This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or ‘hacktivism’ as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends – that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means of botnets – networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target website without the (...) consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions. Second, Gilbert Simondon’s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination. (shrink)

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of (...) children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things. (shrink)

During his celebrated 1922 debate with Bergson, Einstein famously proclaimed: “the time of the philosopher does not exist, there remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist’s.” Einstein’s dictum, I maintain, has been metabolized by the natural sciences, which typically presuppose, more or less explicitly, the existence of a single, univocal, temporal substratum, ultimately determined by physics. This reductionistic assumption pervades much biological and biomedical practice. The chronological age allotted to individuals is conceived as an objective quantity, allowing (...) one to straightforwardly assign and compare the biological age of organisms. This essay argues that the standard practice of assessing the age and aging of organisms against the backdrop of a physical conception of time is problematic. This becomes especially evident in light of recent discoveries of various levels of senescence underlying the development of individual organisms—a phenomenon known as ‘age mosaicism.’ The bottom line is that the study of age and aging requires a biological conception of time, as opposed to a physical one. Einstein clearly wasn’t wrong about his operationalization of time in relativity theory. Still time may be less monolithic than he surmised. (shrink)

This research examines the necessary condition of emotions in predicting consumer ethical decision-making, using a new multiplicative method for identifying and measuring the necessary condition in data sets—Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA). Based on a sample of over four hundred individuals, and combining three different consumption scenarios involving ethical issues, our findings demonstrate that emotions are a necessary condition for consumer ethical decisions and behaviours. In addition, the results show that higher levels of consumer ethical decisions can only be achieved if (...) happiness, gladness and satisfaction increase towards a minimum level of necessity. The findings provide empirical support for the essential role of emotions in predicting consumer ethical decision-making. Furthermore, this research identifies the emotional thresholds without which ethical choices cannot occur and then explains why individuals sometimes behave ethically but other times do not. In addition, this is a first contribution applying NCA to consumer ethics. (shrink)

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no (...) normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to relate the debate about the status of S4 and S5 as modal logics for metaphysical modality to the debate about the identity of propositions. The necessary truth of the characteristic axioms of S4 and S5 (when interpreted in terms of metaphysical modality) is derived from a view about the identity of propositions, the view that necessarily equivalent propositions are identical.

In the theoretical literature on moral responsibility, one sometimes comes across cases of manipulated agents. In cases of this type, the agent is a victim of wholesale manipulation, involving the implantation of various pro-attitudes (desires, values, etc.) along with the deletion of competing pro-attitudes. As a result of this manipulation, the agent ends up performing some action unlike any that she would have performed were it not for the manipulation. These sorts of cases are sometimes thought to motivate historical views (...) of responsibility, on which the agent’s past is relevant to whether she is responsible for a specific action. In a recent paper, Daniel Sharp and David Wasserman bring these theoretical discussions on moral responsibility to bear on practical issues regarding neurological modifications of individuals. After proposing and arguing for a historical view, Sharp and Wasserman offer some insight into how such a view may help us in determining the responsibility of subjects who have undergone Deep Brain Stimulation. This paper aims to join this discussion, by arguing that the correct historical view to be applied will also appeal to the agent’s control over her mental life and the fact that this was bypassed. I conclude with some brief comments on the practical implications of such a historical view. (shrink)

Integrity is often conceived as a moral virtue that pertains to the coherence between one’s moral convictions and actions, as well as consistency in convictions over time. By contrast, I argue that integrity is primarily an epistemic virtue. To act with integrity, an individual or organisation must engage in responsible inquiry; that is, the collection, processing, sharing, and storage of information in ways that promote truth. Organisational structures such as division of labour and hierarchy present challenges to responsible inquiry, thereby (...) making epistemic integrity in organisations inherently vulnerable and increasing the risk of unintentional unethical behaviour. This epistemic perspective on organisational integrity emphasises the importance of developing virtuous epistemic infrastructure and an ethical epistemic culture. By aligning their beliefs with facts, organisations can also improve moral behaviour and reduce the risk of culpable ignorance. (shrink)

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization’s ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between (...) 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations ‘sow doubt’ when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations ‘exploit trust’ when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of ‘sowing doubt’, we find that organizations ‘exploit trust’ in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of ‘exploiting trust’ calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of ‘sowing doubt’. (shrink)

