Este escrito surge de nuestras investigaciones sobre la caracterización y las fuentes del republicanismo arendtiano y pretende intervenir en el debate urgente que se abre acerca de nuestras democracias contemporáneas. Es en este panorama que quisiéramos ubicar nuestras reflexiones con la expectativa de reintroducir, a través del pensamiento de Hannah Arendt, ciertos aspectos que consideramos centrales para pensar la república y que han sido dejados de lado en el debate público sobre los regímenes políticos contemporáneos. Estos son el lugar del (...) pueblo en la república, su función y su dinámica política en la vida de las instituciones y en la expresión de la libertad en el orden político contemporáneo. En efecto, sostendremos en este trabajo que las reflexiones de Arendt sobre la república están íntimamente ligadas a la figura, o, deberíamos decir mejor, a las múltiples figuras del pueblo y al rol que ellas juegan en la institución política de la libertad. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an escalation in corporate social reporting (CSR) by UK companies (Gray, Kouhy and Lavers 1995). Whilst some elements of CSR reporting are required by law, much of it represents voluntary reporting. By investigating the non‐mandatory reporting of two aspects of social responsibility, corporate community involvement (CCI) and environmental impact, this paper seeks to explore why companies choose to make such disclosures. It specifically asks whether companies are primarily motivated by the strategic need to manage their reputation (...) and legitimacy rather than by the recognition of their ethical accountability, which is the stated purpose of reports produced by cutting edge companies (Clarke 1998). (shrink)

In The idea of justice (2009), Amartya Sen builds on his previous work on capabilities to develop a theory of comparative justice which he contrasts to the contractarian approach. The theory has two parts: the proper materials of justice (capabilities); and, a procedure for assessing those materials. The procedure that Sen advocates is one of open impartial deliberation operationalised through Adam Smith's impartial spectator, which he contends is superior to contractarian view operationalised by Rawls’ original position. In this paper we (...) argue that Sen's open impartiality is too open and defend a more bounded version as more workable regardless of the operationalising device used. Moreover, we demonstrate that Sen's own arguments against the possibility of agreement, though aimed at the contractarian tradition, undermine his own attempts to generate a contentful account of justice by driving a wedge between the materials and procedures. Sen's attempt to provide an alternative approach to political philosophy, we conclude, fails. (shrink)

This volume launches a new series of contemporary conversations about scientific classification. Most philosophical conversations about kinds have focused centrally or solely on natural kinds, that is, kinds whose existence is not dependent on the scientific process of synthesis. This volume refocuses conversations about classification on unnatural, or synthetic, kinds via extensive study of three paradigm cases of unnatural kinds: nanomaterials, stem cells, and synthetic biology.

In the literature on philosophical progress it is often assumed that agreement is a necessary condition for progress. This assumption is sensible only if agreement is a reliable sign of the truth, since agreement on false answers to philosophical questions would not constitute progress. This paper asks whether agreement among philosophers is (or would be) likely to be a reliable sign of truth. Insights from social choice theory are used to identify the conditions under which agreement among philosophers would be (...) a reliable indicator of the truth, and it is argued that we lack good reason to think that philosophical inquiry meets these conditions. The upshot is that philosophical agreement is epistemically uninformative: agreement on the answer to a philosophical question does not supply even a prima facie reason to think that the agreed-upon view is true. However, the epistemic uninformativeness of philosophical agreement is not an indictment of philosophy's progress, because philosophy is valuable independent of its ability to generate agreement on the correct answers to philosophical questions. (shrink)

L’article traite des discussions contemporaines autour du concept de totalité là où il est employé pour saisir la réalité sociale. À travers une reconstruction des positions de Durkheim et d’Althusser il s’intéresse aux différentes méthodes développées par ces théories pour justifier leur approche holiste du social. Il s’avère que le marxisme révolutionnaire et la sociologie non révolutionnaire se rencontrent en un point : les deux lisent des textes des sciences sociales pour accéder à ce qui produit la société sous forme (...) de tout. Notre article établit le statut de ces textes pour les deux approches et compare leurs méthodes de lecture, afin de dégager ce que, selon les deux, produit le lien social. (shrink)

When we're inquiring to find out whether p is true, knowing that we'll get better evidence in the future seems like a good reason to suspend judgment about p now. But, as Matt McGrath has recently argued, this natural thought is in deep tension with traditional accounts of justification. On traditional views of justification, which doxastic attitude you are justified in having now depends on your current evidence, not on what you might learn later. McGrath proposes to resolve this tension (...) by distinguishing between different ways of having a neutral attitude. I argue that McGrath's account is unable to account for the full range of cases in which an agnostic attitude is warranted. We can remedy this by pairing his account with my theory of transitional and terminal attitudes, which claims that attitudes are justified in different ways depending on whether they are formed in intermediate stages of deliberation or as conclusions of deliberation. I compare my view with an alternative, more parsimonious one, according to which deliberation itself is a source of new evidence. I argue that this alternative proposal is faced with a dilemma: it either generates a vicious regress, or it fails to capture the relevant cases. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Sextus’s arguments against ethical theories are shorter and more general than those he brings against the other two parts of ancient philosophy, logic and physics. Until recently this part of his work, in Outlines of Pyrrhonism III and Adversus Mathematicos XI has been comparatively neglected. Now, as well as the splendidly scholarly book by Emidio Spinelli, Sesto Empirico: Contro Gli Etici we have Richard Bett’s translation with commentary in the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series. Both books make Sextus’s sometimes elusive (...) work far more available and usable to the modern reader. (shrink)

