Summary When dealing with philosophical questions such as the choice of a world system or the substance of heaven, some sixteenth-century astronomers, including Tycho Brahe and Christophe Rothmann, devised more accurate experimental setups so that they could refine their celestial observations. With this desire to listen to nature arose new questions, in particular that of atmospheric refractions, the understanding and resolution of which became decisive to guarantee the best accuracy. However, to solve such practical problems, it was necessary to consider (...) their philosophical and theological background, as well as the knowledge of optics inherited from the medieval period. We examine this heritage and its transmissions through the works of Peter Ramus's assistants, especially Jean Pena and Friedrich Risner. From this first survey, we try to analyse the lively debate on atmospheric refractions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by exploring the argumentative structure, the philosophical background, and the epistemological grounds of the discourse of authors such as Tycho Brahe, Christoph Rothmann, and Johannes Kepler. (shrink)

L’existence d’une rupture radicale entre les maîtres médiévaux et les auteurs de la Renaissance, revendiquée par ces derniers, est aujourd’hui largement remise en question. Même si à partir du XVe siècle apparaissent de nouveaux savoirs accompagnés d’une modification des méthodes, l’expression de « révolution renaissante », par référence à la notion de révolution scientifique introduite par Kuhn, semble pour le moins inappropriée. Comme le dit Laurence Boulègue : « On aurait pu croire que la ..

I take as my starting point the “one very simple principle” proclaimed by Mill in On Liberty … “That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do (...) or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.”. (shrink)

This contemporary, comprehensive, and practical text helps you discover and determine your own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. This text is the relied-upon, essential text for students in any helping field-the book many students return to well into their professional careers. The authors raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and present opportunities for you to refine (...) your own thinking and actively develop your own informed position. Questions explored include: What role do the therapist's personal values play in the counseling relationship? What ethical responsibilities and rights do clients and therapists have? What considerations are involved in adapting counseling practice to diverse client populations? And more... (shrink)

Benatar’s central argument for antinatalism develops an asymmetry between the pain and pleasure in a potential life. I am going to present an alternative route to the antinatalist conclusion. I argue that duties require victims and that as a result there is no duty to create the pleasures contained within a prospective life but a duty not to create any of its sufferings. My argument can supplement Benatar’s, but it also enjoys some advantages: it achieves a better fit with our (...) intuitions; it does not require us to acknowledge that life is a harm, or that a world devoid of life is a good thing; and it is easy to see why it does not have any pro-mortalist implications. (shrink)

I defend a realist commitment to the truth of our most empirically successful current scientific theories—on the ground that it provides the best explanation of their success and the success of their falsified predecessors. I argue that this Best Current Theory Realism (BCTR) is superior to preservative realism (PR) and the structural realism (SR). I show that PR and SR rest on the implausible assumption that the success of outdated theories requires the realist to hold that these theories possessed truthful (...) components. PR is undone by the fact that past theories succeeded even though their ontological claims about unobservables are false. SR backpeddles to argue that the realist is only committed to the truth about the structure of relations implied by the outdated theory, in order to explain its success. I argue that the structural component of theories is too bare-bones thin to explain the predictive/explanatory success of outdated theories. I conclude that BCTR can meet these objections to PR and SR, and also overcome the pessimistic meta-induction. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between (...) man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

Republican liberty, as recently defended by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, characterises liberty in terms of the absence of domination, instead of, or in addition to, the absence of interference, as favoured by Berlin-style negative liberty. This article considers several claims made on behalf of republican liberty, particularly in Pettit's and Skinner's recent writings, and finds them wanting. No relevant moral or political concern expressed by republicans, it will be contended here, fails to be accommodated by negative liberty.

I INTRODUCTION - THE TOPIC EXPLAINED 1 GENERAL DIFFERENCES From its inception to the present, philosophy may be viewed as a series of struggles between ...

