Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens examines the sensation, expression, and literary representation of envy and jealousy in Classical Athens.

Alain Badiou is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. His ground-breaking philosophy is based on a creative reading of set theory, offering a new understanding of what it means to be human by promoting an 'intelligence of change'. Badiou's philosophical system makes our capacity for revolution and novelty central to who we are, and develops an ethical position that aims to make us less anxious about this very capacity. This book presents a comprehensive and engaging account of (...) Badiou's philosophy, including an in-depth discussion of _The Theory of the Subject_, _Being and Event_ and _Logics of Worlds_. In a clear and careful analysis, Ed Pluth considers exactly how Badiou's theoretical 'anti-humanism' is linked up to what is, for all intents and purposes, a practical humanism. Central to this is an account of Badiou’s theory of the subject, and his attempt to develop an 'ethic of truths'. The role of set theory, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Badiou's philosophy is also given close attention. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

We all find ourselves worrying at one point or another, and we have an intuitive sense of what is communicated by phrases such as ‘I’m worried about this’ or ‘I can’t stop worrying about that’. Despite worry’s ubiquity, however, it is not altogether clear what exactly worrying is, or why it is we worry. And, surprisingly, there has been no dedicated philosophical account given of the nature of worry specifically, although there is a body of psychological literature concerned with it (...) as well as a recent insurgence of philosophical literature concerned with the nature of anxiety. My aim in this paper, therefore, is to provide such an account. I here provide an account of the nature of worry.On the view I develop, worry is to be understood as a form of affectively motivated cognition. More specifically, I argue that worrying is a cognitive activity constituted by our engagement with forms of practical or epistemic reasoning, supplemented by imaginative engagement and motivated by anxiety. I develop this view primarily by marrying together considerations from the psychological literature on worry and the philosophical literature on anxiety. With this characterization in place, I then go on to make some novel claims about why exactly it is that we worry. The upshot should be an account of worry that addresses the questions of what it is and why we do it. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the question of how the costs of undertaking an important type of climate change mitigation should be shared amongst states seeking an environmentally effective and equitable response to global climate change. While much of the normative literature on climate mitigation has focused on burden sharing within the context of reductions in emissions of greenhouse gas, I explore the question of how the costs of protecting tropical forests in order to harness their climate mitigation potential should (...) be distributed amongst developing and developed states. In response to this question, I outline and defend a ‘beneficiary pays’ account of forestry mitigation burden sharing that requires affluent states to finance measures supporting avoided deforestation while less affluent states, within whose territory these forests tend to be located, implement these measures. The normative basis for this account, I argue, is a principle of ‘unjust enrichment’ according to which developed states must bear much of the cost of avoided deforestation for its climate mitigation potential because of the huge economic benefits their citizens have accumulated from productive activities that have contributed to climate change. (shrink)

This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the authors reached a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the authors document wide divergences (...) among countries in all measures of subjective well-being, The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated. (shrink)

The Query is reasonable (First Order) Predicate Logic (PL:) is a ”Universal Grammar" for the languages of Elementary Arithmetic, Euclidean Geometry, Set Theory, Boolean Algebra, .... It defines their expressions, their semantic interpretations, and texts, called proofs, that syntactically characterize the boolean semantic entailment relation: P entails Q iff Q is true whenever P is.

In Research on Language and Computation 5.1:5-17. Formerly C54.

Situates Lacan’s theory of the subject within contemporary philosophical debates over freedom and agency.

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged (...) randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed. (shrink)

François Laruelle's writing on Non-Photography is examined from its ontological condition to its desired form of a unity derived from the work of Kant, discussing precisely how the logic of transcendence and the ontology of immanence central to Laruelle's theory impact on how the photographic image is incontrovertibly involved with Kant's paradox of appearance and reality. In a context of burgeoning technoscience, which lays bare the meaning of Non-Photography for the seemingly impossible reversion to actual photography, the article goes on (...) to consider Photo-Fiction in the context of the Real of science now yoked to an economy of technical models. But by foreclosing the Kantian Real by fractal‐virtual ratio, does not this science reify the Real of Identity and displace real photography with a photography in the Real? The article thus questions how Laruelle's' thesis hangs together in terms of its cause and the contingency of effect that infuses Laruelle's radical aesthetic. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including 'profit with purpose' businesses such as co-operatives, this short guide reveals how to make a success of values. By unpacking what we mean by values and ethics, and setting out a series of practical approaches, Ed Mayo presents how values can become a natural part of commercial life. This book identifies both the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organization, from a bank that responds to (...) an ethical crisis to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality. The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down, or that you would expect. There is no right or wrong set of values, but there is power and potential in making the most of the values that are right for the business you are in. By reading Values: How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be." -- Back cover. (shrink)

