This article aims to demonstrate that a careful examination of Peirce's original manuscripts shows that there are five main periods in Peirce's evolution in his mathematical and philosophical conceptualizations of continuity. The aim of this article is also to establish the relevance of Peirce's reflections on continuity for philosophers and mathematicians.

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

We investigate the nature of the sense of presence that usually accompanies perceptual experience. We show that the notion of a sense of presence can be interpreted in two ways, corresponding to the sense that we are acquainted with an object, and the sense that the object is real. In this essay, we focus on the sense of reality. Drawing on several case studies such as derealization disorder, Parkinson’s disease and virtual reality, we argue that the sense of reality is (...) two-way independent from the spatial and sensory contents of experience. We suggest that the sense of reality is an affective experience akin to a metacognitive feeling. Finally, we present a potentially important implication of our account for the current debate between Intentionalism and Naïve Realism. Since perception is “opaque” with respect to the reality of what is perceived, Intentionalism cannot refer to the sense of reality as what differentiates perception from sensory-like experiences such as imaginings. In contrast, Naïve Realism has an independent explanation of the specificity of perception. (shrink)

One of the major concerns of advocates of common morality is that respect for cultural diversity may result in moral relativism. On their part, proponents of culturally responsive bioethics are concerned that common morality may result in moral imperialism because of the asymmetry of power in the world. It is in this context that critics argue that global bioethics is impossible because of the difficulties to address these two theoretical concerns. In this paper, I argue that global bioethics is possible (...) if we adopt a culturally responsive and self-critical attitude towards our moral values and those of others. I use the example of women’s reproductive autonomy in indigenous African culture to show that the difference between the leading Euro-American and indigenous African construal of autonomy is that the former ascribes greater weight on individual self-determination while the latter emphasizes responsibilities towards the community. One develops dignity in virtue of their capacity for communing with others. Hence, women have rights, but as members of the community, they also have obligations including the duty to procreate. The involvement of the family in reproductive decisions does not contravene women’s dignity and human rights. In applying the principle of autonomy in this communitarian context, one has to be sensitive to these ontological and moral specificities. The aim of global bioethics should not be to reach common grounds at all costs; any common norms should be the result of a negotiated democratic dialogue between cultures and not the result of imposition by the preponderant culture(s). (shrink)

The schoolyard wisdom about “sticks and stones” does not take one very far: insults do not take the form only of words, in truth even words have effects, and in the end the popular as well as the standard legal distinctions between speech and conduct are at least as problematic as they are helpful. To think clearly about how much we should put up with those who would put us down, it is necessary to explore the nature and place of (...) insult in our lives. What kind of injury is an insult? Is its infliction determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it reveal of the character of each and of the character of society and its conventions? What is its role in social and legal life (from play to jokes to ritual to war and from blasphemy to defamation to hate speech)? Philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and legal approaches to the questions are emphasized. Whether intentional or unintentional, the assertions and assumptions of dominance in insults make them a serious and essential form of power play. Is to understand all to forgive all? (shrink)

However one conceives of the relation between a sign and its significate, referring is a communicative act in which a speaker must intentionally direct the attention of an interlocutor to some object, event, or state of affairs that the speaker has in mind. This article examines the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of acts of referring, with special concern for the possible nature of sign-significate relationships. Findings from developments psychology indicate that a group of abilities and skills underlie the ability to refer. (...) Infants follow the gaze of others to objects of attention, and enjoy joint attention with others. Interactions with caregivers in routines well known to the child enable her to achieve joint attention with the adult on a particular ingredient in the routine. In this way, the ability to refer develops from certain "language games ", interactions that combine goal-seeking and joint attention. (shrink)

A puzzling finding from research on strategic decision making concerns the effect that predictions have on future actions. Simply stating a prediction about an opponent changes the total probability (pooled over predictions) of a player taking a future action as compared to not stating any prediction. These interference effects are difficult to explain using traditional economic models, and instead these results suggest turning to a quantum cognition approach to strategic decision making.

