The reader of Demosthenes can hardly avoid the impression that there was something sadly awry with the Athenian naval system in the two decades prior to Chaeronea. The war in the north Aegean was essentially a naval war, and Demosthenes frequently enough blamedAthen's failure on her lack of preparation. ‘Why do you think, Athenians,… that all our expeditionary forces are too late for the critical moments?…In the business of the war and the preparation for it everything is in disorder, unreformed, (...) undefined. So it is that some news arrives, we appoint trierarchs, we give them the opportunity legally to get others to act in their stead, we consider provision of money, then it is decided that the metics and those “living out” should go on the ships, then again you yourselves, then to allow substitutes, and during these delays^the cause for which we would have been sailing is lost before we have sailed] For we spend the time for action on preparations, but the critical moments for action do not last as long as our dilatoriness and cautious procedures’ . This was spoken in 351 and it is much the same a decade later. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 207-222 [Access article in PDF] Burke Contra Kierkegaard:Kenneth Burke's Dialectic via Reading Søren Kierkegaard G. L. Ercolini Isaac—to his children Lived to tell the tale— Moral—with a Mastiff Manners may prevail. —Emily Dickinson Kenneth Burke employs the term dialectic throughout his works and yet, despite its profuse recurrence, the term remains ambiguous. Much secondary scholarship has focused on Burke and dialectics, and still the (...) term in Burke remains—if not already complicated—cloudy. 1 Part of the difficulty regarding this term stems from Burke's own ambiguity; another part from critics' tendency to rely on Burke's own use and definitions for clarification of this concept. The arguments have been helpful and illuminating, yet Burke's dialectic can be further clarified by going beyond what Burke means by the term by focusing on how he deploys dialectical criticism in his own work. 2 This article focuses on Burke's appropriation of the existential thinker Søren Kierkegaard as a particularly clear and remarkable instance of the operation of Burke's dialectic in his criticism. I maintain that although Burke's reading of Kierkegaard is arguably a misreading, his strategic appropriation of Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) not only serves as a clear deployment of the dialectic, but also functions as a foil against which Burke defines his own critical method. Burke's reading of Kierkegaard emphasizes the function of resolution in Burke's critical project.The current literature, although quite informative, does not put Burke's dialectic in sharp focus. Rueckert argues that Burkean dialectics "is really a branch of what Burke was to later call logology, the study of words, of language, of symbol systems" (1994, 14). Heath claims that dialectic "is an analytical tool to help us diagnose perspectives so that we can [End Page 207] examine whether they make sense and consider their implications for social relations" (1986, 162). Crusius contends that, "dialectic for Burke is the study of verbal universes, the disinterested pursuit of a vocabulary's implications" (1986, 24). While Brummett and Crusius show similarity between Hegel's and Burke's dialectic, Heath and Wess distinguish Burke's dialectic from Hegelian idealism and teleological history respectively. 3 Most of the arguments concerning Burke and dialectic focus on "The Dialectic of Constitutions" in A Grammar of Motives (1969), while A Rhetoric of Motives (1962), where Burke identifies humankind as homo dialecticus, is hardly engaged with regard to this concept. 4 Burke's working through Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives demonstrates Burke's dialectical criticism—thus providing an operational account of Burke's dialectic—and allows for his revelation of the three motives in the realm of rhetoric: the Order, the Secret, and the Kill. 5 And yet, despite this centrality of Fear and Trembling, surprisingly little has been said about Burke's Kierkegaard beyond passing mention. 6Despite editorial advice to the opposite regarding an article that would later become a part of the book, Burke evidently regarded his reading of Kierkegaard as important. Joseph Bennett, editor of Hudson Review, responded as follows to Burke's 1948 submission of the article entitled "Imagery of Killing": "I would like to request that you eliminate Kierkegaard from the article in question, confining it simply to literary exegesis and excluding the philosopher theologian." 7 Although he complied for the article, Burke retained his reading of Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives. Despite the lack of attention given to it, Burke's engagement with Kierkegaard clearly demonstrates how Burke views ethical criticism as that which resolves opposition, negation, and paradox to a higher order. Burke contra Kierkegaard The section entitled "Order" in A Rhetoric of Motives contains a detailed, twenty-three-page discussion of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In this discussion, Burke primarily attacks Kierkegaard for encouraging what Burke enigmatically and elliptically identifies as the "cult of the Kill."Burke's portrayal of Kierkegaard is hardly flattering: at the crescendo of his analysis in A Rhetoric of Motives he claims that thinking such as Kierkegaard... (shrink)

