Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

Could Greek philosophers-Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus-be considered as guardians and schoolmasters that brought humanity to Christ in a way similar to the Law of the Old Testament according to Saint Paul (Gal. 3,24)??he philosophical project of Platonism had five fundamental tenets, namely monism, transcendence, participation, ethics of purification, and the relevant notion of evil as non-being. Dr. Dionysios Skliris is both theologian and philosopher, and he sees that all of these philosophical demands were realized in the theology of the (...) Fathers in the most radical way, yet "in another form" (Mark 16,12). After Christ, transcendence means that God is uncreated and creates a contingent world out of free love. Monism coexists with a Trinity of Persons since God is love in His own transcendent being and not only in relation to the world. On every page, Skliris shows us the true implications of purification: it leads to transformation and evil is non-being not as a "fading away" of light, but as a historical closedness to God that cannot survive in the eschaton. (shrink)

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

_ _In __The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism__, Dimitri Ginev draws on devel-opments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those (...) who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature. Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research. (shrink)

Taking user’s role and features as milestones for an approach on scientific representation has become a growing trend. We shall investigate the implications that pragmatics bring in the relevant debate. Proponents of pragmatic approaches support that questions such as ‘how an object represents another’ or ‘which features of a certain object represent the target of the representation and in what way’ can be answered only within the given context of representation’s use. Thus, attention is drawn to the intentionality of the (...) representation, in contrast to the semantic tradition, according to which the representational function is based on morphic relations between the representation and the represented object. Given that scientific representations surrogate objects and phenomena in our studies, they should reproduce aspects, relations and interactions of them, possessing the appropriate features. Therefore, we support that user’s intention is not enough to build the representational relation on it. We claim that a) a sustainable and successful theory of scientific representations cannot be grounded on pragmatics b) pragmatic approaches undermine the objectivity of the knowledge inferred by representations c) the important role of the cognizing subject in a theory of scientific representation can be rescued without the burden coming with pragmatic approaches. (shrink)

In this paper I point out main shortfalls of the three main families of theories of perception and I propose a sort of inferential realism. In addition, I argue that there cannot be a scientific variant of direct realism and illustrate this point with reference to P.F.Strawson's attempt to reconcile, not naïve realism and the scientific variant as he amounts to, but rather, direct and indirect realism. I draw the distinction between four cases of illusion, and I refer to one (...) of these, namely to the case of veridical illusion, to show that Strawson's view, put in terms of the Fregean sense-reference distinction, fails. As regards indirect realism, I argue against the representationalist account and the Lockean picture of primary and secondary qualities. Phenomenalism is rejected in terms of the impossibility to identify an object throughout different contexts and I suggest that what is for x to be that x in different contexts can be given only by a realist analysis of a material object. Finally, I provide an account of what it is for A to perceive that x with respect to different contexts and I conclude with what conditions should veridical perception meet and therefore propose the framework of a new theory of perception. (shrink)

The paper examines the status of ambiguity in the thought of Plotinus (c. 204/205-270). Even though ambiguity should be regarded as the enemy of the philosopher and as pertaining rather to the rhetorical tradition and not the philosophical one as it was especially established by Plato and Aristotle, one can argue that the particularly Neoplatonist philosophical project permitted an important place to it due to some fundamental inherent aspects that it contained. Most importantly, the ambiguity in the generation of the (...) Intellect from the One is examined in this paper as related to the dialectic between existence and being. In such a perspective, ambiguity is initiated by the fact that being is both one in order to exist and not one in order to be a being. Thus, it can be explained only in dialectic with an ontological reality beyond it, namely an absolute One. This means that, in turn, its generation as Intellect from the latter is necessarily a two-fold movement: Both a distribution of existence by procession and a reverting contemplative act for acquisition of substantial definition. This dialectic does not only concern the highest ontological level of the relation of the Being to the One, but is a permanent ontological vacillation in the system of Plotinus. The paper observes this valorization of ambiguity as an original and dynamic feature of Plotinian ontology that arguably paved the way for Modernity. (shrink)

In a stimulating paper, Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) argued how a decision maker could undertake dynamically inconsistent choices when, in an extensive form decision problem, she has a particular type of imperfect recall named absentmindedness. Such memory limitation obtains whenever information sets include decision histories along the same decision path. Starting from work focusing on the absentminded driver example, and independently developed by Segal (2000) and Dimitri (1999), the main theorem of this article provides a general result of dynamically consistent (...) choices, valid for a large class of finite extensive form decision problems without nature. (shrink)

