable force, and revered as the supreme visionary power. The questions of its origins, nature, function, and effects have absorbed writers, theologians, and philosophers alike. J. M. Cocking's Imagination shows how these questions have recurred, through the ages and in various cultures. Exploring this theme, from antiquity to the Renaissance, it opens with a discussion of the treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Tracing its development in the Middle Ages, Cocking pays particular attention to the parallel tradition in Islamic thought of the period. The book pursues the concept through the theories of Dante and the neo-Platonists, concluding with the High Renaissance. (shrink)

In the Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations , asks how we can know that (...) an idea is adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay , asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us. (shrink)

This paper reviews Hume's arguments concerning space and time in the second part of the first book of the _Treatise_. It is argued that Hume's views on the finite divisibility of our ideas of space and time and on space and time as manners of disposition are coherent and well-defended. The same cannot be said about his views on vacuum and the impossibility of temporal passage in the absence of change.

Historians have been divided about the origins of Leveller theories concerning natural rights, equality, and democracy. This article gives an account of the monistic natural philosophy outlined by Richard Overton in his pre-Leveller work Mans Mortalitie (1643/44) and demonstrates how his heretical conception of creation provided a metaphysical foundation for his political ideas about the liberty of the subject. Comparisons and contrasts are made with the hermetic idealism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan and the spiritual materialism of Gerrard Winstanley. (...) The most illuminating comparison amongst contemporaries, however, is found in Milton's poetic vision of the cosmos in Paradise Lost (1667). (shrink)

Many people today deny the idea of Human Change (especially when the word 'evolution' is used). Many others, accepting that we have changed in the past, do not see change as still occurring. My ideas (challenges) are: not only that we are still changing, but that we are changing ever more rapidly, and in new ways.Is Homo sapiens (vainly named, wise human) already in the process of becoming Homo sapientior (wiser human)? Can we expect further change to Homo sapientissimus (...) (wisest human)? Or do we have to fear regression to Homo nerdensis?The seven Ideas of my title cover: Sex, yesterday, today and tomorrow; Gender: women's struggles (and men's); Particularly Dangerous Ideas: Race and Ethnicity, Kin and Ancestors; Ideas on Aging: Life Span, Mortality and Death; Ideas about the Brain: changed, changing and unique; Failure of Ideas: Cheating, Damned Cheating and 'Chorruption'; My Mistakes: Ideas I missed. (shrink)

En este artículo el autor propone revisar la idea kantiana de virtud, su relación con el deber, con la razón y con el sentimiento moral: el respeto. También se revisan las ideas de santidad y perfección, como referencia para dos caras del mismo deber y su papel como orientadoras de la facultad de juzgar, demostrando el carácter unitario de la ética kantiana.

This paper discusses the main logical ideas put forward by Jan Łukasiewicz within their historical context and further development.

What is the meaning of historical changes to the visualisation of knowledge? This article examines the long history of the Latin grammar from antiquity until early modernity and traces shifts in graphics through hundreds of manuscripts and printed books. It shows how the table—today the most common means for representation of grammatical paradigms—only became a common feature of grammar books in the Renaissance. To account for this visual change requires teasing apart the effects of intellectual from material factors on one (...) of the most basic branches of knowledge and learning. It brings to the fore educational practices which are often unnoticed by scholars and shows how humanism, paper and print interacted in forming a new learning experience. Following the evolution of one schoolbook genre throughout a millennium and a half, the articles challenges some of our notions regarding transmission of ideas and entails some important methodological lessons about dealing with visualisations in scientific texts more generally. Above all, it underscores the importance of cognitive considerations in shaping epistemic genres and whole fields of knowledge. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the mutual interaction as well as the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the formation of the Enlightenment in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great. It focuses on the relationship between the work of Adam Smith and Semyon Efimovich Desnitskii, who, thanks to Desnitskii’s studies at the University of Glasgow, got to know each other as teacher and student. The central point of their interaction is the issues of the philosophy of history based on (...) natural-law assumptions and focus on understanding the formation of history, culture, citizenship, and social transformations through morality and law. The paper examines Desnitskii’s ideas on the stages of human coexistence in which Smith’s concept is projected. The paper is not only an attempt to compare these concepts, but it also characterizes Desnitskii’s interest in adapting the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to Russian reality and needs and using them in the environment of the advancing feudal empire, to which Desnitskii wants to contribute with his work. (shrink)

We leverage the notion that abstraction enables prediction to generate novel insights and hypotheses for the literatures on attitudes and mate preferences. We suggest that ideas about liking are more abstract than experiences of liking, and that ideas about liking may facilitate mental travel beyond the here-and-now.

ABSTRACTGraeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers gets as close as is humanly possible to an ethnography of recruiters and sympathizers of the Islamic State. Contrary to much writing on radical Islamism, Wood convincingly shows that the Islamic State’s ideas—rooted in a literalist reading of ancient Islamic sources—are central in motivating many of the movement’s followers. His accounts of individual adherents also suggests, however, that ideas are not the only factor, as certain personality traits influence who is attracted (...) to radical Islamist movements. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study aims to analyse and describe the ideas of pupils about ID. Overall 2324 pupils from 23 Czech primary schools of the so-called mainstream e...

In this empirical study, we investigate _what_ and _how_ teachers in Dutch universities of applied sciences (UAS) think they contribute to the development of students’ ethical compasses. Six focus groups were conducted with teachers across three programmes: Initial Teaching Education, Business Services, and Information and Communication Technology. This study revealed that teachers across the three different professional disciplines shared similar ideas about what should be addressed in the development of students’ ethical compasses. Their contributions were grouped into three core (...) themes: creating students’ moral awareness, developing students’ moral skills and promoting students’ moral professional behaviour. The majority of the teachers used a wide range of planned and unplanned pedagogic–didactic actions (reflecting individual learning and cooperative and group learning) to enhance the development of students’ ethical compasses. However, teachers’ strategies were mostly unstructured and unreflective and depended on the individual teacher’s ability and knowledge to address moral themes. Furthermore, the study revealed two incompatible ideals: as role models, the teachers aimed to exemplify explicitly how to be a professional with an ethical compass. However, they also wanted to adopt a neutral stance because they were afraid to manipulate the students’ ethical compasses. Therefore, they avoided promoting _the_ ethical compass that they believed to be the best. (shrink)

The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism. Tilmann Vetter. E.J. Brill, Leiden 1988. xxxviii, 110 pp. Dfl.42.50.

In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume argues that there is a significant problem with his earlier account of personal identity. There has been considerable debate about what this problem actually is. I develop a new version of an internal inconsistency reading, where I argue that Hume realised that his original account of the connexion between perceptions in terms of an association of the ideas of the perceptions was not a viable means of explaining the connexion between perceptions as (...) it leads to an infinite regress of ideas of perceptions. This is only stopped by accepting that the mind perceives a connexion between perceptions. This, however, is something Hume cannot accept. As a result, Hume is left without a positive account of the self, as he has no account of the connexion between perceptions. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to examine and clarify the truth theory of American pragmatism. Three central ideas of this truth theory will be considered in light of Whitehead's metaphysics: a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, a defense of fallibilism, and a recognition of the temporality of truth.