In their attempt to connect the workings of the human mind with their neural realizers, cognitive neuroscientists often bracket out individual differences to build a single, abstract model that purportedly represents (almost) every human being’s brain. In this paper I first examine the rationale behind this model, which I call ‘Platonic Brain Model’. Then I argue that it is to be surpassed in favor of multiple models allowing for patterned inter-individual differences. I introduce the debate on legitimate (and illegitimate) ways (...) of mapping neural structures and cognitive functions, endorsing a view according to which function-structure mapping is context-sensitive. Building on the discussion of the ongoing debate on the function(s) of the so-called Fusiform “Face” Area, I show the necessity of indexing function-structure mappings to some populations of subjects, clustered on the basis of factors such as their expertise in a given domain. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself realized this and turned the point-coincidence argument against Einstein in his second (...) and more famous 1918 paper. While Einstein had taken nothing from Kretschmann but the expression “point-coincidences”, the logical empiricists, however, instinctively dragged along with it the entire apparatus of Kretschmann’s conventionalism. Disappointingly, in their interpretation of general relativity, the logical empiricists unwittingly replicated some epistemological remarks Kretschmann had written before General Relativity even existed. (shrink)

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach into a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, this paper shows that not only did Einstein and Logical Empiricists come to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but also that in their lifelong interchange, they never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his ”measuring rod objection” against (...) Weyl. On the contrary, Logical Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein–Weyl debate, tried to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz–Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmholtzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, the philosophical significance of which, however, still needs to be fully explored. (shrink)

Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...) insights of thoughtful reductionists with sophisticated antireductionism. When this is done, the question of explanatory reductionism becomes less substantial than often supposed. (shrink)

According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged mindreading (...) abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts. (shrink)

This paper argues that the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics suggests a form of holism for which the whole (total ensemble of paths) has properties that are not strongly reducible to the properties of the parts (the single trajectories). Feynman’s sum over histories calculates the probability amplitude of a particle moving within a boundary by summing over all the possible trajectories that the particle can undertake. These trajectories and their individual probability amplitudes are thus necessary in calculating the total (...) amplitude. However, not all possible trajectories are differentiable, thus suggesting that they are not physical possibilities, but only mathematical entities. It follows that if the possible differentiable trajectories are taken to be part of the physical system, they are not sufficient to calculate the total probability amplitude. The conclusion is that the total ensemble is weakly non-supervenient upon the physically possible trajectories. (shrink)

Most of the arguments usually appealed to in order to support the view that some abstraction principles are analytic depend on ascribing to them some sort of existential parsimony or ontological neutrality, whereas the opposite arguments, aiming to deny this view, contend this ascription. As a result, other virtues that these principles might have are often overlooked. Among them, there is an epistemic virtue which I take these principles to have, when regarded in the appropriate settings, and which I suggest (...) to call ‘epistemic economy’. My purpose is to isolate and clarify this notion by appealing to some examples concerning the definition of natural and real numbers. (shrink)

Why, for such a long time, has there been no Kantian point of view among the most influential theories about thought experiments? The primary historical reason – the main trends in the philosophy of science have always rejected the existence of a priori knowledge – fits a theoretical reason. Kant oscillated between two very different views about the a priori: on the one hand, he attributed to it a particular content, whereas on the other hand he insisted on its purely (...) formal character. The first interpretation of the a priori was one-sidedly developed by Ørsted and led to his untenable notion of thought experiment. The other interpretation, however, can be further developed into new Kantian theories of thought experiments in the natural sciences and in philosophy. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kristin Mickelson argues that Alfred Mele’s Zygote Argument, a popular argument for the claim that the truth of determinism would preclude free action or moral responsibility, is not valid. This sort of objection is meant to generalize to various manipulation arguments. According to Mickelson, the only way to make such arguments valid is to supplement them with an argument that is an inference to the best explanation. In this paper, I argue that there are two other (...) ways in which the proponent of such manipulation arguments can modify their argument, neither of which requires an inference to the best explanation. I then briefly consider and respond to a worry with one of these proposed solutions. (shrink)