With the increasing number of human disasters in recent years, disaster service workers are faced with an ever-growing challenge of criticism concerning their professional competence. The workers also realize the limitation inherent in their practice, as well as bioethics problems regarding autonomy and heteronomy. Therefore, professionals and researchers of human service devote to the issue of post-disaster rehabilitation of the people so as to identify an effective way and practice to aid the post-disaster individual, family and community. This study explores (...) the effectiveness of rehabilitative function of disaster service workers through the action research of Typhoon Morakot and the 2014 Gas Explosion in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. The case studies serves as a platform for thediscussion of principles of bioethics and the analysis of the process of self-discipline of the workers of human services in hope of ultimately establishing bioethical principles for heteronomy during disasters and work indicators for post-disaster community restoration. Discuss Issues are 1. How can self-discipline in bioethics be achieved for the human service workers during times of disaster? 2. In post-disaster reconstruction, how does the human service worker take into? account bioethical principles to serve and partake in the restoration of the postdisaster life of community residents? 3. During the process of a disaster research, what are the bioethical considerations to be taken into for the test subjects? Conclusion and suggestions: To formulate indicators for a post-disaster “community of health and wellness;” to establish bioethical principles of heteronomy for disaster service workers. (shrink)

No one doubts that for Kierkegaard's definition of Christian faith one should look to the "Concluding Unscientific Postscript." The contention of this paper is that within the Postscript, most have looked in the wrong place. The well-known definition that is usually cited is actually a definition of Socratic or religious faith, and the definition of specifically Christian faith, given a few pages later, represents an existential intensification, which moves from an 'objective uncertainty' to an 'objective absurdity'. This latter definition is, (...) literally and philosophically, the pivot on which the whole work turns. (shrink)

If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of (...) such an approach to the Tractatus (TLP). But he also introduces some novel and interesting lines of criticism that merit serious attention. Foremost among the latter is White's treatment (in Section III of his paper) of three engaging examples that he sees as making trouble for resolute readers, and for their opposition to the standard idea that the lesson of the Tractatrrs could consist in its communicating, and our grasping, ineffable insights by way of its nonsense-sentences. (shrink)

This paper considers the status of both the natural real and thinking in transcendental or structural materialisms, and questions whether the relationship between thinking and being in such philosophies can really be considered dialectical or not. Looking at the recent work of Slavoj Žižek, but with an eye to work being done by thinkers such as Brassier, Johnston, and Meillassoux as well, I consider what is said about quantum physics in some of Žižek’s recent books, and argue that it is (...) difficult to see how any version of the natural real – quantum or not – can have a status in a dialectical philosophy that does not end up at least implicitly giving ordinary human experience and thought a de-realized or ontologically degraded status, in a manner that is in fact very un-dialectical. The sciences basically require a reductionist perspective, such that it is hard to argue that there is any vigorous relationship between thinking and being in them. There is much about human experience and thinking that does need to be de-realized, of course. Hegelian philosophy and Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis have always done an excellent job of that. (shrink)

In a widely cited 2017 study, Robinson et al. (2017) found that ‘emotionally expressive’ writing makes physical wounds heal faster when compared to writing that did not engage the emotions. The Writing Long COVID project at Aberystwyth University engaged similar territory in a recent pilot study. Participants’ writing activities explored how literary production can affect a person’s experience of this new chronic condition, as well as contribute to our understanding of its symptoms. In this short essay, I show how we (...) designed a course of short-duration online workshops that increased accessibility for people with Long COVID-related fatigue. I also argue that future Long COVID creative activities should let their timing, venue, content, and structure be influenced by the preferences of the Long COVID patient. The preliminary study suggests that the traditional parameters of the writing workshop, including its duration, could deter participation in potentially beneficial creative activities. (shrink)

As Death Comes for the Archbishop approaches one hundred years of critical scrutiny, it still speaks to readers in much the same way it did in the 1920s. A critical response to early twentieth-century materialism and mendacity, the story of nineteenth-century New Mexico Archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend and Vicar, Fr. Joseph Vaillant affirms as it dramatizes friendship and renunciation while simultaneously celebrating the centrality of the transcendent self and the richness and value of lived personal experience.