Metaphor is a significant tool in the recontextualization of specialized knowledge in popularizations transmitted through the mass media. This study explores metaphor in popularizations of scientific articles on cancer in the English press. Metaphors used for cancer and cancer research were identified and analysed in a corpus of 37 articles from The Guardian. Special attention was paid to the aspects emphasized and de-emphasized as they can have potential ideological implications. Fifteen conceptual metaphors were identified in the corpus, ranging from the (...) most frequent CANCER IS WAR to an isolated reference to Achilles' heel. The average was 2.9 metaphors per text. The quantitative data and contextual analysis indicate that no single metaphorical system is sufficient to represent the complexity of cancer-related knowledge. Metaphors are used in combination to perform three main functions, attracting the reader, structuring and explaining scientific concepts, and organizing the text into a narrative. (shrink)

‘The matter will hinge on this point: what will be established is the ideal wise and virtuous person either of the Stoics or of the Old Academy [Platonists and Aristotelians]. You can’t have both; the dispute between them is not about boundaries but about complete ownership, since all rationale for living is involved in one’s definition of the final good, and dispute about that is dispute about all rationale for living. So it can’t be both, since they disagree so deeply; (...) it must be one or the other.…I am dragged in different directions—at one time one view seems more convincing to me, at other times the other. Still, unless one or other of them is the case, I firmly believe that virtue is defeated. But—just on this issue they disagree.’. (shrink)

The evaluation of character has taken on new significance in moral theory, and, indeed, some advocate a shift in focus away from evaluating action to evaluating character. This has been taken to pose special challenges for utilitarian and consequentialist moral theory. Utilitarianism's commitment to impartiality and its seeming failure to accommodate virtue evaluation have led to problems, some of which are developed in the essays in this volume.

According to a major trend in Hegel scholarship, Hegel advocates a McDowell-style transformativist conception of the human mind. Central to this conception is a methodological dualism, according to which phenomena belonging to the rational mind, in contrast to those belonging to non-rational nature, must be accounted for from within the ‘space of reasons.’ In this paper I argue, by contrast, that Hegel rejects methodological dualism. For Hegel, a constitutive aspect of the rational mind is the activity of expression. I show (...) how Hegel’s philosophy of mind adequately accounts for low-level forms of expressivity without appealing to capacities connected to conceptual thought and judgment, and that he does so by drawing on methods similar to those employed within the empirical sciences of his time. Thus, for Hegel, the sphere of the rational mind is broader than the McDowellian space of reasons. (shrink)

As an approach to public engagement, deliberation has the potential to pursue a range of goals identified by public participation theorists including the opportunity to substantively inform policy processes, increase the public’s knowledge and understanding of public issues and create or restore loss of public trust and confidence in public institutions. Baum and colleagues (2009) offer several important take-home messages for policy makers and public health leaders about the value of engaging with the public about ethically challenging, value-laden and resource (...) intensive policy issues such as pandemic response planning. (shrink)

Antiochus’ is a hybrid theory, seeking convergence between Aristotelian and Stoic accounts of nature. He aims to retain the Stoic developmental account of virtue as the culmination of a natural progression, but tries to make the result more intuitive, arguably not successfully.

In his later depiction of an ideal city, the Laws, Plato does not move from rule by experts to the rule of law, as often claimed, since law is also basic to the Republic. Rather, he now sees educated law-abidance as part of civic virtue: the laws are to be obeyed strictly, but also to be understood so that they are obeyed in the right spirit. Plato introduces original means to encourage this, and is led to make some moves in (...) the direction of what will later be developed by the Stoics as natural law. (shrink)

Response to Nancy Snow In Nancy’s impressive book she shows, through a thorough study of the philosophical debate about the position called ‘situationism’ and the psychological literature that supposedly based it, that there was a serious misconception right from the start among philosophers about the kind of disposition or trait which psychologists were concerned with. The kind of disposition the philosophers were rejecting was one taken to be expressed over a number of situations characterized from the outside, independently of the (...) person’s take on the situation. What ‘situationist’ psychologists were defending was an account of traits which took into consideration the person’s own construal of the situation. They weren’t defending the view that situations in themselves get us to act regardless of what we bring to them . When properly understood, situationist psychology is a friend, not a .. (shrink)

