Elias wrote in both English and German, and in all his work runs to 14 books and around 90 other essays, along with poems and numerous interviews. The 18 volumes of the collected works contain many writings not previously published in English, and a small number never published before. All of the texts have thoroughly checked and revised, by editors who have a deep knowledge of Elia's thinking; they have inserted many clarifications, cross-references and explanatory notes.

Elias Baumgarten taught philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1972 to 2018. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in California, and went to schools in Boston and Chicago. He was one of the first recipients of the campus’s “Distinguished Teaching Award.” He taught a wide variety of courses including Medical Ethics, Ethics of War and Peace, Ethics of Nationalism, and Darwinism and Philosophy. Most of his publications are in ethics, including “Zionism, Nationalism, and Morality” and “Curiosity as (...) a Moral Virtue.” Dr. Baumgarten also served for over 30 years on hospital ethics committees at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. A child of immigrants, Prof. Baumgarten was passionate, both as teacher and citizen, in celebrating multicultural diversity both on our campus and in our country. He sees travel as a form of education and traveled to over 70 countries. (shrink)

What is Sociology? presents in concise and provocative form the major ideas of a seminal thinker whose work--spanning more than four decades--is only now gaining the recognition here it has long had in Germany and France. Unlike other post-war sociologists, Norbert Elias has always held the concept of historical development among his central concerns; his dynamic theories of the evolution of modern man have remedied the historical and epistemological shortcomings of structualism and ethno-methodology. What is Sociology? refines the arguments (...) that were first found in Elias' massive work on the civilizing process, in which he formulated his major assertions about the interdependence of the making of modern man and modern society. It is Elias' contention that changes in personality structure--embodied in phenomena ranging from table manners and hygiene habits to rites of punishment and courtly love--inevitably reflect and mould patterns of control generated by new political and social instututions. Elias' rejection of a dichotomy between individual and society, and his use of psychoanalysis, political theory, and social history, help restore a fullness of resource to sociology. (shrink)

A unified answer is offered to two distinct fundamental questions: whether a nonclassical solution to the semantic paradoxes should be extended to other apparently similar paradoxes and whether a nonclassical logic should be expressed in a nonclassical metalanguage. The paper starts by reviewing a budget of paradoxes involving the logical properties of validity, inconsistency, and compatibility. The author’s favored substructural approach to naive truth is then presented and it is explained how that approach can be extended in a very natural (...) way so as to solve a certain paradox of validity. However, three individually decisive reasons are later provided for thinking that no approach adopting a classical metalanguage can adequately account for all the features involved in the paradoxes of logical properties. Consequently, the paper undertakes the task to do better, and, building on the system already developed, introduces a theory in a nonclassical metalanguage that expresses an adequate logic of naive truth and of some naive logical properties. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with a logical difficulty which Lionel Shapiro’s deflationist theory of logical consequence (as well as the author’s favoured, non-deflationist theory) gives rise to. It is argued that Shapiro’s non-contractive approach to solving the difficulty, although correct in its broad outlines, is nevertheless extremely problematic in some of its specifics, in particular in its failure to validate certain intuitive rules and laws associated with the principle of modus ponens. An alternative non-contractive theory is offered which does not (...) suffer from the same problem. (shrink)

Hegel and the Representative Constitution presents the first comprehensive historical discussion of the institutional dimension of G.W.F. Hegel's political thought. Elias Buchetmann traces this much-neglected aspect in unprecedented contextual detail and makes the case for reading the Philosophy of Right from 1820 as a contribution to the lively and widespread public debate on the constitutional question in contemporary Central Europe. Drawing on a broad range of primary source material, this volume illuminates the wider political discourse in post-Napoleonic Germany, carefully (...) locates Hegel's institutional commitments within their immediate cultural and political context, and reveals him as something closer to a public intellectual. By exploring this indispensable thinker's demand for the constitutional protection of popular participation in government, it contributes beyond Hegel scholarship to shed new light on the history of democratic theory in early nineteenth-century Europe and encourages critical reflection on questions of representation today. (shrink)

We introduce a new solution concept, called correlated-belief equilibrium. The difference to Nash equilibrium is that, while each player has correct marginal conjectures about each opponent, it is not necessarily the case that these marginal conjectures are independent. Then, we provide an epistemic foundation and we relate correlated-belief equilibrium with standard solution concepts, such as rationalizability, correlated equilibrium and conjectural equilibrium.