The defence of necessity has had a long, though confused, legal career. Like self-defence, consent, duress, insanity and mistake of law, necessity is rooted in moral intuitions about when conduct which causes harm to another's person or property is not wrong, or should be tolerated, permitted or praised. If a man is literally starving to death and steals a loaf of bread, we are reluctant to say that his extreme circumstances should make no difference at all to the way we (...) treat him at trial. And if two men, adrift at sea, are clinging to a log which can only support the weight of one, we are once again reluctant to say that if one pushes the other off the log, it is just a case of murder. These intuitions are deepseated; but it is extremely difficult to articulate the defence they seem to support, or to isolate the circumstances which mark the difference between a situation where the defence ought to apply and where it ought not. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Plato IT is a mark of wisdom in Greek political thought that the form and content of education receive primary consideration from those who are ...

A thematic reading guide for the Great books of the Western world series.

Lest the conjunction seduce readers into supposing that the two are of a piece, we point out that analyses made at the superset level concerning intelligence do not readily align with or outperform the scientific advances made via investigations of reasoning, which at best can be viewed as a subset of intelligent behaviour.

Can poetry tell the truth? This question has embarrassed and challenged writers for a long time. While the question may be addressed at both an ethical and an epistemological level, its resonance is strongest when the ethico-political issues become paramount—as they were for both Socrates and Plato.Today the question appears most pressing not among poets but among their custodians, the critics and academicians.1 Whether or not poetry can tell the truth—whether or not it can establish an identity between thought and (...) its object—has become an acute problem for those who are asked to bring critical judgment to the matter. To the extent that a consensus has been reached, the judgment has been negative. That poetry develops only a metaphorical and nonidentical relation between thought and its object is the current general view. 1. This crisis has been widely debated; my own contribution to the discussion may be found in Social Values and Poetics Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work . The critique of Plato in the early sections of this work is particularly relevant to the question of poetry’s truth-functions. The same subject is pursued further in the sequel, Toward a Literature of Knowledge . Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. The Textual Condition is his most recent critical work, and he is the editor of the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. (shrink)

… [T]he scandals surrounding the work of these men are as nothing compared to the scandal of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. We are amused to think that anyone ever felt Byron might have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know. We are not amused by the Cantos. Like Pound’s letters and so much of his prose, the Cantos is difficult to like or enjoy. It is a paradigm of poetic obscurity because its often cryptic style is married to materials which are (...) abstruse, learned, even pedantic. The poem also makes a mockery of poetic form; and then there are those vulgar and bathetic sinking which it repeatedly indulges through its macaronic turns of voice.All that is scandalous, but the worst has not been said. For the Cantos is a fascist epic in a precise historical sense.1 Its racism and anti-Semitism are conceived and pursued in social and political terms at a particular point in time and with reference to certain state policies. Those policies led to a holocaust for which the murder of six million Jews would be the ultimate exponent. That is truly scandalousFor anyone convinced that works of imagination are important to human life, however, the scandal takes a last, cruel twist. Pound’s magnum opus is one of the greatest achievements of modern poetry in any language. That is more a shocking than a controversial idea. It shocks because it is outrageous to think so; but it is in fact a commonplace judgment passed on the poem by nearly every major writer and poet of this century. The greatness of the Cantos was an apparent to Pound’s contemporaries as it has been to his inheritors, to his enemies as to his friends, to those who have sympathized with Pound’s ideas and to those who have fought against them. 1. See John Lauber, “Pound’s Cantos: A Fascist Epic,” Journal of American Studies 12 : 3-21; Victor C. Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” Journal of Politics 17 : 173-97. Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. This essay was originally one of the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently one of the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Prologue: retrospective and prospective -- The ethics of enough -- Real and apparent goods -- Wrong desires: pleasure, money, fame, and power -- Right desires: the totum bonum and its constituents -- Fundamental errors in moral philosophy -- Necessary but not sufficient -- Epilogue: transcultural ethics.