In Constituent Power, Violence, and the State, Dimitri Vouros examines the question of political violence by placing the thought of Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in conversation with contemporary theories of sovereignty and constituent power. Vouros argues that the violence sustaining the modern state inhibits institutional accountability and derails constituent power. The paradox of modern law-which is both the expression of the people's will but also alienated from them-sets the stage for political contestation. For Vouros, the multitude's potentiality (...) is actualized through either organized or spontaneous acts of resistance against state force. Antagonism is therefore a key element of the political and must be included in any theory of political agonism. A strong notion of constituent power ensures the integrity of the public sphere and the expansion of citizens' political agency. Bringing all these ideas together is unique for this field of investigation. Accessible and engagingly written, Constituent Power, Violence, and the State is a must read for researchers in political theory and political philosophy. Critical legal studies scholars and social theorists will also profit from this book. (shrink)

In recent years, the significant proliferation of hate speech in several facets of the public sphere has triggered the renewal of scholarly interest in the phenomenon across disciplinary areas. Within this picture, it is often observed that hate speech may nowadays be realised in real-life communication via more implicit or indirect forms, which do not meet the legal threshold. Theoretically, the introduction of the term ‘soft hate speech’ has been aimed at capturing all these cases of implicit, covert or indirect (...) realisations of hate speech. Adopting a combination of critical perspectives from discourse and argumentation studies, the present special issue zooms in on the discursive strategies and lines of argumentation that end up subtly justifying discriminatory hatred within this remit. (shrink)

Debate on the nature of representation in cognitive systems tends to oscillate between robustly realist views and various anti‐realist options. I defend an alternative view, deflationary realism, which sees cognitive representation as an offshoot of the extended application to cognitive systems of an explanatory model whose primary domain is public representation use. This extended application, justified by a common explanatory target, embodies idealisations, partial mismatches between model and reality. By seeing representation as part of an idealised model, deflationary realism avoids (...) the problems with robust realist views, while keeping allegiance to realism. (shrink)

In the literature on the nature and role of cognitive representation, three positions are taken across the conceptual landscape: robust realism, primitivism, and eliminativism. Recently, a fourth alternative that tries to avoid the shortcomings of traditional views has been proposed: content pragmatism. My aim is to defend pragmatism about content against some recent objections moved against the view. According to these objections, content pragmatism fails to capture the role played by representation in the cognitive sciences; and/or is an unstable view (...) that ends up collapsing into one of the traditional alternatives. I argue that those arguments fail. I show that content pragmatism has as much claim to descriptive adequacy as the traditional theories. Moreover, I defend the robustness of the view by arguing that it does not collapse into any of the traditional positions. Content pragmatism therefore offers a valid and coherent account of the nature of representational content. (shrink)

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final (...) chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

Through accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s views of linguistic expression and understanding, and by tracing the evolution of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language offers a comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language.

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the concept of natural liberation in classical Sāṃkhya. On the basis of the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa and its traditional commentaries, I will attempt to demonstrate that liberation from suffering in Sāṃkhya is not the result of rational inquiry—the prevailing view among contemporary scholars. The Sāṃkhya does not necessarily prescribe yogic practice as argued by other scholars. Instead, I will defend a position expressed by K.C. Bhattacharyya and Frank R. Podgorski, according to which liberation in (...) classical Sāṃkhya is a natural and spontaneous process of suffering transforming into its own cure. I will argue that although traditional authorities may disagree over the form the liberating process takes on the phenomenal level, there is a general agreement that the natural forces are the primary drives and agents of liberation. (shrink)

The author reflects on the future of Catholic health care by looking at the essays in this volume by Dennis Brodeur, Clarke E. Cochran, and Christopher J. Kauffman. The author argues that (1) Roman Catholic teaching on the Trinity is defective, yielding an inadequate model of society, (2) Roman Catholic teaching on the Incarnation is defective, yielding an impoverished understanding of the “sacramental,” and (3) the institutional orientation of Roman Catholicism combined with the lack of true sacramental vision makes it (...) nearly impossible for Roman Catholic theory to criticize the current structure of health care financing. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Graeco-Arabic studies, or the study of the translations of classical Greek works into Arabic during the early ‘Abbāsid caliphate of the Arabs (ca. 750–1000), is a field that is well known; it has been cultivated, with significant results for the study of medieval Islamic civilization, for more than a century and a half now. What is less well known is the opposite trend of translations from Arabic into (Byzantine) Greek, which began after the Photian renaissance — as a direct result, (...) I have claimed, of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement — and is of comparable significance for the study of Byzantine civilization. For reasons that it might be interesting to investigate at some point, Byzantinists have shied away from Arabo-Greek studies, to the great detriment of a deepened study of Byzantine writings, especially the scientific literature. The book by Dr. Hélène Condylis under review here, a study of the Greek translation of the famous Arabic book of fables Kalīla wa-Dimna (originally of Indian provenance), finally breaks open this unduly neglected area and makes a most impressive first contribution to Arabo-Greek studies that will, in years to come, be considered as pioneering. (shrink)