The need to anticipate these questions already betrays an abnormal state of affairs. Carl Schmitt is an extremely controversial figure, compromised by his collusion with Nazism at the peak of his career and throughout his life a European conservative whose authoritarian political objectives have never been in doubt. So what is a nice leftist journal like Telos doing in a dieoretical dive like this? Having successfully protected our political virtues from corruption by the totalitarian undercurrents of the various Marxisms and (...) Marxism-Leninisms, have we now succumbed to one of the few alternatives that made the worst Stalinism palatable to a whole generation of odierwise highly sophisticated intellectuals like Bloch and Lukács? (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that William James's well-known attempt to justify religious faith in ‘The Will to Believe’ is a failure. But despite the fact that James wrote his essay as a reply to the ‘tough-minded’ ethics of belief represented by such thinkers as W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley, the reasons commonly given today for rejecting James's position seem to be mostly based on the same principle of intellectual ethics that motivated Clifford and Huxley. Clifford, it (...) may be recalled, maintained that ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’. Although this is a rather rhetorical way of stating it, the principle is basically the same one adhered to by most scientists and philosophers who consider themselves rigorous and ‘objective’ thinkers. Even philosophers not associated with the hardheaded modern Anglo-American style of empiricism commonly pledge their allegiance to such a principle. For example, Brand Blanshard holds that the ‘main principle’ of the ethics of belief is that one should ‘equate one's assent to the evidence’ and he then goes on to criticize James, on the basis of this principle, for advocating self-deception and intellectual dishonesty. (shrink)

The title of this presentation may suggest that the subject is homocystinuria. It is not. Rather, the subject is how our epistemology influences our concept of disease, which in turn determines our ability to help patients.

The humanitarian thought did not encounter such challenges that we face today. Biotechnologies outline the perspectives of “posthuman” personology, while digitalization and robotization of almost all spheres of social practice bring to the fore the idea of homodicy – justifying the need for human existence. The article analyzes four blocks of challenges to humanitarian knowledge: (1) achievements in medicine, prosthetics, transplantology and genetic engineering, which outlined the separation of a sentient subject from traditional anthropomorphism (“posthuman” personology); (2) studies of the (...) brain neurophysiology, which advanced new arguments against free will; (3) costs of ill-considered propaganda of human rights; (4) digitization of almost all socio-cultural practices – from economics and military affairs to the formation and functioning of authority. Digitalization permeates all these “problematization fields,” setting their common conceptual and technological platform. In this regard, the question arises of the humanitarian expertise of modern technologies and the projects of education, communication and management, which implemented with their help. That expertise deals with not only the consequences, progress or even the possibility of implementing such projects, but also with their necessity. The focus and criteria of such expertise are important. Obviously, it cannot be directed only at the preservation of the biological species of homo sapiens and the conditions of its survival. Paradoxical choice arises in a situation where freedom and free will are questioned: which is more important – homo or sapiens? It is time for a clear distinction between the concepts of humanism and humanitarianism, including in the latter the posthuman personology. If humanitarianism is a personology of free spirit, then humanism seems to have a place next to economism and nationalism as forms of confined humanitarianism. This wide range of problems requires comprehension not only of their content but also of the methodology of the humanities and of the prospects of the humanities in modern society. (shrink)

A function is recursive (in given operations) if its values are computed explicitly and uniformly in terms of other "previously computed" values of itself and (perhaps) other "simultaneously computed" recursive functions. Here, "explicitly" includes definition by cases. We investigate those recursive functions on the structure $\mathbf{N} = \langle \omega, 0, \operatorname{succ,pred}\rangle$ that are computed in terms of themselves only, without other simultaneously computed recursive functions.

Una importante causa filosófica e ideológica de la inhumanidad de la sociedad rusa durante las décadas del marxismo-leninismo fue la obsesiva orientación de los marxistas-leninistas hacia el futuro histórico (futuro comunismo) en aras de lo cual, comunidades, culturas y personas podían ser reducidas a medios para alcanzar ese fin histórico. El autor de los debates apoyándose en los propios pensadores rusos de la "tradición clásica", como por ejemplo Herzen, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Leontiev y Berdiaev. No se opone a cualquier tipo de (...) orientación de futuro, pero recalca la importancia de las personas actuales. (shrink)