In an empirical study, we compared how lay people judge motivation enhancement as opposed to cognitive enhancement. We found alienation is not seen as a danger associated with either form of enhancement. Cognitive enhancement is seen as more morally wrong than motivation enhancement, and users of cognitive enhancement tend to be judged as less deserving of praise and success than users of motivation enhancement. These more negative judgments of cognitive enhancement may be driven by differences in perceived fairness rather than (...) differences in effort exerted by the user, although lay people generally see effort as necessary to deservingness of praise and success. (shrink)

Farmers’ organizations all over the world are very well aware that in order to build and retain a critical mass with sufficient bargaining power to democratically influence local governments and international organizations they will have to unite by identifying common goals and setting aside their differences. After decades of local movements and struggles, farmers’ organizations around the globe found in the concept of “food sovereignty” the normative framework they were long searching for. The broadness of the concept has had a (...) remarkable success in embracing the interests of food producers and consumers from all geographic locations and development levels. (shrink)

Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in response to the unspeakable is structurally akin (...) to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence. (shrink)

Classical realism and Morgenthau in particular have recently experienced a revived interest in International Relations (IR). The evolving debate has helped to contextualise and reconstruct Morgenthau's thought which until now had been misrepresented in structural realist and early poststructuralist interpretations. However, despite all of its achievements, we have yet to draw more attention to Morgenthau's contribution to contemporary IR theory. To contribute to the closing of this research gap this article considers a set of questions which Morgenthau himself asked at (...) the beginning of his career as its conceptual framework. It is argued that Morgenthau was particularly concerned with the dehumanisation of socio-political life in modern democracies evoked through processes of ideologisation, technologisation, and scientification, which he countered by focusing on a re-introduction of the human factor to politics. This demonstrates that Morgenthau's work is a rich source for IR theory because his intellectual agenda was driven by concerns similar to what we find in poststructuralism. (shrink)

McGarvey (Econometrica, 21(4), 608–610, 1953) has shown that any irreflexive and anti-symmetric relation can be obtained as a relation induced by majority rule. We address the analogous issue for dominance relations of finite cooperative games with non-transferable utility (coalitional NTU games). We find any irreflexive relation over a finite set can be obtained as the dominance relation of some finite coalitional NTU game. We also show that any such dominance relation is induced by a non-cooperative game through β-effectivity. Dominance relations (...) obtainable through α-effectivity, however, have to comply with a more restrictive condition, which we refer to as the edge-mapping property. (shrink)

La Historia de la Filosofía se ubica en una tensión entre el tiempo y el logos, cuya adecuada comprensión decide en última instancia el papel que ésta cumple en la Filosofía. Esta tesis es desarrollada por el autor mediante el estudio del lugar que tal disciplina ocupa en la constitución del Sistema hegeliano. Según esto, la dependencia mutua del tiempo y del logos debe mostrarse por dos vías contrapuestas: de un lado, la necesidad de considerar la existencia (Dasein) del concepto (...) en el tiempo, y de otro lado, el esfuerzo que representa la Filosofía como esclarecimiento del tiempo histórico en el concepto. Por esta razón, si bien Hegel sabe de la importancia de la Historia de la Filosofía en la consolidación del Sistema (según el lema de que el saber acerca del devenir histórico de la Filosofía es ya Filosofía), su presentación de la misma revela un mayor énfasis en el lagos. A diferencia de Hegel, el autor opina que no debe hablarse de los textos filosóficos como "meros hijos de su tiempo" (y por tanto, como observables desde una perspectiva "superior" a ellos), sino que es preciso reconocer en ellos una opacidad inherente, reflejo de la cual los textos filosóficos pueden abordarse siempre de modos diversos. (shrink)

In order to theorize about the nature and scope of the philosophical reflection, philosophers have used a wide array of metaphors and analogies, from Plato's cave to Wittgenstein “family resemblances”. This paper reviews some of those metaphors and discusses what they show about the nature of philosophy, and most important, about the teaching of philosophy. It is not enough to be in favour of the presence of philosophical dialogue or to demand a specific philosophical subject matter in the curriculum of (...) formal or compulsory schooling. We need to offer a more precise description of the kind of philosophical learning we are proposing, and which educational goals we think that students can achieve if they are exposed to philosophical reflection all along their school life. Philosophical metaphors can help us to present the style of philosophical dialogue we want to implement in our class rooms in order to philosophy empower children in such a way the can think for themselves in a critical, creative and cooperative way. (shrink)

Different languages present a variety of ways of talking about emotional experience. Very commonly, feelings are described through the use of ¿body image constructions¿ in which they are associated with processes in, or states of, specific body parts. The emotions and the body parts that are thought to be their locus and the kind of activity associated with these body parts vary cross-culturally. This study focuses on the meaning of three ¿body image constructions¿ used to describe feelings similar to, but (...) also different from, English ¿jealousy¿, ¿envy¿, and ¿covetousness¿ in the West African language Ewe. It is demonstrated that a ¿moving body¿, a pychologised eye, and red eyes are scripted for these feelings. It is argued that the expressions are not figurative and that their semantics provide good clues to understanding the cultural construction of emotions both emotions and the body. (shrink)

The ninth and last volume of the Adagia of the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus gives an introduction in German and a critical edition of the Latin text of the Collectanea , an early version of the Adagia that completely differs from the latter collection.

This paper offers both exegetical and systematic reconsiderations of Donald Davidson’s view on metaphor. In his essay What Metaphors Mean, Davidson argued against the idea that metaphors have any kind of propositional content beyond the literal meaning of the relevant sentence. Apart from this negative claim, Davidson also made a constructive proposal by suggesting that metaphor’s distinctive effect is to prompt a mental state of seeing-as. These two points seem connected insofar as Davidson makes the following assumptions. First, metaphors cause (...) their distinctive effects in an a-rational way. Second, seeing-as is a nonpropositional mental state. If we side with Davidson in thinking of meaning as rational and propositional, then it follows that metaphors’ distinctive effects cannot be an instance of meaning. They have the wrong format and are brought about in the wrong way. Against this background, I distinguish a strong reading and a modest reading of Davidson’s wrong-kind objection to metaphorical meaning. By taking into account some of Davidson’s later pronouncements on the matter, this paper aims to show that Davidson did not hold on to the strong version of the wrong-kind objection. This would open up the way to conceiving of metaphorical meaning in terms of speaker’s meaning, were it not for the fact that Davidson sticks to the wrong-way objection. The two concluding sections examine the cogency of the wrong-way objection as applied to metaphorical speaker’s meaning, and offer a model for thinking about the a-rational mental causation Davidson thought metaphors exhibit. (shrink)

This collection of original essays on political and legal theory concentrates on themes dealt with in the work of Felix Oppenheim, including fundamental political and legal concepts and their implications for the scope of morality in politics and international relations. Among the issues addressed are the relationship between empirical and normative definitions of "freedom", "power", and "interests", whether governments are free to act against the national interest, and whether they can ever be morally obliged to do so.

Sebastian Grève interviews Felix Mühlhölzer on his work on the philosophy of mathematics.