The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated biochemical mechanisms. To “rehabilitate” slime mould from (...) the rank of a purely living electronics element to a “creature of thoughts” we are analyzing the cognitive potential of P. polycephalum. We base our theory of minimal cognition of the slime mould on a bottom-up approach, from the biological and biophysical nature of the slime mould and its regulatory systems using frameworks such as Lyon’s biogenic cognition, Muller, di Primio-Lengelerś modifiable pathways, Bateson's “patterns that connect” framework, Maturana's autopoietic network, or proto-consciousness and Morgan's Canon. (shrink)

An attempt to warrant specific readings and to discredit others through appeal to the authority of the “text itself” … must be recognized for what it is: a political strategy for reading in which the critic’s own construction of the “text itself” is mobilized in order to bully other interpretations off the field. This passage, from an article by a contemporary English literary theorist, is typical of a genre of assertions that may, at first glance, seem to have less to (...) do with critical theory than with pop psychology. For the writer, like other writers in this genre, may appear to be making a psychological observation to the effect that the disposition to claim that one’s interpretations of texts are “correct” and other interpretations are “incorrect” is the function of an arrogant belligerence . But such a psychological observation is closely related to a somewhat more dignified and elaborate sort of claim, namely, that the objectivist notion that there can be a standard of correctness in the interpretation of texts can be shown to have specific –and unsavory—political implications. And although contemporary polemicists who refer to connections between objectivist theory and right-wing tendencies generally omit to demonstrate the existence of such a relationship, it is possible to suppose that their omission, rather than reflecting a preference for invective over analysis, is tied to implicit references to analyses that have already been carried out. An ideal arena for such ideological analysis is the seventeenth century, the period during which early modern epistemology and the scientific movement laid the foundations for modern notions about objective knowledge, and during which philosophers were quite willing to discuss both their epistemological principles and their political convictions. Provided with such a wealth of raw materials, the contemporary scholar with an interest in ideological analysis need not attribute political opinions to theorists, but need only uncover the deeper ideological connections between views that were publicaly expressed. And if the relationship between objectivism and politics is one that can be revealed by darwing out the implications of the epistemological theory itself, then the results of an ideological analysis of early modern objectivism should, mutatis mutandis, be applicable to twentieth-century varieties. In the light of these considerations, it is quite apt that Michael Ryan, in attempting to merge deconstruction with ideological analysis in his Marxism and Deconstruction, uses as his paradigmatic case an analysis of Hobbes’ views on metaphor and on sovereignty. Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries , and he is currently at work on Dilemmas of Enlightenment, a study of tensions between epistemological and ethico-political commitments during the early-modern period. (shrink)

RESUMEN:Michael Tomasello considera que, aunque todos los animales son el resultado (no acabado) de la evolución biológica y aunque en muchos animales no humanos la utilización de herramientas es latente (uno de los principales signos de rasgos culturales), solo en los humanos se produce la evolución cultural acumulativa y el efecto trinquete, esto es, la acumulación progresiva (e innovadora) de mejoras a lo largo de la historia sobre los artefactos creados. Contrario a esto, se sugiere em este artículo que (...) algunos estudios recientes pueden utilizarse para, también en este aspecto, reafirmar el continuum animal-humano y extender la cultura acumulativa a otros animales. PALABRAS CLAVE: EVOLUCIÓN CULTURAL ACUMULATIVA, EFECTO TRINQUETE, IMITACIÓN, INNOVACIÓN.ABSTRACTMichael Tomasello believes that although all animals are the result (not finished) of biological evolution, and in many nonhuman animals using tools is latent (one of the main signs of culturaltraits), the cumulative cultural evolution and ratchet effect, i.e., progressive (and innovative) accumulation of improvements over history about the artifacts created, occur only in humans. Contrary to this, I believe that some recent studies can be used with the purpose of, also in this regard, reaffirming the animal-human continuum and extend the cumulative culture to other animals.KEYWORDS: CUMULATIVE CULTURAL EVOLUTION, RATCHET EFFECT, IMITATION, INNOVATION. (shrink)

La filosofía del deporte, al igual que la pedagogía, la historia y otros estudios humanísticos alrededor del fenómeno deportivo, ha permanecido tradicionalmente en un segundo plano en facultades e instituciones educativas, incluso en aquellas cuyo fin es, precisamente, comprender adecuadamente cómo y por qué jugamos del modo que lo hacemos y con qué finalidades (Kretchmar, 2005). En una reciente editorial de la revista Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Michael McNamee (2015) hace un repaso de la actualidad, exponiendo cómo a pesar (...) de que la disciplina no para de crecer y ganar protagonismo, sobre todo en el ámbito editorial, no acaba de hacerse el hueco pertinente en la academia. (shrink)

In Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty H. Nowotny, P. Scott, e M. Gibbons vindicate a “socially robust” scientific knowledge in accordance with the social needs of our time. Such a knowledge would not be just epistemically reliable; in addition, it would also fit the situations to which will be put to use, and take into account the consequences of its utilization. In the authors’ view, this new kind of science, which they call “Mode 2 (...) knowledge” in another book, would do justice to a society that is not restrained to receive or ask for scientific information, but also requires sharing in its production. Nowotny and her colleagues mention several epistemological changes which a “robust” knowledge would involve. In this paper I analyze some of those alleged changes. (shrink)

This volume studies a range of modernist works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and James Joyce to explore what Modernism looks like when viewed through the lens of disability.

