Patočka’s text from 1946, right after World War II and before the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, analyzes the important historical events he was living through from a philosophical perspective. Patočka describes the crisis in Enlightenment-based social humanism, which even though having won the war, was left battered and distrusted for not preventing the disaster. With this branch of social humanism being discredited, people turned towards its Eastern manifestation, i.e., Socialism or Communism. Patočka distinguishes the various aspects of Socialism that exist (...) undifferentiated within the term: the concept of Man, ideology, and the Idea. The liberation of the Idea is twisted when combined with a material concept of Man as just one force among other forces, which the ideology then uses and abuses for an external aim. (shrink)

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality (...) and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence. (shrink)

This book uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, of the kinds posited by scientific taxonomies. Specification relations, such as those holding between determinates and determinables (determination), are central to this logical investigation of kinds. The species–genus relation is a familiar specification relation for substantival kinds, but this book focuses on adjectival kinds—whose instances are properties—instead. Determination relations are then used to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces, which in turn (...) leads to a theory for individuating properties (tropes). These determination relations are contrasted with realization relations, the latter being the favored way of understanding the connection between the mental and the physical. Particular attention is given to the distinction between multiple realizability and multiple determination, and it is argued that determination and realization are mutually exclusive. The claim that multiple realizability entails various senses of autonomy is defended from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization then provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction. (shrink)

This is a book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context. Specifically, Eric Watkins argues that a grasp of Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian thought in eighteenth-century Germany helps one to see how the critical Kant argued for causal principles that have both metaphysical and epistemological elements. On this reading Kant's model of causality does not consist of events, but rather of substances endowed with causal powers that are exercised according to their natures and circumstances. This (...) innovative conception of Kant's view of causality casts a light on Kant's philosophical beliefs in general, such as his account of temporality, his explanation of the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, and his response to the skeptical arguments of Hume. (shrink)

Recent attempts to define being moved have difficulties agreeing on its eliciting conditions. The status quaestionis is often summarized as a question of whether the emotion is evoked by exemplifications of a wide range of positive core values or a more restricted set of values associated with attachment. This conclusion is premature. Study participants associate being moved with interactions with their loved ones not merely for what they exemplify but also for their affective bond to them. Being moved is elicited (...) when we apprehend the value of entities to which we are connected through basic as well as extended forms of affiliative attachment. These comprise people, certain objects, and even abstract entities, including the unshakable life-guiding ideas we call “core values.”. (shrink)

An enduring question in the philosophy of science is the question of whether a scientific theory deserves more credit for its successful predictions than it does for accommodating data that was already known when the theory was developed. In The Paradox of Predictivism, Eric Barnes argues that the successful prediction of evidence testifies to the general credibility of the predictor in a way that evidence does not when the evidence is used in the process of endorsing the theory. He (...) illustrates his argument with an important episode from nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev's Periodic Law and its successful predictions of the existence of various elements. The consequences of this account of predictivism for the realist/anti-realist debate are considerable, and strengthen the status of the 'no miracle' argument for scientific realism. Barnes's important and original contribution to the debate will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy of science. (shrink)

How did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little appeal before the modern period and how can we explain its rise to dominance? In The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray addresses these questions by contrasting the market conception of freedom with the republican view that it displaced. After analyzing the ethical core and exploring the conceptual complexity of republican freedom, MacGilvray shows (...) how this way of thinking was confronted with, altered in response to, and finally overcome by the rise of modern market societies. By learning to see market freedom as something that was invented, we can become more alert to the ways in which the appeal to freedom shapes and distorts our thinking about politics. (shrink)

In this introduction to the life and thought of one of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth-century Eric Matthews shows how Merleau-Ponty has contributed to current debates in philosophy, such as the nature of consciousness, the relation between biology and personality, the historical understanding of human thought and society, and many others. Surveying the whole range of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the author examines his views about the nature of phenomenology and the primacy of perception; his account of human (...) embodiment, being-in-the-world, and his understanding of human behaviour; his conception of the self and its relation to other selves; and, his views on society, politics, and the arts. A final chapter considers his later thought, published posthumously. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty are shown to be of immense importance to the development of French philosophy and the author evaluates his distinctive contributions and relates his thought to that of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, both in France and elsewhere. This unrivalled introduction will be welcomed by philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as students taking courses in contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: (...) they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

