Ambivalence is a form of inner volitional conflict that we experience as being irresolvable without significant cost. Because of this, very few of us relish feelings of ambivalence. Yet for many in the Western philosophical tradition, ambivalence is not simply an unappealing experience that's hard to manage. According to Unificationists--whose view finds its historical roots in Plato and Augustine and is ably defended by contemporary philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgaard--ambivalence is a failure of well-functioning agency. The reasons (...) for this, we're told, are threefold. First, it precludes agents from resolving their wills in a way that is necessary for autonomy. Second, it precludes agents from fully affirming their live and, in particular, from fully affirming the choices they make. As a result, ambivalence robs them of an important source of meaning. Finally, ambivalence causes agents to act in self-defeating ways. In so doing, they act without integrity. Ambivalence is thus seen as a threat to a trio of important agential goods, and as a result, it imperils the best forms of human agency. -/- Against the Unificationists, D. Justin Coates argues that ambivalence does not preclude volitional resolution or normatively significant forms of affirmation. Nor does it guarantee self-defeat. Consequently, ambivalence as such is no threat to autonomy, meaning, or integrity. In assessing these arguments, ambivalence is also revealed to have an important role in securing the very goods that unificationists contend it undermines. The reason for this is that each of these goods requires the agent to be normatively competent. But normative competence itself, Coates argues, often leads agents to be ambivalent. The best forms of human agency are therefore shown to be not only compatible with ambivalence but as regularly requiring it. Ambivalence is thus not a volitional defect, but a crucial constituent of well-functioning agency. (shrink)

Giuseppina D'Oro explores Collingwood's work in epistemology and metaphysics, uncovering his importance beyond his better known work in philosophy of history and aesthetics. This major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important figures in history of philosophy will be essential reading for scholars of Collingwood and all students of metaphysics and the history of philosophy.

The work of Michèle Le Dœuff creatively disrupts established notions of what philosophy might be. Far from being a discipline about the leader and the disciple, a hierarchy of knowledge and paternalism, Le Dœuff proposes a philosophy of dialogue and friendship. The conversations in this book explore how this philosophy can be enacted and explored, and show how openness and generosity can be the starting point of truly rigorous thinking. Introduced and curated by the late philosopher, Pamela Sue Anderson, In (...) Dialogue with Michèle Le Dœuff explores themes like contemporary feminism, joy in philosophy, memory, the significance of friendship to thinking and a key Le Dœuffian concept, the imaginary. Le Dœuff's interlocutors, including Penelope Deutscher, Elizabeth Fallaize and Meenda Dhanda, are some of the most significant thinkers in the fields of feminism and continental thought and provide insights and ways into considering philosophy as a profoundly dialogical exercise. (shrink)

This book brings together ten previously published essays on the philosophy of economics and economic methodology. The general theme is the application of Karl Popper's philosophy of science to economics -- not only by Popper himself but also by other members of the "Popperian school." There are three major issues that surface repeatedly: the applicability of Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science; the applicability of I. Lakatos's "methodology of scientific research programs" to economics; and the question of Popper's "situational analysis" approach (...) to social science. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION If there is one underlying implication in the following essays it is the inadequacy of the information-processing model for cognitive ...

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Pairwise classifiers, which identify whether two examples belong to the same class or not, are important components in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering applications. Existing methods for learning pairwise classifiers from labeled training data are based on string edit distance or common features between two examples. However, if two examples from the same class have few common features, these methods have difficulties (...) in finding these pairs and achieving high recall. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different citations refer to the same person or not. Since similarities between examples from the same class become close to zero, classifiers fail to distinguish positive pairs from negative pairs. One approach to avoiding the problem of zero similarities is using conjunctions of different features across examples, but implementing this idea straightforwardly makes the computational cost prohibitive for practical problems. Using a kernel on pair instances, our method can use feature conjunctions across examples without actually doing feature mappings, which are computationally expensive. The kernel is a tensor product of two inner products on the original feature space. The corresponding feature mapping generates conjunctions of features only across the two different examples while that of the conventional polynomial kernel also generates conjunctions of features from the same example, which are irrelevant to pairwise classification and cause deterioration of accuracy. Our experiments on the author matching problem show that this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods at medium recall levels. (shrink)