In his 1916 review paper on general relativity, Einstein made the often-quoted oracular remark that all physical measurements amount to a determination of coincidences, like the coincidence of a pointer with a mark on a scale. This argument, which was meant to express the requirement of general covariance, immediately gained great resonance. Philosophers such as Schlick found that it expressed the novelty of general relativity, but the mathematician Kretschmann deemed it as trivial and valid in all spacetime theories. With the (...) relevant exception of the physicists of Leiden (Ehrenfest, Lorentz, de Sitter, and Nordström), who were in epistolary contact with Einstein, the motivations behind the point-coincidence remark were not fully understood. Only at the turn of the 1960s did Bergmann (Einstein’s former assistant in Princeton) start to use the term ‘coincidence’ in a way that was much closer to Einstein’s intentions. In the 1980s, Stachel, projecting Bergmann’s analysis onto his historical work on Einstein’s correspondence, was able to show that what he started to call ‘the point-coincidence argument’ was nothing but Einstein’s answer to the infamous ‘hole argument’. The latter has enjoyed enormous popularity in the following decades, reshaping the philosophical debate on spacetime theories. The point-coincidence argument did not receive comparable attention. By reconstructing the history of the argument and its reception, this paper argues that this disparity of treatment is not justified. This paper will also show that the notion that only coincidences are observable in physics marks every critical step of Einstein’s struggle with the meaning of coordinates in physics. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

A standard approach to examining Deleuze's concept of difference in Difference and Repetition is to follow his critique of representation through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze finds to be the definitive task of philosophy after Nietzsche. While engaging this largely critical project, however, there is a tendency to overlook the dimensions of Platonism that Deleuze rehabilitates in a differential and immanent register. This paper aims to recover the essential dimensions of Platonism at the very heart of Deleuze's philosophy of (...) difference. This recovery is accomplished by distinguishing Nietzsche's overturning of Platonism through his evaluation of the reactive politics of the Idea from Deleuze's own reversal of Platonism through his evaluation of the active politics of simulacra. (shrink)

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance (...) animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence. (shrink)

In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie, Ernst Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the “physics of principles” that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the “physics of models.” In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a role similar to the energy principle in previous physics. In this article, I argue that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Cassirer pointed out that before and after (...) Kant, the history of physics presents significant instances in which the search for formal conditions that the laws of nature must satisfy preceded and made possible the direct search for such laws. In his earlier years, Cassirer seems to have regarded principles like the energy principle, the relativity principle, and the principle of least action as a constitutive but provisional form of a priori, imposing specific limitations on the form of the allowable laws of nature. Only in his later years, by attributing an autonomous status to these statements of principle, did Cassirer attribute a definitive but merely regulative meaning to the a priori. This does not impose specific requirements on natural laws but only a motivation to search for them. (shrink)

The paper argues that Frege’s primary foundational purpose concerning arithmetic was neither that of making natural numbers logical objects, nor that of making arithmetic a part of logic, but rather that of assigning to it an appropriate place in the architectonics of mathematics and knowledge, by immersing it in a theory of numbers of concepts and making truths about natural numbers, and/or knowledge of them transparent to reason without the medium of senses and intuition.

Embodiment and embeddedness define an attractive framework to the study of cognition. I discuss whether theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others to predict and explain their behaviour, fits these two principles. In agreement with available evidence, embodied cognitive processes may underlie the earliest manifestations of social cognitive abilities such as infants’ selective behaviour in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. Instead, late theory-of-mind abilities, such as the capacity to pass the (elicited-response) false belief test at age (...) four, depend on children’s ability to explain people’s reasons to act in conversation with adults. Accordingly, rather than embodied, late theory-of-mind abilities are embedded in an external linguistic practice. (shrink)

Commercial video games are popular entertainment media and part of students’ media reality. While commercial video games’ main purpose is not learning, they nonetheless could and should serve as objects of reflection in formal educational settings. Teachers could guide student learning and reflection as well as motivate students with commercial video games, but more evidence from formal educational settings is required. We conducted two mixed methods case studies to investigate students’ reflection processes using commercial video games in regular formal high (...) school teaching. In a double lesson, 29 students of a 10th-grade biology course and 17 students of a 12th-grade advanced course on history played and discussed a commercial video game related to the current curricular topic. We examined the reflection processes of students in terms of their reactions to the teachers’ game-related statements and questions. Regarding teachers’ statements, students discussed several topics related to game enjoyment and the games’ representation of topic-related content. Regarding teachers’ questions, students discussed multiple goals in each game, how the games represented topic-related content, and how the games could be appropriate for learning. In Study 2, students additionally discussed emotions, stereotypes, violence, and the narrative related to the digital history game. We found that the discussions provided students opportunities to reflect on their game experiences and the current curricular topic as well as to practice media criticism. We further provide quantitative results on students’ perceived topic knowledge, on several facets of their learning motivation, and on their acceptance of video games. Overall, our findings illustrate the educational value of using commercial video games as objects of reflection. (shrink)