If I say that Alice is everything Oscar hopes to be, I seem to be quantifying over properties. That suggestion faces an immediate difficulty, however: though Alice may be wise, she surely is not the property of being wise. This problem can be framed in terms of a substitution failure: if a predicate like ‘happy’ denoted a property, we would expect pairs like ‘Oscar is happy’ and ‘Oscar is the property of being happy’ to be equivalent, which (...) they clearly are not. I argue that a Fregean response that draws a distinction between objects and concepts faces serious difficulties, and that a syntactic solution to the substitution problem likewise fails. I propose to account for the substitution failure by instead distinguishing different ways that expressions can stand for properties: whereas ‘the property of being happy’ refers to a property, ‘happy’ expresses or ascribes that property. I go on to compare this view to proposals made by Wright and Liebesman, and end by drawing out a consequence my proposal has for a debate about the ontological commitments of predicatively quantified sentences. (shrink)

As is well known, it was only in 1926 that a comprehensive mathematical theory of braids was published—that of Emil Artin. That said, braids had been researched mathematically before Artin’s treatment: Alexandre Theophile Vandermonde, Carl Friedrich Gauß and Peter Guthrie Tait had all attempted to introduce notations for braids. Nevertheless, it was only Artin’s approach that proved to be successful. Though the historical reasons for the success of Artin’s approach are known, a question arises as to whether other approaches to (...) deal with braids existed, approaches that were developed after Artin’s article and were essentially different from his approach. The answer, as will be shown, is positive: Modesto Dedò developed in 1950 another notation for braids, though one, which was afterward forgotten or ignored. This raises a more general question: what was the role of Artin’s notation, or, respectively, Dedò’s, that enabled either the acceptance or the neglect of their theories? More philosophically, can notation be an epistemic technique, prompting new discoveries, or rather, can it also operate an as obstacle? The paper will analyze the method introduced by Dedò to notate braids, and also its history and implications. It aims to show that Dedò, in contrast to Artin, focused on factorizations of braids and the algebraic relations between the operations done on these factorizations. Dedò’s research was done against the background of Oscar Chisini’s research of algebraic curves on the one hand and of Artin’s successful notation of braids on the other hand. Taking this into account, the paper will in addition look into the epistemic role of notation, comparing Dedò’s work with Artin’s, as both presented different notations of braids and their deformations. (shrink)

Male violence against women is at shocking levels in South Africa. According to Faul, ‘A woman is killed by an intimate partner every eight hours, a probable underestimate because no perpetrator is identified in 20 percent of killings’, whilst ‘More than 30 percent of girls have been raped by the time they are 18’. Reeva Steenkamp’s killing by her partner, Oscar Pistorius, came ‘the day before she planned to wear black in a “Black Friday” protest against the country’s excruciatingly (...) high number of rapes’. The purpose of this article is to reread a key biblical text regarding male violence against women in order to highlight how Jesus would want us to respond to such violence. The text is John 7:53–8:11. The NRSV: Catholic Edition entitles the story ‘The woman caught in adultery’. However, this title is problematic as it can lead to misleading readings of the text, as I will show, and so I have given it a different title, namely ‘The woman threatened with stoning’. (shrink)

Oscar Kenshur’s “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism” should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for “ideological” criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the “more-historical-than-thou” offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the (...) nature of ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur’s argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile—most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a “corrective” to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of “sav[ing history] from its friends” but of returning it to the status of “background” or “context” that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument—epistemology and/or ideology—redefine “ideological criticism” in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save “history” from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur’s argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis. 1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102 : 292-303. Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy. (shrink)