The fundamental reason that the genetics of behavior has remained so controversial for so long is that the layer of theory between data and their interpretation is thicker and more opaque than in more established areas of science. The finding that variations in tiny snippets of DNA have small but detectable relations to variation in behavior surprises no one, at least no one who was paying attention to the twin studies. How such snippets of DNA are related to differences in (...) behavior—known as the gene‐to‐behavior pathway—is the great theoretical problem of modern behavioral genetics.Given that intentional human breeding is a horrific prospect, what kind of technology might we want (or fear) out of human behavioral genetics? One possibility is a technology that could predict important behavioral characteristics of humans based on their genomes alone. A moment's thought suggests significant benefits and risks that might be associated with such a possibility, but for the moment, just consider how convincing it would be if on the day of a baby's birth we could make meaningful predictions about whether he or she would become a concert pianist or an alcoholic. This article will consider where we are right now as regards that possibility, using human height and intelligence as the primary examples. (shrink)

Writing on the heart is a frequent and often vivid image in medieval literature and art. Saints' legends describe martyrs receiving divine inscriptions in hearts that are later opened and read by others. Sermons and poems liken the heart to a book where the believer writes God's commands or where Christ writes the story of his own Passion. In the secular lyric and romance a different passion inscribes itself on lovers' hearts, sometimes by way of love letters and usually anticipating (...) the bodily writing of sexual intercourse. In the realm of visual art medieval painters depict hearts as books , and late-medieval scribes actually produced heart-shaped manuscript codices, examples of which still survive. (shrink)

The history of ancient chemistry has been virtually ignored. I examine the foundations of the chemical theories of the Peripatetics and Stoics, in an attempt to glean the motivations for their chemical theories, and how these theories relate to their greater natural philosophies. This involves a detailed examination of ancient theories of mixture. I attempt to relate Aristotle's theory of mixture to his theories of substantial change, the elements and matter. This entails a rejection of the notion of prime matter, (...) and a reevaluation of the status of the contrarieties. I also look at the understudied fourth book of the Meteorologica, which sheds new light on Aristotle's theory of matter. I then turn to Alexander of Aphrodisias, and his development of Aristotle's theory. Next I consider the Stoic theory of body, and how doxographers have misinterpreted this theory. While offering a radically new interpretation of the Stoic theory of mixture, much of Stoic natural philosophy is reconstructed, including their theory of categories and qualities. In the end a Stoic theory free from obvious paradox is presented. (shrink)

Recent work within psychology demonstrates that unconscious cognition plays a central role in the judgments and actions of individuals. We distinguish between two basic types unconscious social cognition: unconsciousness of the influences on judgments and actions, and unconscious of the mental states that give rise to judgments and actions. Influence unconsciousness is corroborated by strong empirical evidence, but unconscious states are difficult to verify. We discuss procedures aimed at providing conclusive evidence of state unconsciousness, and apply them to recent empirical (...) findings. (shrink)

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...

Written in 1839 and chosen as the winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will marked the beginning of its author's public recognition and is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism. Schopenhauer distinguishes the freedom of acting from the freedom of willing, affirming the former while denying the latter. He portrays human action as thoroughly determined but (...) also argues that the freedom which cannot be established in the sphere of human action is preserved at the level of our innermost being as individuated will, whose reality transcends all dependency on outside factors. This volume offers the text in a previously unpublished translation by Eric F. J. Payne, the leading twentieth-century translator of Schopenhauer into English, together with a historical and philosophical introduction by Günter Zöller. (shrink)