In view of recent research can we continue to argue for a superiority over other animals that justifies dominating and exploiting them? This question, now “in the center of ethical discussion,” invites us to “radically reconsider the terms of ethical inquiry” (Rolston 1993, 382). Those terms now include the feelings biophilia and biophobia as well as compassion, sympathy, and empathy. Are we prepared to value not only reason but also emotions that connect us to other animals? If we are to (...) save ourselves and our planet, we need a more interdisciplinary model of ethics that includes “emotive” as well as analytic ethics. Derrida’s “L’Animal que donc je suis (ti suivre)” (1997) combines them, citing literature to demonstrate the role of feelings in situation-specific ethics. Though he does not use E.O Wilson’s terminology, Derrida suggests that what blocks biophilia is an apparently instinctive, superstitious fear of animals that has expanded into what we now call biophobia. Ultimately, Derrida focuses on a new experience of compassion that can bring about the political change needed to save our planet. (shrink)

Le Code civil français, depuis juin 2013, permet aux couples de même sexe de se marier, d’adopter conjointement, et de recourir à l’adoption de l’enfant du conjoint. Malgré ces changements juridiques considérables, nombre de situations parentales sont difficilement prises en considération. Tel est le cas, par exemple, lorsque des couples de femmes recourent à une reproduction assistée avec don de sperme ou lorsque des couples d’hommes recourent à une gestation pour autrui, tous ces couples ayant élaboré conjointement le projet de (...) fonder une famille. Le choix du nom de famille et du prénom de leur enfant est alors une occasion d’affirmer le statut parental des deux membres du couple de même sexe. L’examen précis de quelques situations laisse entrevoir les pratiques spécifiques de ces couples mais aussi les différences entre couples de pères et couples de mères. Si les enquêtes disponibles montrent qu’en France les mères se soucient rarement de transmettre leur nom à leur enfant, les mères lesbiennes y portent au contraire une grande attention et vont même jusqu’à quelquefois donner en premier le nom de la mère non biologique. Les familles qu’elles composent ont ceci de particulier qu’à condition que l’état civil le leur permette, elles favorisent la transmission des noms féminins. (shrink)

Résumé L’interprétation serait un point qui divise les arts. À l’encontre de cette idée, l’auteur pose un principe d’équivalence entre les arts qui n’est plus fondé sur des questions de définition des « pratiques artistiques » mais sur leur mode de diffusion. Le concert, le spectacle, le cinéma, l’édition d’un livre trouvent alors leur contrepartie dans le monde des arts plastiques avec l’exposition. L’exposition est en outre le point de rencontre de différentes formes d’interprétation : celle de l’artiste, celles de (...) ses médiateurs, celles des spectateurs. (shrink)

Ambient assisted living systems are based on sensors and actuators, with a diversity of network protocols and vendors. This commonly leads to the introduction of gateways or middlewares into the technical infrastructure in order to address interoperability issues. The xAAL framework presented in this paper aims to provide interoperability and to redesign such “gateways” into well-defined functional entities communicating with each other via a lightweight message bus over IP. Each entity may have multiple instances, may be shared between several boxes, (...) and may be physically located in any box. Thanks to the distributed architecture of the system, each home automation vendor may peacefully provide its own xAAL box without revealing details of its technology. Also, several applications may be plugged together on the xAAL bus without getting bored with underlying heterogeneity. Moreover, the management of the dynamicity allows sensors or applications to enter and leave the system at any time. (shrink)