The evidence of blindsight is occasionally used to argue that we can see things, and thus have perceptual belief, without the distinctive visual awareness accompanying normal sight; thereby displacing phenomenality as a component of the concept of vision. I maintain that arguments to this end typically rely on misconceptions about blindsight and almost always ignore associated visual (or visuomotor) pathologies relevant to the lessons of such cases. More specifically, I conclude, first, that the phenomena very likely do not result from (...) dissociations within a single system, but from the interaction of evolutionarily distinct, if interacting, systems; second, that a closer study of spared motor abilities indicates that verbal responses of patients result not from degraded vision but from proprioception; and, finally, above chance verbal responses, being forced guesses, are not tentative beliefs and cannot become beliefs just by training patients to have more confidence in their responses. (shrink)

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor (...) has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

I argue that post-Kuhnian approaches to rational scientific change fail to appreciate several distinct philosophical requirements and relativist challenges that have been assumed to be, and may in fact be essential to any adequate conception of scientific rationality. These separate requirements and relativist challenges are clearly distinguished and motivated. My argument then focuses on Shapere's view that there are typically good reasons for scientific change. I argue: that contrary to his central aim, his account of good reasons ultimately presupposes the (...) requirement of universal standards of scientific reasoning; that the good reasons established by his account underdetermine the rationality of scientific change and allow that other changes would have been equally or even more rational; that as a result, Shapere's approach fails to meet what I characterize as the challenges of moderate, sociological, and cognitive relativism. (shrink)

Raunig develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. The animal of the molecular revolution will be neither mole nor snake, but a drone-animal-thing that is solid, liquid, and a gas. —from Dividuum As the philosophical, religious, and historical systems that have produced the “individual” (and its counterparts, society and community) over the years continue to break down, the age of “dividuality” is now upon us. The roots of the concept (...) of the “dividuum” can be traced back to Latin philosophy, when Cicero used the term to translate the “divisible” in the writings of Epicurus and Plato; later, medieval scholars utilized the term in theological discussions on the unity of the trinity. Grounding himself in the writings of the medieval bishop Gilbert de Poitiers and his extensive commentaries on Boethius, Gerald Raunig charts a genealogy of the concept and develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. Through its components of dispersion, subsistence, and similarity, dividuality becomes a hidden principle of obedience and conformity, but it also brings with it the potential to realize disobedience and noncompliant con/dividualities. Raunig's bad news is that dividuality is responsible for much of the intensified exploitation and enslavement taking place under contemporary machinic capitalism. Algorithms, derivatives, big data, and social media technology all contribute to the rampant expansion of divisive management strategies and desires for self-division. The good news, however, is that this same terrain of dividuality presents an opportunity for a new kind of resistance, one that can be realized in the form of con/division. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 327-341 [Access article in PDF] The Rise of Postmodernisms and the "End of Science" Gerald Holton * [Errata]In a remarkable essay, "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will," Isaiah Berlin leads up to a key question facing historians of ideas today. He begins with the observation that beliefs have entered our culture that "draw their plausibility" from a deep and radical revolt (...) against the central tradition of Western thought. That central tradition rested on the "pillars of the social optimism," which had found its fullest expression in the Enlightenment, "that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle solvable; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole." 1But these pillars, Berlin notes, "came under attack toward the end of the eighteenth century by a movement first known in Germany as Sturm und Drang, and later in the many varieties of romanticism... and the many contemporary forms of irrationalism of both the right and the left, familiar to everyone today." In our time, in the alleged absence of "objective rules," the new rules are those made up by the rebels: "Ends are not... objective values," and "ends are not discovered at all but made, not found but created." And he concludes: "The prophets of the nineteenth-century predicted many things... but what none of them, so far as I know, predicted was that the last third of the twentieth century would be dominated by... the enthronement of the will of individuals or classes, and the rejection of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit. How did this begin?" 2 As if to ensure that the question be considered central to the understanding of our age, Berlin adds that the explosion of irrationalism is one of the "outstanding characteristics of our century, the most demanding of explanation [End Page 327] and analysis." 3 Elsewhere he also appeals to seek the causes of "what appears to me to be the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time." 4Focusing my presentation chiefly on the aspects concerning science, one may well rephrase Berlin's question: how did it come about that we have passed again in many areas into what Susan Haack calls an "Age of Preposterism?" 5 -- that, for example, scientists, who are now in a period of spectacular advances of knowledge across the board, find a whole array of highly placed academics and journalists asserting that scientists' hopes to reach objective truths (two highly suspect words now) are in vain because there is no difference between the laws scientists find in nature and the arbitrary rules that govern baseball games; that science is "just one language game among others"; that we must "abolish the distinction between science and fiction"; that "The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge"; and in any case, as the title of a current bestseller has it, we are at The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." 6These are only a few glimpses, indicators of a stream of derogations, issuing from academe and the media. But happily, my concern here is not with the details of the current manifestation of what has been called the war on science but rather with examples of its historic lineage, with earlier phases of what Isaiah Berlin called the "Romantic Revolt." 7 Here we must begin our analysis by recognizing that any such multifaceted movement is best understood as a reaction against what went before, against what became so unsatisfactory or even intolerable as to cause the revolt.Historically, the most obvious and early reaction of this sort was the response to the breakthroughs in the seventeenth century that formed science and simultaneously signaled the great rupture from the ancient worldview, in which the individual, in principle, had been able to be both intellectually and spiritually comfortable. As one of the direct ancestors of romanticism, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744... (shrink)

In " Re-Emergence" he explores the question of conscious properties arising from brute, unthinking matter, making the case that there is no equally plausible non-emergent alternative.