In 1970 a coalition of student activists opposing the Vietnam War circulated documents revealing the involvement of several prominent social scientists in U.S. counterinsurgency activities in Thailand--activities that could cause harm to the people who were the subject of the scholars' research. The disclosure of these materials, which detailed meetings with the Agency for International Development and the Defense Department, prompted two members of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association to issue an unauthorized rebuke of the accused. Over (...) the next two years, the AAA agonized over the allegations and the appropriate response to them. Within an academic community already polarized by the war, political and professional acrimony reached unprecedented levels. Although the association ultimately passed a code of ethics, the key issues raised in the process were never fully resolved. Now back in print, Eric Wakin's Anthropology Goes to War is the first comprehensive study of what became known as the Thailand Controversy--and a timely reminder of a debate whose echoes may be heard in our own time. (shrink)

Though Kant is best known for his strictly philosophical works in the 1780s, many of his early publications in particular were devoted to what we would call 'natural science'. Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens made a significant advance in cosmology, and he was also instrumental in establishing the newly emerging discipline of physical geography, lecturing on it for almost his entire career. In this volume Eric Watkins brings together new English translations of Kant's first publication, (...) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, the entirety of Physical Geography, a series of shorter essays, along with many of Kant's most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin offers the first translation of the full German text of Anamnesis published in 1966.

La philosophie politique d'Eric Weil analyse les problemes auxquels est confronte l'Etat moderne: le conflit entre l'Etat et la societe, la mondialisation de la societe moderne, la necessite et les risques d'une organisation politique internationale. Elle definit l'enjeu de l'action politique: la liberte reelle de l'individu, la possibilite offerte a tous de mener une vie sensee par la reduction de la violence sociale et politique.

The Type VI secretion system is a multiprotein and mosaic apparatus that delivers protein effectors into prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells. Recent data on the enteroaggregative Escherichia coli T6SS have provided evidence that the TssA protein is a key component during T6SS biogenesis. The T6SS comprises a trans-envelope complex that docks the baseplate, a cytoplasmic complex that represents the assembly platform for the tail. The T6SS tail is structurally, evolutionarily and functionally similar to the contractile tails of bacteriophages. We have shown (...) that TssA docks to the membrane complex, recruits the baseplate complex and initiates and coordinates the polymerization of the inner tube with that of the sheath. Here, we review these recent findings, discuss the variations within TssA-like proteins, speculate on the role of EAEC TssA in T6SS biogenesis and propose future research perspectives. In the environment, bacteria have to cope with other microbial species and therefore have evolved anti-microbial mechanisms. The bacterial Type VI secretion system transports toxins into bacterial and/or eukaryotic cells using a contractile mechanism. At the architectural level, the T6SS could be viewed as a nano-speargun assembled in the bacterial cytoplasm and anchored to a trans-envelope complex. We describe and speculate on recent findings demonstrating that the TssA subunit is involved in the different stages of T6SS biogenesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spring Fishing Song, Prehistoric Paros JOHN ERIC HAMEL Come, tuna, iridescent whorl, Spin color through our rain-locked sea. Come, scatter winter’s smoke and spitting hail, The brazier’s headache, days of coiling clay, The endless shuttle. Let the restless needle be. Come, return the sea to life. The days of winter card our limbs to rope. Restore the muscle with your flesh, unfurl The cold’s crushing boredom into the (...) sun. We’ve burnished long enough our winter soul. The heat begins to double back. The stars That mark the Oar re-stroke at last the salt. All turns. By island and straight you loop and belt, In time with star and turning tide. Shake sail, Bring oar and rope. The barley weaves new fleece. Come, bless our boats, wake us from the hours Of dropping lines over bleached gunnel, The nights of damp and cold breathing sea. Raw mackerel for days to eat, until A line is bumped like a lover’s finger touch, And fins cut water fast as breakers flash. The circled sea within our fleet erupts With flailing fins as sharp as swords. We gaff the bleeding gills into our boats. arion 28.3 winter 2021 44 spring fishing song, prehistoric paros Come, strong fish with gemstone scale, Blow on the coals of our blood, renew our strength. The deep obsidian light of winter clouds Begins to pour molten copper thick as oil All down the sea. We’re born for sails and shrouds, We’re born in waters of a mother’s wave, And return our marble souls into the grave. 2017... (shrink)