Education has always been at the heart of most, if not all, human endeavours. This explains the growing interest of many scholars in educational issues. Self-Reliance, one of Emerson’s most impressive and influential works, provides an outstanding contribution to education in general and particularly to the personal development of individuals in society. The relevance of the educational values addressed in Self-Reliance makes it an appropriate context for academic reflection. This paper scrutinises the educational dimension of Emerson’s work with a focus (...) on language didactics. My concern is to provide evidence that the educational values expressed instruct didactics. The study of Self-Reliance reveals the expression of some values, the main ones being trust, responsibility, commitment, creativity, autonomy, independence, self-esteem, self-determination, self-evaluation, and individual talents. By reflecting on their educational dimension with a focus on their didactic implications I come to conclude that even though didactics does not draw directly on Emerson’s educational philosophy, it integrates some aspects, notably the values referred to in this paper. (shrink)

Résumé — L’Encyclopédie hégélienne n’indique pas ce que devrait être une philosophie systématique, mais rend ce système effectif. Et, pourtant, sa présentation rigoureuse, sous forme de paragraphes, accepte le voisinage intermittent et désordonné d’un certain nombre de remarques, munies du laissez-passer tout relatif que leur offre leur brièveté, et récusant souvent par leur longueur cette justification même. On tente d’abord ici de saisir l’origine des remarques, en s’intéressant aux différents voisinages du système encyclopédique : la parole philosophique et populaire, le (...) parcours phénoménologique, les explications préliminaires, les esquisses d’encyclopédie non publiées et l’énigmatique « encyclopédie autre, habituelle » à laquelle se réfère régulièrement Hegel. Le désordre des remarques s’explique alors par la rencontre entre différents ordres .On en déduit finalement qu’il y a place chez Hegel pour une logique de la non-rigueur, qui fonde l’invention des remarques, en acceptant toutes les rencontres. Cette logique révèle, selon ses propres termes, les parentés et les divergences entre les connaissances non philosophiques et la pensée pure ; elle assure la brièveté et la complétude de l’exposition. Bref, elle réalise toutes les exigences d’une encyclopédie philosophique, elle la fait être.Die hegelianische Enzyklopädie weist nicht darauf hin, wie eine systematische Philosophie beschaffen sein sollte, sondern sie verwirklicht dieses System selbst. Ihre strenge Darstellung, organisiert inParagraphen, lässt das zeitweilig unterbrochene und ungeordnete Nebeneinander zahlreicher Anmerkungen zu. Deren Kürze verleiht ihnen auf befremdliche Art einen Freibrief, eine Rechtfertigung, die jedoch durch die Länge einiger Anmerkungen zurückgewiesen wird. Der vorliegende Artikel versucht zunächst, den Ursprung dieser Anmerkungen zu erfassen, indem er sich den verschiedenen Nebenbereichen des enzyklopädischen Systems zuwendet : der philosophischen und der populären Rede, dem phänomenologischen Verlauf,den vorläufigen Erklärungen, den unveröffentlichten Entwürfen der Enzyklopädie und schliesslich der rätselhaften « anderen, gewöhnlichen Encyclopädie », auf die sich Hegel regelmässig bezieht. Im Lichte dieser Beziehungen erklärt sich die Unordnung der Anmerkungen alsdann als das Ergebnis eines Zusammentreffens unterschiedlicher Ordnungen .Aus diesen Untersuchungen ergibt sich die Feststellung, dass Hegel einen Platz einräumt für eine Logik der Nicht-Strenge, die die Erfindung der Anmerkungen begründet, indem sie ein jegliches Zusammentreffen zulässt. Diese Logik enthüllt, nach ihren eigenen Worten, die Verwandtschaften und Abweichungen zwischen den nicht-philosophischen Kenntnissen und dem reinen Denken ; sie sichert die Kürze und die Vollkommenheit der Ausführungen. Kurz gesagt, sie erfüllt alle Anforderungen einer philosophischen Enzyklopädie, sie verwirklicht ihr Sein. (shrink)

Les travaux de Polanyi et Veblen permettent de comprendre quelques mécanismes du Capital comme imago. Ils s'inscrivent ainsi contre les théories économiques libérales les plus modernes appliquées à l'histoire, complexes théoriques qui participent de la projection d'un Capital idéal dans les sociétés passées.