When they abandoned the analytic-synthetic distinction, analytic philosophers substituted for it uncritical appeals to thought experiments or conceivability arguments. Although the history of philosophy is replete with thought experiments, medieval and early modern philosophers developed sophisticated theories concerning what governs what happens in thought experiments. By contrast, contemporary philosophers subscribe to the thesis of facile conception according to which casual allegations of conceivability or inconceivability are taken as good evidence of possibility or impossibility. Philosophers need to adopt standards of thought (...) experimentation like those found in science and to ground them in a general theory of conceivability. (shrink)

Catholic moral theology possesses a number of tools that can be employed to promote worker justice. Some of these tools, such as Catholic social teaching on solidarity and workers’ rights, have been used to this end before. However, advocates of workers’ rights have seldom utilized other concepts, such as cooperation in evil, scandal, and evangelization. This essay provides a theoretical introduction to several tools in the “toolkit” of Catholic ethicists, engaging contemporary scholarship on them. It then applies the concepts to (...) two cases in order to demonstrate their usefulness in the struggle for worker justice. Both cases involve Catholic universities, which means the ethical concepts introduced from the Catholic moral tradition should have normative status for these institutions. The first case entails a divestment campaign at the University of Notre Dame. The second case confronts the unjust treatment of adjunct faculty members at Catholic colleges and universities. (shrink)

During his pontificate John Paul II received the teaching of Nostra Aetate: by interpreting the mystery of human suffering in the light of Christ; by linking religions and cultures; by recognizing the universal activity of the Holy Spirit; by constantly showing his friendship for Jews; by encouraging Catholics to collaborate with all people in the defence of life and all moral values. Nostra Aetate speaks of the revelatory and salvific dimensions of the divine self-communication , and pushes us into confessing (...) Christ not only as universal Saviour but also as universal Revealer. (shrink)

Parmenides didn't mention reference as such, but if he had he would have undoubtedly agreed with the philosophers who nowadays hold what is called "the axiom of existence": that one can only refer to what exists. The sources of possible support for this view are examined and rejected. Primary support for the axiom is given by two sorts of argument; one concerning quantification, the other summarizing a standard Parmenidean puzzle. Weaknesses in both are exposed. Finally, the relations between the axiom (...) and connected claims about predication and truth are probed, and an attempt is made to determine the limits of the mutual support these claims give one another. (shrink)

This paper analyses ethical training in neuroscience curricula at universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. The main findings are that 52 % of all courses have ethical training available, while in 82 % of those cases, the training is mandatory. In terms of specific contents of the teaching, ethical issues about ‘animal subjects and human participation in research’, ‘scientific misconduct’, and ‘treatment of data’ were the most prominent. A special emphasis during the research was (...) placed on the prevalence of dual-use bioethics. In total, only 3 % of all courses mention it in any of their modules. One of the major findings of the survey was the trend towards ‘mainstreaming’ ethics education particularly in the UK, which is to disperse ethics among the various modules within the education instead of relying on a single ethics module. The paper discusses the utility of this approach for science education as well as describes the overall difficulties that course coordinators face when trying to teach ethics based on the responses to the qualitative part to the survey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this (...) fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

This study examined the effects of emotional subject matter and descriptive style in short story excerpts on text (e.g. rich in meaning) and reader response-oriented (e.g. liking) ratings. Forty-eight subjects, including equal numbers of trained and novice male and female students, read two examples of each text twice and either generated or received interpretations between readings in a within-subjects design. In general, intellectual challenge slowed the pace of reading, whereas suspense-based arousal increased it. Emotional subject matter had a more powerful (...) effect than descriptive style on both cognitive (challenging, rich in meaning) and affective (expressive, personally relevant) scales and were read more quickly. Generating interpretations fostered subjective reactions to the Emotional excerpts (images), whereas Descriptive texts were less amenable to subjective responses. Consistent effects were also found for background and gender. As in everyday life, subject matter had a dominant effect in engaging a person's involvement. (shrink)