In Spinoza’s metaphysics, we encounter many puzzling doctrines that appear to entangle metaphysical notions with cognitive, logical, and epistemic ones. According to him, a substance is that which can be conceived through itself and a mode is that which is conceived through another. Thus, metaphysical notions, substance and mode, are defined through a notion that is either cognitive or logical, being conceived through. He defines an attribute as that which an intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance. Intellectual (...) perception, something cognitive, is used to define an attribute, something metaphysical. And he claims that if something exists there is a reason why it exists and if something doesn’t exist there is also a reason why it doesn’t. Thus, a reason, something cognitive or epistemic, is necessary for existence or nonexistence. What are we to make of the intimate connections that Spinoza sees between metaphysical, cognitive, logical, and epistemic notions? Between being and reason? In this book, I argue for what might be called a realist interpretation: although Spinoza is confident that the order of being mirrors the order of reason, he believes that they are two orders, not one. There is inherence over and above conceptual dependence; there is causation in addition to causal explanation; the world has a nature that we can grasp and that our way of grasping it does not interpose an impenetrable conceptual veil between it and us. (shrink)

In _Around the Day in Eighty Worlds_ Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by (...) weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise. (shrink)

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, (...) defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables. (shrink)

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is one of the most brilliant political plays ever written. Despite its ancient Roman setting, it remains a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition illuminates its relevance to Shakespeare'sown time and to later ages while also emphasizing the wide range of interpretations that are possible in performance.

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Prekäres Wissen handelt nicht von den großen Themen der Metaphysik und Epistemologie, sondern von Randzonen wie der Magie und der Numismatik, der Bibelinterpretation und der Orientalistik. Es geht nicht nur um Theorien, sondern auch um Furcht und Faszination, nicht um die großen Forschergestalten, sondern um vergessene und halbvergessene Gelehrte. Es ist ein Buch voller spannender Geschichten, eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und zugleich der ambitionierte Versuch, den Begriff des Wissens selbst im Zeichen des" material turn", des" iconic turn"und der (...) Kommunikations- und Informationsgeschichte neu zu denken. (shrink)

Kant will die beständige Möglichkeit des radikal Bösen mit dem zeitlich offenen Charakter des menschlichen Seins rechtfertigen. Jede zu machende Entscheidung setzt voraus, dass der die Selbstachtung ermöglichende gute Wille nicht automatisch die oberste Maxime meiner Handlung ist. So kann und muss der Mensch «bei lauter guten Handlungen dennoch böse» sein.

Cuando se leen los relatos que los grandes santos hacen de su experiencia de Dios, encontramos expresiones que rompen las reglas de la lógica lingüística, prueba de que hay experiencias que no son fáciles de describir y transmitir. San Agustín, en el contexto de una de las más célebres páginas de sus Confesiones, esa en la que exclama: “Tarde te amé, hermosura tan antigua y siempre nueva”, dice, por una parte, que Dios está “dentro” de él, para añadir a renglón (...) seguido que las cosas están dentro de Dios, pues si no estuvieran en él, no serían . En San Pablo encontramos expresiones similares: por una parte, se puede leer en sus cartas que “Cristo vive en mí” , y por otra, el autor de los Hechos de los Apóstoles pone en su boca que “en Dios vivimos, nos movemos y somos” . Este doble modo de concebir la relación de Dios con la realidad creada, con el cosmos y con el ser humano, resulta paradójico y es una provocación para el pensamiento.¿Dios está en la realidad, se hace presente en ella de algún modo, o es más bien la realidad la que está en Dios? Posiblemente no hay contradicción entre ambas imágenes, sino complementariedad. Tomás de Aquino, como veremos, afirma las dos cosas. Dios es de una naturaleza tal que, por una parte puede hacerse presente en la realidad mundana y humana y, por otra, llevar dentro de sí estas mismas realidades. ¿Hay alguna analogía, alguna imagen que pueda servir para describir una naturaleza así y ayudarnos a comprender mejor el ser divino? En definitiva, ¿qué significa “estar en” o “dentro de” las criaturas por parte de Dios y en o dentro de Dios por parte de las criaturas? ¿Se trata de simples imágenes o estas imágenes son modelos que tienen alguna correspondencia con la realidad?When you read the accounts that the great saints do of their experience of God, you find expressions that break the rules of linguistic logic, what proves that there are experiences not easy to describe and transmit. St Augustine in the context of one of the most known pages of his Confessions, where he exclaims: “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new”, says that God is inside him and adds immediately after that things are inside God, since if things were not in him they wouldn’t exist. We find similar expressions in St Paul: On the one hand, one can read in one of his letters: “Christ lives in me”, on the other hand, the author of the Acts of the Apostles puts in his mouth: “in God we live and move and have our being” . This double way of understanding God’s relation to created things, the cosmos and human beings, is paradoxical and becomes a provocation to reason.Is God inside reality, is he present in it someway, or is rather reality which is in God? Possibly there is not contradiction between the two images, but they complement each other. Thomas Aquinas, as we’ll see later, states the two. God is such a nature, that, on the one hand, he can be present in wordly and human reality, on the other hand, he can contain inside himself these realities. Is there any analogy, any image able to describe a nature like this that could help us to understand better his divine being? In short, what does it mean to be in or inside the creatures in relation to God and to be in or inside God in relation to creatures? Is it about simple images or these images are models with some relation to reality? (shrink)

In [6] Messmer and Wood proved quantifier elimination for separably closed fields of finite Ershov invariant e equipped with a (certain) Hasse derivation. We propose a variant of their theory, using a sequence of e commuting Hasse derivations. In contrast to [6] our Hasse derivations are iterative.

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)