C’est une évidence : on ne parle plus aujourd’hui d’une crise succédant à d’autres crises – et préludant à d’autres encore –, mais de « la crise », qui plus est d’une crise globale qui touche aussi bien la finance que l’éducation, la culture, le couple ou l’environnement. Ce constat témoigne d’une véritable mutation : si à l’origine le concept de krisis désignait le moment décisif dans l’évolution d’un processus incertain permettant d’énoncer le diagnostic (et donc la sortie de crise), (...) nous vivons actuellement précisément l’inverse – le moment où surgissent les incertitudes quant aux causes, aux effets, à la possibilité même d’une issue. Afin d’éclairer ce renversement, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes se penche sur le mouvement d’arrachement au passé et à la tradition qui caractérise la modernité, et qui dissout d’un même élan les anciens repères de la certitude qui balisaient la compréhension du monde. Privé de toute forme de transcendance, l’homme moderne se trouve face à un monde redoutablement ambigu et auto-référentiel, qui a vu s’évanouir tour à tour l’idée de temps nouveaux, la croyance au progrès et l’esprit de conquête, modifiant profondément le rapport de l’homme à son vécu et à ses attentes. C’est à partir de cette expérience du temps d’un nouveau genre, à la fois coupée de ses référents passés et dépourvue de lendemains qui chantent, que cet essai stimulant nous invite à reconsidérer de façon inédite la « crise » dans laquelle nous sommes plongés et à y puiser de quoi aller de l’avant. (shrink)

This is the classic study of the history and continuing philosophical values of the law of nature. D'Entrèves discerned three distinct sources that have contributed to the development of natural law: Roman law teachings, Christian beliefs regarding law, and egalitarian and revolutionary theories of the Enlightenment. Now regarded as a classic work, Natural Law has exercised considerable influence over the course of Anglo-American legal theory in the past forty years. The statements of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings (...) show that the law of nature still holds powerful appeal in defining judicial rules. In the new introduction, Cary J. Nederman points out both the contemporary value and the historical significance of Natural Law. He also provides the biographical as well as intellectual context for d'Entrèves immense accomplishments. This volume is essential reading for students of legal history, political theory, and philosophy. It will also be of interest to historians. "Few texts provide as concise or as cogent an introduction to natural theory as Alexander Passerin d'Entrèves' Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy.... Transaction Publishers has performed a genuine service by bringing out a new edition of Natural Law. D'Entrèves' analysis is clear and penetrating, and will guide the student of natural law to further, fruitful study."--Mitchell Muncy, The University Bookman. (shrink)

In diesem Band deckt Diego D'Angelo semiotische Strukturen in der Husserl’schen Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung auf. Ist es der Phänomenologie darum zu tun, die Erfahrung von Dingen in unserer Umwelt zu beschreiben, so ist dabei der Begriff des Horizontes von zentraler Bedeutung: Was wir unmittelbar wahrnehmen, verweist immer schon auf anderes, was nur „mitgegeben“ ist. Wenn wir Dinge wahrnehmen, haben wir nur eine bestimmte Perspektive, d.h. wir sehen lediglich einen Aspekt. Aber wir nehmen immer ganze Gegenstände wahr (wir sehen Tische und (...) Stühle und andere Menschen). Jeder dieser Gegenstände erscheint in einem Feld weiterer Gegenstände, und es ist der Horizontbegriff, der es erlaubt, das Verhältnis zwischen Selbstgegebenheit und Mitgegebenheit zu explizieren. Dieses Buch stellt den ersten detaillierten Versuch dar, die Ursprünge solcher horizontaler Felder in semiotischen Strukturen zu suchen. Aus der Verbindung zwischen Husserls eigener Semiotik und seiner Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung ergibt sich, dass das wahrgenommene Phänomen als Zeichen verstanden werden muss. Das Zeichen wiederum bezeichnet etwas, was in leiblicher Bewegung eingeholt werden kann. Mit der Verbindung von Leiblichkeit, Semiotik und Wahrnehmung thematisiert diese Monographie das Verhältnis zwischen folgenden phänomenologischen Forschungsgebieten: • Husserls Semiotik der Wahrnehmung in den Logischen Untersuchungen • Phänomenologische Raumanalyse – kinästhetische Indikation • Horizont und Noema • Passive Anzeige • Zeichen und Leiblichkeit als Grundlagen der Fremderfahrung • Genetische Phänomenologie und Semiotik der Erfahrung • Protentionen und teleologische Semiose • Induktion und Ursprung des menschlichen Ichs Das Buch eröffnet die Möglichkeit, Husserls Phänomenologie jenseits einer Metaphysik der Präsenz zu verstehen. Zudem leisten D'Angelos Einzeluntersuchungen einen Beitrag zu aktuellen Diskussionen in der Philosophie der leiblichen Kognition. – Eine hilfreiche Leseempfehlung für • Interessierte Themenneulinge • Bachelor- und Masterstudenten der Geisteswissenschaften • Hochschulabsolventen sowie Forschungswissenschaftler. (shrink)