There is an increasing awareness of the importance of food security, of which the UN’s Millennium Development Goals are the best measure. Although some progress has been made in some regions, much progress still needs to be made in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture largely remains subsistence and personal savings extremely low, and where population growth outstrips economic growth.Thus, there has been a renewed effort to bring these problems back on the development agenda. Food insecurity is a major manifestation of poverty, (...) and hence agricultural development is the most effective way out of rural poverty.The ethical imperative is to bring about the political will to effect such development. Institutions must be built that focus on smallholder development as an engine of economic growth. Along with classic issues of development , the rural poor, who respond well to market-based development and are thus good micro-credit risks, must be given access to markets and finances.The drive to bring the rural poor into the market is frustrated, however, by the subsidies that the Northern nations use to prop up their own markets and farmers. One of the most pressing ethical questions, then, remains how the North can continue to support its subsidy system, while, at the same time, contributing to development work. (shrink)

Je m’oppose ici à la théorie « structurale » de la sensation développée par Kurt Koffka dans les années 1920, et reprise notamment par Merleau-Ponty, qui en fait le centre théorique des analyses de la psychologie de la forme. Je commence donc par examiner cette théorie et les faits sur lesquels elle repose, en montrant notamment, à l’aide de la méréologie husserlienne, qu’ils ne peuvent paraître corroborer une théorie structurale de la sensation que si l’on confond « abstraire » et (...) « séparer réellement » une qualité de son contexte. Il s’agit par là plus largement de montrer l’impossibilité, en fait comme en droit, de toute philosophie de la perception qui chercherait à réduire les sensations ou « qualia » à des prédicats relationnels. Je convoque alors William James à l’appui de ces conclusions, en rappelant qu’il avait déjà montré contre les théories néo-hégéliennes de son époque l’illégitimité de leur prétention à se réclamer de faits psychologiques similaires, et qu’il avait soutenu contre eux une théorie de la connaissance par accointance et de l’absoluité ontologique des qualités sensorielles que je cherche à reprendre à mon compte. (shrink)

Ego-justifying, group-justifying, and system-justifying motivations contribute to base-rate respect. People tend to neglect (and use) base rates when doing so allows them to draw desired conclusions about matters such as their health, the traits of their in-groups, and the fairness of the social system. Such motivations can moderate whether people rely on the rule-based versus associative strategies identified by Barbey & Sloman (B&S).

In his review on Leo Strauss’ «On tyranny» Eric Voegelin, pointing out importance of his opponent’s work, still disagrees with several crucial Strauss’s findings. Especially important for him is comparing of «ancient» and «modern» tyranny, as well as Strauss’ idea that the text of «Hiero» makes up bounds between ancient and modern political philosophy, «tyrannical teaching» of Xenophon, the author of «Hiero», is very close to the Machiavelli’s point of view as presented in «The Prince». Voegelin points out that (...) this thought is indeed not that true and Machiavelli’s teaching does deal with the same sort of problem as Xenophon’s writing, because these texts were created in different historical contexts. The main aim is to understand modern tyranny, but, Voegelin argues, it won’t happen if we, as Strauss does, think that ancient and modern tyranny are the same. (shrink)

Une étude des Méditations pour se disposer à l’Humilité et à la pénitence qui les replace dans le cadre des pratiques de son époque, par exemple, chez François de Sales, celles de l’oraison, de la méditation et de la contemplation, permet d’apercevoir que l’une des thèses majeures du malebranchisme, la vision en Dieu, est un effet instauré dans le destinataire par un dispositif textuel. Celui-ci tire sa puissance prescriptive de l’a priori pratique où il s’inscrit. C’est à une opération de (...) production de soi que l’exercice spirituel donne lieu : l’analyse des quatre premières Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques, en particulier, montre que c’est une organisation de la substance personnelle que provoque le travail spirituel sur soi. Celui-ci consiste à déterminer le rapport à soi comme relation d’une vision attentive à une activité illuminante, par un décentrement textuel du « je » vers le « tu ». (shrink)