The naive theory of vagueness holds that the vagueness of an expression consists in its failure to draw a sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. The naive theory is contrasted with the nowadays dominant approach to vagueness, holding that the vagueness of an expression consists in its presenting borderline cases of application. The two approaches are briefly compared in their respective explanations of a paramount phenomenon of vagueness: our ignorance of any sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. These (...) explanations clearly do not provide any ground for choosing the dominant approach against the naive theory. The decisive advantage of the former over the latter is rather supposed to consist in its immunity to any form of sorites paradox. But another paramount phenomenon of vagueness is higher-order vagueness: the expressions introduced in order to express in the object language the vagueness of the object language are themselves vague. Two highly plausible claims about higher-order vagueness are articulated and defended: the existence of “definitely ω ” positive and negative cases and the “radical” character of higher-order vagueness itself. Using very weak logical principles concerning vague expressions and the ‘definitely’-operator, it is then shown that, in the presence of higher-order vagueness as just described, the dominant approach is subject to higher-order sorites paradoxes analogous to the original ones besetting the naive theory, and therefore that, against the communis opinio, it does not fare substantially better with respect to immunity to any form of sorites paradox. (shrink)

According to the naive theory of vagueness, the vagueness of an expression consists in the existence of both positive and negative cases of application of the expression and in the non- existence of a sharp cut-off point between them. The sorites paradox shows the naive theory to be inconsistent in most logics proposed for a vague language. The paper explores the prospects of saving the naive theory by revising the logic in a novel way, placing principled restrictions on the transitivity (...) of the consequence relation. A lattice-theoretical framework for a whole family of “tolerant logics” is proposed and developed. Particular care is devoted to the relation between the salient features of the formal apparatus and the informal logical and semantic notions they are supposed to model. A suitable non-transitive counterpart to classical logic is defined. Some of its properties are studied, and it is eventually shown how an appropriate regimentation of the naive theory of vagueness is consistent in such a logic. (shrink)

Earnings management behavior is a concern of standard-setters, regulators and the accounting profession. This study examines the ethics of this practice using a national sample of 763 accounting practitioners, faculty and students. Possible determinants of the ethics of this practice such as perceived role of ethics and social responsibility, and personal moral philosophies (i.e. idealism and relativism) are explored. Results indicate a positive relationship between social responsibility, focus on long-term gains, idealism, and the ethical perception of earnings management and negative (...) relationship between focus on short-term gains, relativism and the ethical perception of this practice. Implications for the accounting profession as it deals with the issue of earnings management are discussed. (shrink)

Belgian law on child euthanasia uses the concept of discernment to bestow the right to die to minors. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of oppositional logic grasps the ambiguity of this use of discernment and generally challenges the alleged force of a textual sign meaningfully to differentiate itself from its different and meaningless else. This alleged ability to discern the presence of discernment impinges the truth-value of the distinction between worthy/unworthy lives. The resulting undecidability morally suggests the respect for otherness and promotes (...) the moral value of the suspension of arbitrary judgment and, in so doing, de facto converges towards the praxis of the doctrine of the sanctity of life that embraces the ‘life is always quality’ argument. (shrink)

This article examines humanist works written in the immediate aftermath of Stefano Porcari's failed conspiracy against Pope Nicholas V. While they were designed to flatter the pope and support papal claims to temporal power, these works use images and adopt rhetorical startegies that are republican and not, as one would expect, imperial in origin. The humanists were so devoted not only to classical form, but also to Roman republican ideals that they sometimes present Porcari positively, have heroes of the Roman (...) republic comment on the modern papacy, and construct a strained theory of papal liberty. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I propose a mereological account of ordinary macro-events of experience that is based on two central features of these entities, namely their spatio-temporal character, and their status as things that belong to event-kinds. I argue that, from the perspective of descriptive metaphysics, these features must be incorporated in the analysis of the part-whole relations of events, and I show the steps involved in achieving this task. Furthermore, I argue that the program initiated here is quite promising: (...) the analysis of event-part that I propose stands up quite well against the more serious objections, and the apparatus I provide for the mereological conditions of events can be easily modified to yield similar conditions for material objects. (shrink)

In Crull it is argued that, in order to confront outstanding problems in cosmology and quantum gravity, interpretational aspects of quantum theory can by bypassed because decoherence is able to resolve them. As a result, Crull concludes that our focus on conceptual and interpretational issues, while dealing with such matters in Okon and Sudarsky, is avoidable and even pernicious. Here we will defend our position by showing in detail why decoherence does not help in the resolution of foundational questions in (...) quantum mechanics, such as the measurement problem or the emergence of classicality. (shrink)

DAVID KHALFA. — L’initiative de Genève a fait beaucoup parler d’elle dans le monde et plus particulièrement en Europe. Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui de cette initiative, quels ont été les échos de cette initiative politique sur le leadership palestinien et plus largement sur la société palestinienne ?ELIAS ZANANIRI. — Cette initiative..