Testing is an effective learning method, and it is the basis of mobile quiz apps. Quiz apps have the potential to facilitate remote and self-regulated learning. In this context, automatized feedback plays a crucial role. In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of two feedback types of quiz apps on performance, namely, the standard corrective feedback of quiz apps and a feedback that incorporates additional information related to the correct response option. We realized a controlled lab setting (n= 68, (...) Study 1) and an unsupervised mobile setting (n= 150, Study 2). In the learning phase, participants used the quiz app and received feedback. They also completed a subsequent test as well as a follow-up test 1 week later by using the same quiz app. Irrespective of feedback type and setting, cognitive outcomes (quiz scores) and metacognitive outcomes (response certainty) increased similarly in the short term and long term. Feedback effects were not moderated by participants' overall response certainty during learning, their prior knowledge, and the difficulty of quiz items. Moreover, we found that participants perceived the quiz app to be similarly attractive, interesting, and enjoyable in both feedback conditions and that they spent slightly more time to process quiz items in the lab setting. We discuss these results in detail, including the role of moderating and mediating factors and prospects for further research and practice. Overall, our results underline that quiz apps are useful and effective tools that can support the acquisition and retention of semantic knowledge in different learning settings. (shrink)

In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where length contraction is only an (...) apparent effect due to an arbitrary choice of clock synchronization. Ehrenfest and Einstein considered this line of reasoning dangerously misleading and took a public stance in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, countering that relativistic length contraction is both apparent and real. It is apparent since it disappears for the comoving observer, but it is also real since it can be experimentally verified. By drawing on his lesser-known private correspondence with Varićak, this paper shows how Einstein used the Ehrenfest paradox as a tool for an ‘Einsteinian pedagogy’. Einstein’s argumentative stance is contrasted with Bell’s use of the Dewan-Beran thread-between-spaceships paradox to advocate for a ‘Lorentzian pedagogy’. The paper concludes that the disagreement between the two ways of ‘teaching special relativity’ stems from divergent interpretations of philosophical categories such as ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’. (shrink)

In 1912, Ernst Cassirer contributed to the special issue of the Kant-Studien that honored Hermann Cohen's retirement—his mentor and teacher, and the recognized founding father of the so-called 'Marburg school' of Neo-Kantianism. In the context of an otherwise rather conventional presentation of Cohen's interpretation of Kant, Cassirer made a remark that is initially surprising. It is “anything but accurate,” he wrote, to regard Cohen's philosophy as focused “exclusively on the mathematical theory of nature,” as is usually done. A reconstruction of (...) the genesis of Cohen's thought, Cassirer continued, would already refute this interpretation. Actually, “[t]he... (shrink)

The importance of intention reading for communication has already been emphasized many<br>years ago by Paul Grice. More recently, the rich debate on “theory of mind” has convinced many<br>that intention reading may in fact play a key role also in current, cognitively oriented theories of<br>pragmatics: Relevance Th eory is a case in point. On a close analysis, however, it is far from clear<br>that RT may really accommodate the idea that intention reading drives comprehension. Here<br>I examine RT’s diffi culties with that idea, (...) and propose a framework where intention reading is<br>actually assigned a signifi cant role. Th is framework is compatible with RT’s account of a unifi ed,<br>automatic mechanism of interpretation in lexical pragmatics, to the extent that the account<br>shares many features of associative and constraint-based explanations of other linguistic phenomena.<br>In fact, my suggestion is that our sensitivity to others’ intentions depends crucially on the<br>availability of specifi c patterns of intentional behaviour grounded in social regularities. In other<br>words, intention reading would be just a case, though a very special one, of pattern recognition. (shrink)