How can the fine-grained phenomenology of conscious experience arise from neural processes in the brain? How does a set of action potentials (nerve impulses) become like the feeling of pain in one's experience? Contemporary neuroscience is teaching us that our mental states correlate with neural processes in the brain. However, although we know that experience arises from a physical basis, we don't have a good explanation of why and how it so arises. The problem of how physical processes give rise (...) to experience is called the 'hard problem' of consciousness and it is the contemporary manifestation of the mind-body problem. This book explains the key concepts that surround the issue as well as the nature of the hard problem and the several approaches to it. It gives a comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon incorporating its main metaphysical and epistemic aspects, as well as recent empirical findings, such as the phenomenon of blindsight, change blindness, visual-form agnosia and optic ataraxia, mirror recognition in other primates, split-brain cases and synaesthesia. (shrink)

Hinton’s methodology of perceiving four-dimensional space is based on the application in higher dimensions of the geometric properties of objects that exist in our familiar three-dimensional space and on colouring all the points of these objects according to their movement through these four dimensions. Hinton applied his methodology on coloured cubes, thus leading to a mental perception of the hypercube. In this article, we evolve Hinton’s methodology aiming at the mental perception of the hypersphere, based on tracing and colouring the (...) hypersphere’s points according to their four coordinates. Finally, we describe an interactive application that we developed for visualizing the hypersphere. (shrink)

Dimitri Lorrain est chercheur en sciences humaines (EHESS), spécialisé dans l'étude de l'art et de la littérature (il a publié des articles sur Michel-Ange, Alberti, ainsi que sur l'art des «?nouveaux commanditaires?»). Installé à Francfort-sur-le-Main, il chronique la vie intellectuelle allemande pour la revue Panorama des idées.

Structuralist foundations of mathematics aim for an ‘invariant’ conception of mathematics. But what should be their basic objects? Two leading answers emerge: higher groupoids or higher categories. I argue in favor of the former over the latter. First, I explain why to choose between them we need to ask the question of what is the correct ‘categorified’ version of a set. Second, I argue in favor of groupoids over categories as ‘categorified’ sets by introducing a pre-formal understanding of groupoids as (...) abstract shapes. This conclusion lends further support to the perspective taken by the Univalent Foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

This research examines three thematic areas: philosophy, education, and ecology. It aims to be an interdisciplinary study, fundamentally based on the importance of the philosophy of environmental education and the practical implications that it can have. The problem of the contemporary hylomorphic production approach is first examined and then educational solutions are outlined towards a holistic understanding of the environment and of producing with it and not on it. By environment, in research, we also mean the human being because this (...) is only one of his many appendages; therefore, as such, we try to relocate him to a non-privileged place (a place where he has been autonomously placed for centuries). It aims to be a militant study towards a different anti-anthropocene educational approach that finds its paradigm in the “Green Schools” of Bali, as we will see in the conclusion. Keywords: Hylomorphism, ontology, environmental education, philosophy of education, ecosophy. (shrink)

This is the second, revised and updated, edition of this foundational work introducing a reading of Avicenna's philosophical works that is consistent with his intention and purpose in philosophy. Its usefulness is enhanced with a new appendix offering a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works that incorporates and updates Mahdavi.

Charles Butterworth's English translation of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, in which he continues to proceed as he did in previous publications, suffers from three fatal flaws. The translation as a whole is inexact and unrepresentative of what Averroes meant, because Butterworth fails to take into account the decisive influence which the garbled Arabic translation of the Poetics and earlier Arabic commentaries had on Averroes' understanding of the text. The rendering of key technical terms, which is offered wholly without (...) argument or justification, is arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Secondary literature on Aristotelian poetics in Arabic, a subject rather intensely studied in the last two decades, is almost completely ignored, and as a result both the situation described in the former two counts comes about and Butterworth's work is misrepresented as a pioneer in the field. It would appear that all this is due to Butterworth's untenable approach to the text of Averroes: wishing to understand it "on its own terms," as he says, he completely disregards its historical and semantic context, which alone gives it specific meaning, and consequently also disregards the secondary literature that analyzes and explains this context. Previous reviewers have repeatedly brought these matters to Butterworth's attention, but he has chosen to ignore them and has thus rendered his work irrelevant to the scholarly study of Averroes. (shrink)