In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Arguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the ...

Explores the symbiosis of philosophy and literature in understanding negativity.

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives (...) and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being. (shrink)

This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas held that it (...) was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely. (shrink)

Roscoe Pound, in the introduction, gives a panorama of the various schools of legal philosophy, & places natural law in its proper perspective relative to ...

Boersma’s (1997, 1998) Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA) performs a sequence of slight re-rankings of the constraint set triggered by mistakes on the incoming stream of data. Data consist of underlying forms paired with the corresponding winner forms. At each iteration, the algorithm needs to complete the current data pair with a corresponding loser form. Tesar and Smolensky (Linguist Inq 29:229–268, 1998) suggest that this current loser should be set equal to the winner predicted by the current ranking. This paper develops (...) a new argument for Tesar and Smolensky’s proposal, based on the GLA’s factorizability. The underlying typology often encodes non-interacting phonological processes, so that it factorizes into smaller typologies that encode a single process each. The GLA should be able to take advantage of this factorizability, in the sense that a run of the algorithm on the original typology should factorize into independent runs on the factor typologies. Factorizability of the GLA is guaranteed provided the current loser is set equal to the current prediction, providing new support for Tesar and Smolensky’s proposal. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

BackgroundWe describe our experience from a multi-national application of a European Union-funded research-driven paediatric trial (DEEP-2, EudraCT 2012-000353-31; NCT01825512). This paper aims to evaluate the impact of the local and national rules on the trial authorisation process in European and non-European countries. National/local provisions and procedures, number of Ethics Committees and Competent Authorities to be addressed, documentation required, special provisions for the paediatric population, timelines for completing the authorisation process and queries received were collected; compliance with the European provisions were (...) evaluated. Descriptive analysis, Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test and General Linear Model analysis were used to determine factors potentially influencing the timelines. The Cluster Analysis procedure was used to identify homogenous groups of cases.ResultThe authorisation process was completed in 7.7 to 53.8 months in European countries and in 17.1 to 27.1 months in non-European countries. The main factors influencing these timelines were the requests for changes/clarifications in European countries and the different national legislations in non-European countries.ConclusionThis work confirms that the procedures and requirements for the clinical trial application of a paediatric trial are different. In the European Union, the timeframes for submission were generally harmonised but longer. In non-European countries, delays were caused by national dispositions but the entire authorisation process resulted faster with less requests from ECs/cas. The upcoming application of Regulation (EU) 536/2014 is expected to harmonise practices in Europe and possibly outside. Networks on paediatric research acting at international level will be crucial in this effort. (shrink)

Apparently, aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is true’ can hardly differ from aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is epistemically justified’. So one may be tempted to agree with Richard Rorty that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useless because it cannot make any difference ‘when the question is about what I should believe now’. I (...) resist this conclusion by arguing that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful even if the two properties are indeed normatively coincident. The argument I offer turns on the claim that truth plays an explanatory role that justification is inherently incapable of playing. However, my contention is not just that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because truth is a bona fide explanatory notion. It is that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because the realization that the former plays an explanatory role that the latter is inherently incapable of playing gives access to reasons which would otherwise escape our attention. If truth is a bona fide explanatory notion, the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because it is precisely when the question is about what I should believe now that attending to such a distinction will often make a difference – and it will make a difference even if the two properties are in fact normatively coincident. (shrink)

En este escrito se ofrece no sólo el mapa topográfico de la Nápoles de Vico sino también el mapa humano de las interrelaciones que Vico mantuvo con tantos y tan diferentes individuos. Estos dos factores juntos, los mapas topográfico (ciudad) y humano (cívico), nos dan la ciudad que civiliza, la idea de una gran raza humana. Visitar la Nápoles de Vico nos daría el placer y la emoción de conocer verdaderamente a Vico como napolitano que fue y valorar así sus (...) escritos más íntimamente. El artículo se muestra, pues, como una "guía" mediante la cual el lector, a través de su imaginación, recorrerá el mundo vital de Vico; y una propuesta para visitar la ciudad partenopea siguiendo este itinerario. (shrink)

La prima parte del saggio è apparsa in «Documenti e Studi» 3, 1 271-304 . L'esame analitico condotto su ciascuna delle sette questioni egidiane permette all'A. di valutare «le dimensioni e le modalità dell'impiego delle opere di Tommaso d'Aquino compiuto da Egidio Romano» . Di ciascuna questione viene quindi presentata una scheda ragionata articolata in tre parti: 1) collocazione della questione ; 2) analisi delle sezioni ; 3) raffronto complessivo tra la questione studiata e l'articolo parallelo del commento al II (...) libro Sententiarum di Egidio, seguito da una valutazione generale del rapporto tra la questione di Egidio e la trattazione svolta da Tommaso. (shrink)

When we look at a face, we readily perceive that person's gender, expression, identity, age, and attractiveness. Perceivers as well as scientists have hitherto had little success in articulating just what information we are employing to achieve these subjectively immediate and effortless classifications. We describe here a method that estimates that information. Observers classified faces in high levels of visual noise as male or female (in a gender task), happy/unhappy (in an expression task), or Tom Cruise/John Travolta (in an individuation (...) task). They were unaware that the underlying face (which was midway between each of the classes) was identical throughout a task, with only the noise rendering it more like one category value or the other. The difference between the average of noise patterns for each classification decision provided a linear estimate of the information mediating these classifications. When the noise was combined with the underlying face, the resultant images appeared to be excellent prototypes of their respective classes. Other methods of estimating the information employed in complex classification have relied on judgments of exemplars of a class or tests of experimenter‐defined hypotheses about the class information. Our method allows an estimate, however subtle, of what is in the subject's (rather than the experimenter's) head. (shrink)