This research aims to determine the quality of public services through the Electronic-Based Government System (SPBE), as well as to know and analyze the Implementation of Strategies for Achieving PERPRES No. 95 of 2018 concerning SPBE in the Medan City Government. This research is important to obtain a Strategic Management Model in Achieving PERPRES No.95 of 2018 concerning SPBE in the Medan City Government. The research paradigm used is Constructivist Paradigm, with Qualitative Research Method. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, (...) discussions with several informants from the Medan City Office, DPRD, UPT Kecamatan, and community leaders. In addition, data was also collected through literature study, document study, and secondary data. The results showed the following: First, there is coordination between agencies in the development of application services. The coordination is conducted by the Diskominfo of Medan City Government. A number of Departments used external consultants in the development of SPBE. Diskominfo made new rules to address ICT service issues. The services use external programmers and experts and if an error occurs, the City Government is not responsible for the service. Secondly, Medan City Government conducted a Memorandum of Understanding with Tangerang City to collaborate and share resources through the innovation of E-Files application for correspondence needs. The use of shared correspondence applications by the Government in Tangerang City was adjusted based on the specific needs of each city. The platform used is the same, but with different application names, E-Files in Tangerang and Sarana in Medan. Third, there are 3 SPBE service providers in Medan City Government, including: Telkom (PT. Telekomunikasi Indonesia) for Kelurahan/Kecamatan, GDS (Global Digital Solusi) for Diskominfo and other OPDs, and TNC (Telemedia Network Cakrawala) for Medan City Office. Fourth, Medan City Government uses a Strategic Management Model that combines the Environmental Model with the Collaboration Model in developing the Achievement of PERPRES No.95/2018 on SPBE in Medan City Government. The Environmental Model/Flow emphasizes vertical and horizontal coordination between work units in Medan City Government. The Collaboration Model develops a strategy of collaborative cooperation with other local governments or state-owned/private enterprises. (shrink)

La inclusión de la población menor de edad en los procesos y decisiones políticas es fundamental para alcanzar una sociedad justa y equitativa. No obstante, existen desafíos que obstaculizan su participación activa y silencian su voz. Este artículo se propone analizar uno de estos retos: la actitud de superioridad de la población adulta, que puede entenderse como arrogancia epistémica. Para ilustrar este punto, se examina el caso de la segregación socioeconómica escolar en España, donde las medidas educativas se centran en (...) los intereses de la población adulta discriminada, pasando por alto la discriminación que también enfrenta el alumnado debido a su perfil socioeconómico. Para abordar este desafío, los modelos de democracia deliberativa surgen como posibles soluciones, siempre y cuando permitan la participación activa de la población menor de edad en la conceptualización y práctica de la participación política. La inclusión de la minoría de edad en estos modelos puede garantizar la participación de aquellos que están estructuralmente excluidos, brindándoles oportunidades para que sus voces sean escuchadas. Además, la democracia deliberativa puede ayudar a contrarrestar la arrogancia epistémica al fomentar la reconsideración de prejuicios y suposiciones falsas durante la interacción deliberativa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe (...) in God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

I begin with some points from the Republic which are familiar, perhaps over-familiar, to everyone, and then raise an issue about the role of law in Kallipolis which points us to something not so familiar. I hope that this contribution to honoring Fred Miller will lead to the kind of discussion that his own work has stimulated over the years, across an incredibly wide range of topics. I am honored and delighted to contribute to honoring Fred, and hope that this (...) paper will be worthy of its inclusion in this collection. (shrink)

In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume argues that there is a significant problem with his earlier account of personal identity. There has been considerable debate about what this problem actually is. I develop a new version of an internal inconsistency reading, where I argue that Hume realised that his original account of the connexion between perceptions in terms of an association of the ideas of the perceptions was not a viable means of explaining the connexion between perceptions as it (...) leads to an infinite regress of ideas of perceptions. This is only stopped by accepting that the mind perceives a connexion between perceptions. This, however, is something Hume cannot accept. As a result, Hume is left without a positive account of the self, as he has no account of the connexion between perceptions. (shrink)

La diversité des témoignages historiques est presque infinie. Tout ce que l'homme dit ou écrit, tout ce qu'il fabrique, tout ce qu'il touche peut et doit renseigner sur lui.Marc BlochJudging from all the evidence we have, it appears that History must start again to look at aspects of the human existence in their time and must open up to the realm of imagination, of affectivity, and of mental attitudes; to put it differently, it must work from a new basis of (...) sensibility and with different questions, with novel sources and themes that permit us to learn more about what happens in the public and private spheres, about the exceptional and the common, about the real and the symbolic, about social practices and about the dominant ideology, as well as the links that connect those divergent fields. Such an approach presupposes a particular attitude toward historical evidence. (shrink)

This special supplementary volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy contains the proceedings of the Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy held at Oberlin, Ohio in 1986. The exceptionally high quality of the papers, and the format of speaker, reply, and speaker's reply, has resulted in a volume which furthers some issues which are currently the object of keen controversy in ancient philosophy. Contributors include Michael Frede, Terence Irwin, and Martha Nussbaum.