The paper is a discussion of collected reviews of Erwin Ritter von Zach, one of the most influential scholars in the history of Sinology.

In The Open (2002), a series of reflections on the historical endeavours to define the essential features of the human figure in relation to the biological existence it shares with animals, Giorgio Agamben offers a detailed reading of Titian’s painting The Nymph and the Shepherd. He argues that the scene depicted enables the contemporary viewer to visualize the advent of radical freedom, the moment when the historical dialectic of nature and culture comes to a ‘stand-still’. In this article, I offer (...) a different reading of The Nymph and the Shepherd, whereby the advent of radical freedom and death become indistinguishable. This different reading, I argue, calls into question Agamben’s understanding of corporeal being. I conclude by suggesting more speculatively and tentatively that ‘bioart’, the field now emerging at the intersection of the creative arts and the bio-medical sciences, may provide a better site of reflection on the questions Agamben ultimately poses about the future of bio-political governmentality. (shrink)

his paper presents a unified treatment of the propositional and first-order many-valued logics through the method of tableaux. It is shown that several important results on the proof theory and model theory of those logics can be obtained in a general way. We obtain, in this direction, abstract versions of the completeness theorem, model existence theorem (using a generalization of the classical analytic consistency properties), compactness theorem and Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. The paper is completely self-contained and includes examples of application to (...) particular many-valued formal systems. (shrink)

Wollen (2022) is a critique of deontological libertarianism, the version of this philosophy predicated upon private property rights and the non-aggression principle. The launching pad for this article of his is the difficulty faced by conjoined twins, who diverge sharply in their view of their desirable future. The present rejoinder maintains that this author’s critique fails; further, that it really has little or nothing to do with conjoined twins per se, but, rather, aims at an entirely different challenge, that of (...) the tie or the dead heat. This latter is a critique that all political economic philosophies face, without exception, and libertarianism does no worse on this challenge than any other, the critique of Wollen to the contrary notwithstanding. (shrink)

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich (...) archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions. (shrink)

Huemer [33] argues against the killing of animals. I offer a critical libertarian analysis of his claim.

This new collection by Walter Laqueur, one of the most distinguished historians and political commentators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, vividly brings to life his perspective on fifty years of political life. The essays in this volume deal with events ranging from more than seventy years ago to some that have not yet happened, but may in years to come. Laqueur divides his writings into five main areas: optimism in politics, the topic that unites this volume; Europe; the (...) Arab Spring; Israel and Jewish affairs; and recollections of the past. This volume addresses an increasingly important question: How much optimism do we need in politics? Some neuroscientists believe that many of our assessments rest on an excess of optimism amounting to a dangerous bias. Another school of cognitive scientists sees the main danger in being influenced too much by negative conclusions. Although these competing perspectives have been only rarely investigated, Laqueur argues that such psychological factors play a decisive role in the assessment of political trends, and they should. Laqueur also reminds readers that there is a connection between writing history and commenting on current affairs, but it is not remotely as close and simple as often thought. The idea that the historian is somehow better qualified than others to interpret the present, let alone predict the future, is certainly not borne out by the evidence. Some great historians have been good and reliable political commentators, others have been miserable failures. Laqueur definitely falls in the former camp, as these reflections attest. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.

What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even the most minimal forms of subjective experience. I will also offer an introduction to the central thesis of (...) the book, i.e. the pathological complexity thesis, according to which consciousness evolved in order to enable animals to adaptively respond to their life history challenges. (shrink)

Malaysia had its first four patients with COVID-19 on 25 January 2020. In the same week, the World Health Organization declared it as a public health emergency of international concern. The pandemic has since challenged the ethics and practice of medicine. There is palpable tension from the conflict of interest between public health initiatives and individual’s rights. Ensuring equitable care and distribution of health resources for patients with and without COVID-19 is a recurring ethical challenge for clinicians. Palliative care aims (...) to mitigate suffering caused by a life-limiting illness, and this crisis has led to the awareness and urgency to ensure it reaches all who needs it. We share here the palliative care perspectives and ethical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia. (shrink)

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" , the "pragmatological" , and the "nomological" . However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's (...) development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late.". (shrink)

We provide a survey of significant libertarian contributions to the discussion surrounding ethics and taxation. By significant contributions, we mean those which have exerted a strong influence both on libertarianism, popular and academic, and on political and ethical discourse more broadly. Our discussion centers on the work of three prominent libertarians: Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. For each, we present his or her position concerning some ethical aspect of taxation and evaluate objections to it. Section 4.2 discusses Nozick’s (...) analogy between taxation of labor from earnings and forced labor and applies his argument against the fairness principle to fairness-based justifications of such taxation. Section 4.3 focuses on Rand’s view that compulsory taxation as such is unjust and considers her proposed scheme of voluntarily-funded minimal government. We argue that she failed to convincingly argue for either the feasibility or desirability of the latter. Section 4.4 addresses Rothbard’s similar position concerning the injustice of taxation per se and defends his view against possible justifications of that institution. (shrink)

The first results of my Phd-thesis regarding Michael Psellos’ practical philosophy, namely his approach on brotherly love and cosmopolitism. I will analyze passages from several texts and present first translations. Secondly I will put his arguments in context with the classical pagan, late antique and Christian ways of understanding virtue, cosmopolitism and brotherly love as well as work out his proper innovation. Michael Psellos is representative for the byzantine way of thought and its unique mixture that just begins to be (...) analyzed by modern scholars. (shrink)

This paper discusses logical accounts of the notions of consistency and negation, and in particular explores some potential means of defining consistency and negation when expressed in modal terms. Although this can be done with interesting consequences when starting from classical normal modal logics, some intriguing cases arise when starting from paraconsistent modalities and negations, as in the hierarchy of the so-called cathodic modal paraconsistent systems (cf. Bueno-Soler, Log Univers 4(1):137–160, 2010). The paper also takes some first steps in exploring (...) the philosophical significance of such logical tools, comparing the notions of consistency and negation modally defined with the primitive notions of consistency and negation in the family of Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs), suggesting some experiments on their expressive power. (shrink)

This original and accessible text is more than an introduction to comparative philosophy in the East and West. It is also a guide to 'philosophizing' as a thinking process. In addition to outlining the presuppositions of different traditions, it discusses their methods and techniques for reasoning in what the author calls four dimensions of 'philosophical space': object, subject, the situational and the aspective/perspective dimension.