Moses Mendelssohn is often described as the founder of modern Jewish thought and as a leading philosopher of the late Enlightenment. One of Mendelssohn's main concerns was how to conceive of the relationship between Judaism, philosophy, and the civic life of a modern state. Elias Sacks explores Mendelssohn's landmark account of Jewish practice--Judaism's "living script," to use his famous phrase--to present a broader reading of Mendelssohn's writings and extend inquiry into conversations about modernity and religion. By studying Mendelssohn's thought (...) in these dimensions, Sacks suggests that he shows a deep concern with history. Sacks affords a view of a foundational moment in Jewish modernity and forwards new ways of thinking about ritual practice, the development of traditions, and the role of religion in society. (shrink)

This article argues that errors in audio data processing should be examined to explore and expose the underlying components that enable linguistic communication and cross-cultural understanding. Examples of errors in the transcription of a Mexican social network’s conversations are analyzed to demonstrate the potential of such data in the development of sociocognitive language-processing theories. It is suggested that researchers working with audio-recorded data should expand the scope of what is considered useful data for the sake of both methodological reflexivity and (...) identifying the underlying cognitive processes enabling linguistic understanding. (shrink)

The brain is involved in theory-laden cognitive processes. But there are two different theory-laden processes. In cases where the theory is based on facts, more facts can either falsify or confirm a theory. In cases where the theory is about the choice of a benchmark or a standard, more facts can only make a theory either more or less warranted. Clark offers a review of a view of the brain where the brain pro- cesses input information in a way that (...) confirms its priors or its pre- dictions. This does not mean that the brain creates its own reality. The brain, rather, processes input data, but it does so in light of its own priors. The brain is a bidirectional hierarchical structure. While the top layers generate priors, the lower layers process input data. The brain amounts to the dynamics of image- making, where the top-down process generates unified images, while the bottom-up process, which takes data, corrects the images. (shrink)

This volume examines the historical end of the Platonic tradition in relation to creation theories of the natural world through the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus' (412-485) elaboration of an investigation of Plato's theory of metaphysical archetypal Forms. Proclus proceeds to a systematic construction of this theory and grounds it in ontological monism. He presents the Forms as constructing, through their combinations, the presuppositions for the creation of the natural world, in such a way that it functions in an orderly and harmonious (...) way, showing the natural world is not produced by chance or means of automatizations, but on the basis of a teleological planning. This volume also reflects Proclus' dealing with the topics of objective reality and the nature of the "universals.". (shrink)

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the potential of replacing (...) the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability. (shrink)

Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before Liberalism (reviewed by Elias Palti).

This article contributes to the literature on national varieties of socially responsible investment (SRI) by demonstrating how Scandinavian SRI developed from the 60s and onwards. Combining findings on Scandinavian SRI with insights from previous research and institutional theory, the article accounts for the role of changes in societal values and norms, the mechanisms by which SRI practices spread, and how investors adopt and transform practices to suit their surrounding institutional contexts. Especially, the article draws attention to how different categories of (...) investors act as institutional entrepreneurs during specific historical periods, and how these roles come to shift as institutional rule systems of varying societal levels change. Thus, the insights gained are useful in the future research agenda concerned with advancing knowledge on idiosyncrasies and commonalities of national SRI manifestations, and to understand the reasons underlying such characteristics. (shrink)

