The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a (...) fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role. Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life. (shrink)

In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own ...

Paul Seligman; VII—Some Aspects of Spinozism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1 June 1961, Pages 109–128, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universa...

Presents a mathematically rigorous, philosophically sound foundation for a science of information.

NINE Morality and Prospection -- TEN Prospection Gone Awry: Depression -- ELEVEN Creativity and Aging: What We Can Make With What We Have Left -- Afterword -- Author Index -- Subject Index.

Hybrid languages have both modal and first-order characteristics: a Kripke semantics, and explicit variable binding apparatus. This paper motivates the development of hybrid languages, sketches their history, and examines the expressive power of three hybrid binders. We show that all three binders give rise to languages strictly weaker than the corresponding first-order language, that full first-order expressivity can be gained by adding the universal modality, and that all three binders can force the existence of infinite models and have undecidable satisfiability (...) problems. (shrink)

We shed light on an old problem by showing that the logic LP cannot define a binary connective $\odot$ obeying detachment in the sense that every valuation satisfying $\varphi$ and $(\varphi\odot\psi)$ also satisfies $\psi$ , except trivially. We derive this as a corollary of a more general result concerning variable sharing.

This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. Character Strengths and Virtues classifies twenty-four specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture. This book demands the attention of anyone interested in psychology and what it can teach about the good life.

The present monograph on Plato's Sophist developed from series of lectures given over a number of years to honours and graduate phi losophy classes in the University of Waterloo. It is hoped that it will prove a useful guide to anyone trying to come to grips with, and gain a perspective of Plato's mature thought. At the same time my study is addressed to the specialist, and I have considered at the appropriate places a good deal of the scholarly literature (...) that has appeared during the last thirty years. In this connection I regret that some of the pub lications which came to my notice after my work was substantially completed (such as KamIah's and Sayre's) have not been referred to in my discussion. As few philosophy students nowadays are familiar with Greek I have (except in a few footnotes) translated as well as transliterated all Greek terms. Citations from Plato's text follow Cornford's admirable trans lation as closely as possible, though the reader will find some significant deviations. The most notable of these concerns the key word on which I have rendered throughout as "being," thus avoiding Cornford's "existence" and "reality" which tend to prejudge the issues which the dialogue raises. (shrink)

This volume presents work that evolved out of the Third Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications, held at Oiso, Japan, in November of 1991. The chapters presented in this volume continue the mathematical development of situation theory, including the introduction of a graphical notation; and the applications of situation theory discussed are wide-ranging, including topics in natural language semantics and philosophical logic, and exploring the use of information theory in the social sciences. The research presented in this volume reflects (...) a growing international and interdisciplinary activity of importance for many fields concerned with information. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the relationship between norms of belief revision that may be adopted by members of a community and the resulting dynamic properties of the distribution of beliefs across that community. We show that at a qualitative level many aspects of social belief change can be obtained from a very simple model, which we call ‘threshold influence’. In particular, we focus on the question of what makes the beliefs of a community stable under various dynamical situations. We (...) also consider refinements and alternatives to the ‘threshold’ model, the most significant of which is to consider changes to plausibility judgements rather than mere beliefs. We show first that some such change is mandated by difficult problems with belief-based dynamics related to the need to decide on an order in which different beliefs are considered. Secondly, we show that the resulting plausibility-based account results in a deterministic dynamical system that is non-deterministic at the level of beliefs. (shrink)

Turing's (1936) analysis of effective symbolic procedures is a model of conceptual clarity that plays an essential role in the philosophy of mathematics. Yet appeal is often made to the effectiveness of human procedures in other areas of philosophy. This paper addresses the question of whether Turing's analysis can be applied to a broader class of effective human procedures. We use Sieg's (1994) presentation of Turing's Thesis to argue against Cleland's (1995) objections to Turing machines and we evaluate her proposal (...) to understand the effectiveness of procedures in terms of their reliability and precision. A number of conditions for effectiveness are identified and these are used to provide a general argument against the possibility of a Leibnizian decision procedure. (shrink)

THE AUTHOR SHOWS THAT WITTGENSTEIN'S PHENOMENOLOGICAL\nSOUNDING TALK IN "PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS", II, XI,\nABOUT "EXPERIENCING MEANINGS" SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD AS AN\nALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT WITTGENSTEIN ELSEWHERE REFERS\nTO AS THE "FORM OF LIFE" OR TOTAL CONTEXT WITHIN WHICH\nLINGUISTIC MEANING IS ESTABLISHED AND MAINTAINED. THIS IS\nDONE BY DRAWING CERTAIN ANALOGIES WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF\nSEEING ASPECTS OR SEEING ASPECT SHIFTS FAMILIAR TO\nGESTALTIST PSYCHOLOGY. THESE OTHERWISE PUZZLING PASSAGES\nARE THUS SHOWN TO BE OF A PIECE WITH WITTGENSTEIN'S VIEWS\nAS EXPRESSED IN PART I OF THE "INVESTIGATIONS".

The importance of being ambiguous -- Interlude : ambiguity, order and the deity -- Notation and its limits -- Interlude : the Israelite red heifer and the edge of power in China -- Ritual and the rhythms of ambiguity -- Interlude : crossing the boundaries of empathy -- Shared experience -- Interlude : experience and multiplicity.

In this article, I develop an understanding of ritual and of sincerity as two ideal-typical modes of framing human action. I focus on the dangers of what I term the sincere model because it is so strongly counter-intuitive to the way we usually understand the world, the moral imperatives of action and the framing of our intersubjective universe. I will begin, however, with some brief remarks on ritual — not as a discrete realm of human endeavor, usually identified with ‘religious’ (...) ritual (though inclusive of religious ritual), but rather as a particular modality of understanding action that is essential to the constitution of both social and individual selves and without which a shared world would not be possible. (shrink)