Thought experiments de facto play many different roles in biology: economical, ethical, technical and so forth. This paper, however, is interested in whether there are any distinctive features of biological TEs as such. The question may be settled in the affirmative because TEs in biology have a function that is intimately connected with the epistemological and methodological status of biology. Peculiar to TEs in biology is the fact that the reflexive, typically human concept of finality may be profitably employed to (...) discover mechanical-experimental causal relations in all living beings—with the obvious caveat that we do not hypostatise and interpret this concept as an ontological quality, since this would land one in an implicitly animistic, pre-Galilean view of nature. From a methodical point of view, the concept of finality is an essential assumption as well as a powerful heuristic tool in the practice of biology, that is, in the investigation of living beings in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way. (shrink)

O presente artigo propõe uma interpretação deflacionista para a doutrina da essência absolutamente considerada , apresentada por Tomás de Aquino no opúsculo "De ente et essentia". O norte do trabalho é a análise das expressões reduplicativas que são constantemente utilizadas pelo Doutor Angélico para designar as EAC's. Portanto, pretendo mostrar que a EAC é a consideração dos predicados essenciais, que se predicam das expressões reduplicadas, diferentemente da noção acidental de existência. Por isso, a EAC não existe nem no intelecto nem (...) na realidade, o que, dito em outras palavras, significa apenas que "existir no intelecto" e "existir na realidade" são predicados acidentais em relação às essências apreendidas abstrativamente pela mente. This paper proposes a deflationist interpretation of the doctrine of the Nature as such, which Thomas Aquinas exposes in his work "De ente et essentia". The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of reduplicative expressions used by Aquinas to refer nature as such. Hence, I will show that the nature as such is the consideration of the essential properties predicated by the reduplicative expressions, diverse from the accidental notion of 'existence'. Consequently, nature as such does not exist in the intellect and do not exist in reality, for in other words 'existing in the intellect' and 'existing in the reality' are accidental predicates when attributed to essences grasped by the mind. (shrink)

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her (...) legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right. (shrink)

The ‘species problem’ can be characterized, to a first approximation, as the task of providing a viable species concept —that is, a functional analysis that picks out the ‘right’ kind of biological entities. After decades of debate and centuries of taxonomic practice, no overarching consensus has been reached. The individuation and definition of the units of evolution and classification, species included, remains controversial. If anything, there now seems to be more disagreement than ever before.

En el presente artículo damos cuenta pormenorizada de los ejemplos per figuram obtenidos a través de un novedoso método de trabajo plasmado en decotgrel. De esta forma hemos podido sistematizar todos los ‘usos especiales’ documentados en el así llamado Priscianus minor. De esta manera hemos podido encontrar consideraciones que van más allá de lo meramente normativo y que tienen un gran interés tanto para el conocimiento de la lengua en cuestión como para el análisis de la evolución de los conceptos (...) gramaticales y de las teorías lingüísticas desde la Antigüedad hasta la Modernidad. (shrink)

In his 1920 monograph Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori the young Reichenbach distinguished between two meanings of the a priori: ‚apodictically valid, true for all time‘ and ‚constituting the concept of object‘. At the end of the 1990s Michael Friedman drew again the attention of philosophers of science to this forgotten distinction. In the spirit of Reichenbach’s early Kantianism Friedman attempted to construct a relativized or temporally variable a priori, which is nevertheless constitutive of the object of knowledge. Friedman rejects an (...) alternative historicized version of the a priori elaborated by the Marburg school and in particular by Cassirer. According to Friedman, Cassirer defended a regulative, but absolute version of the a priori, the existence of a yet-to-be-found set of final principles that are conditions of all scientific experience. This paper suggests that using the constitutive/regulative distinction as a basis for comparison is misleading. In order to understand the Marburg school’s conception of the a priori one should get back to Hermann Cohen’s interpretation of Kant and in particular to his own distinction between two meanings of the a priori. A more suitable comparison is that between Cohen’s opposition metaphysical-vs.-transcendental a priori and Reichenbach’s distinction apodictic-vs.-constitutive a priori. If the comparison is conducted along these lines—as already suggested in the mid-1920 s by the Dutch neo-Kantian Alfred C. Elsbach—it turns out that Cohen and the Marburg school and not Reichenbach provided a good example of a relativized a priori. (shrink)