The paper discusses some ways in which the phenomenon of borderline cases may be thought to bear on the traditional philosophical idea that certain domains of facts are fully open to our view. The discussion focusses on a very influential argument (due to Tim Williamson) to the effect that, roughly, no such domains of luminous facts exist. Many commentators have felt that the vagueness unavoidably inherent in the description of the facts that are best candidates for being luminous plays an (...) illicit role in the argument. The paper investigates this issue by centring around the idea that vagueness brings with itself borderline cases, and that these in turn generate absence of a fact of the matter and hence epistemically benign lack of knowledge. It is argued that, given the possibility of absence of a fact of the matter, the idea of luminosity should be reformulated using the notion of determinacy, and that the resulting reformulation is not immediately subject to the original anti-luminosity argument. However, it is shown that the specific understanding of determinacy required by this strategy validates a new argument against the reformulated version of luminosity. Moreover, reflection on the connection between mistake and absence of a fact of the matter offers another argument against such version, with the surprising upshot that, granting the soundness of the original anti-luminosity argument, not even the determinacy of a certain fact would guarantee its knowability. (shrink)

Civil society consists of members obligated to respect each other’s rights and, hence, trade with each other as equals. What determines the boundary, rather than the nature, of civil society? For Adam Smith, the boundary consists of humanity itself because it is determined by identification: humans identify with other humans because of common humanness. While Smith’s theory can explain the emotions associated with justice (jubilance) and injustice (resentment), it provides a mushy ground for the boundary question: Why not extend the (...) common identity to nonhuman animals? Or why not restrict the boundary to one’s own dialect, ethnicity or race? For David Hume, the boundary need not consist of humanity itself because it is determined by self-interest: a European need not respect the property of outsiders such as Native Americans, if the European benefits more by exploiting them than including them in the European society. While Hume’s theory can provide a solid ground for the boundary question, it cannot explain the emotions associated with justice. This paper suggests a framework that combines the strengths, and avoids the shortcomings, of Smith’s and Hume’s theories. (shrink)

I argue that curiosity about the world deserves attention as a moral virtue, even apart from the role it may play in (the more generally praised) love of wisdom. First, close relationships and caring are reasonably considered part of a well-lived life, and curiosity is important for caring both about people and about things in the world. Second, curiosity helps us to define an appropriate way for persons to be affected by certain situations. Perhaps most important, curiosity can help one (...) to live well because it addresses the most fundamental existential task humans face, the need to see their lives as meaningful. I argue that curiosity is a distinctive virtue but suggest that related virtues (e.g., receptivity, reverence) may contribute to different kinds of worthy engagement with the world. (shrink)

A notion of truth as applicable to events of assertoric use ( utterances ) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterance says . This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may thus be (...) thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising from context dependence and the semantic paradoxes which notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simple disquotational schema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for plausible if not uncontroversial non-indexical forms of context dependence, arising from the possibility that what an utterance says can be the case or not relative to different situations and that the truth of an utterance u of a sentence φ arguably depends on the truth of φ at the situation "associated" with u . On the other hand, a quantified utterance-truth variation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence φ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of φ; moreover, a resilient quantified propositional variation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema. (shrink)

Significant research has found that corporations have a social responsibility beyond maximizing shareholders' value. This study examines the effect of high-profile corporate bankruptcies on perception of corporate social responsibility. Undergraduate and graduate business students rated the importance of corporate social responsibility on profitability, long-term success and short-term success, before and after high-profile bankruptcies. The results indicated that students in general perceived corporate social responsibility to be more important to profitability and long-term success of the firm and less important to short-term (...) success after media publicity of corporate scandals. Several demographic factors such as gender, age and college major played a role in this perception. These findings have important implications for business education, especially as it relates to corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

On the representation of the Nakba in regional literature and film.

Dans cet article, l’auteur s’engage dans une courte autobiographie sur un pays qu’il porte en lui, le Liban. Il la conçoit comme une expérience collective du morcellement qui traverse singulièrement tous ceux qui se rattachent au nom de Libanais. L’auteur raconte porter aussi sa propre guerre qui s’essouffle et change de signes, au-delà même du Liban, en vue de transformer le rapport même à la guerre. Il renvoie à quelques textes qui traitent, sous l’angle de la déconstruction, d’une autre politique (...) de la communauté et des frontières, à plus d’une loi. (shrink)

quaeras forsitan satis anxie, studiose lector, quid deinde dictum, quid factum. dicerem, si dicere liceret; cognosceres, si liceret audire. sed parem noxam contraherent et aures et lingua[e] illae temerariae curiositatis. In spite of the reader's curiosity, the narrator will not break the secrecy of Isis’ mysteries. Precisely an act of curiositas had brought about Lucius’ transformation into an ass; at the end of the novel he demonstrates that he has learnt his lesson.