The epistemologist John Pollock has implemented computationally an architecture for a rational agent which he calls OSCAR. OSCAR models both practical and theoretical (or epistemic) reasoning. I argue that Pollock's model of practical reasoning, which has seven components, is superior not only to the two-component belief-desire model stemming from Aristotle, but also to the three-component belief-desire-intention model developed especially by Michael Bratman. Despite its advantages, Pollock's model of practical reasoning is incomplete in at least three respects: it (...) is solipsistic, it is egoistic and it is unsocial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:7 Forum: Teaching about Ferguson 8 Feminist Studies 41, no. 1. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 211 Jennifer C. Nash Teaching about Ferguson: An Introduction This forum was organized around the idea of asking feminist scholars to reflect on the practice of teaching about racial violence as well as on the experiences of teaching in the midst of racial violence. What do feminist pedagogies centered on Ferguson and (...) its aftermath look like? How do we present the various forms of violence—including state action (in the case of murder) and state inaction (in the case of nonindictments)— that produce and uphold the conditions that mark the current situation? How do we bring our feelings about this moment into our classrooms, and how do we do this feeling-teaching in ways that attend to the fact that feminist scholars are endlessly called on to perform affective labor and also that racialized and gendered bodies’ affects are policed inside and outside of the academy? What happens if we refuse the composure that faculty bodies are supposed to perform and enact grief, rage, or sadness? What happens if we refuse performing anything but exhaustion, numbness, or a protective desire to shield our bodies from our students’ scrutiny or curiosity? It quickly became apparent that a forum focused on “feminist pedagogies of Ferguson” would be far more expansive than a conversation focused on how to teach about Ferguson; put simply, to speak about Ferguson is always to speak about more than Ferguson. “Ferguson” has become shorthand for a murdered young man, Michael Brown, for a grand jury’s nonindictment of the police officer who shot him, and for 212 Jennifer C. Nash the Department of Justice’s recommendation not to bring civil rights charges against the officer, Darren Wilson. “Ferguson” has also become shorthand for a number of lives that ended violently, often at the hands of the state: Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tarika Wilson, Tanisha Anderson, Renisha McBride, and Tamir Rice, to name a few. “Ferguson,” then, has become a keyword around which scholars organize conversations about legal murders, the variety of laws that regard property more than black life (so-called stand-your-ground laws, for example), racial profiling, stop and frisk, mass imprisonment, the death penalty, and the racial logics of systems of value that ensure that racially marked bodies are, in Lisa Marie Cacho’s words, “ineligible for personhood.”1 The scholars included in this forum capture the expansive ways that we, as scholars and educators, articulate the meanings of this moment and the ways that we situate Brown’s death in the conditions of the unfolding present. The scholars included in this forum also powerfully ask about the possibilities for activism in the wake of Ferguson(s) and the powerful coalitions that have formed in the wake of Ferguson(s). If “Black Lives Matter” (and #blacklivesmatter) and “I Can’t Breathe” have become refrains that respond to the violence of the present by making visible black pain, the scholars included here voice the possibilities these movements might open up. We can consider these possibilities alongside the painful truth that it takes spectacular violence to generate a widespread articulation of black bodies as bodies that matter. 1. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 6.... (shrink)

Daniel, Michael E Review of: Words from the wound: selected addresses, letters and homilies of archbishop mark coleridge, by Mark Coleridge, edited by Anthony Ekpo and David Pascoe, pp. 342, $24.95.

Gracias a Genette, que identificó la voz narrativa y la diferenció del modo, es posible estudiar aspectos vinculados a las peculiaridades de quien se expresa en la narración. El estudioso francés planteó la importancia de la observación y del análisis de los aspectos relacionados con el tiempo y con el sujeto de la enunciación que residen en el discurso narrativo, pues sus múltiples variaciones reflejan uno de los valores identificativos de los textos contemporáneos. El lector es guiado por una voz (...) que transmite una información que, asumida y referida por la figura de un personaje o por una entidad independiente de la otra, pretende captar su atención y obtener con ella el pacto narrativo. Para que se dé esta situación, entre otros factores, debe articularse en función de las exigencias del lector posible. Estas, según Genette son las que reflejan las relaciones entre las diferentes instancias narrativas... (shrink)

For Bakhtin the “gradual narrowing down” of the carnival’s regenerative power is directly linked to its separation from “folk culture” and its ensuing domestication as “part of the family’s private life.” Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s faith in the inherent indestructibility of “the carnival spirit” compels him to find it preserved, even if in an interiorized and psychological form, in the post-Renaissance literary tradition, and he specifically names Diderot, along with Molière, Voltaire, and Swift, as authors who kept alive the subversive possibilities of (...) a Saturnalian laughter . But, of course, as Bakhtin himself recognizes, much more has changed in both the nature and the effects of that laughter than merely its locus of action. The crucial difference, according to Bakhtin, is a new sense of terror felt at the heart of the post-Renaissance carnival grotesque:The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque and medieval and Renaissance grotesque…The world of Romantic grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying word, alien to man…Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual and secure. [Pp. 38-39]Directly linked to this burden of terror, of laughter as a response to dread, not exuberance, is a change in the literary function of madness:Other specific traits are linked with the disappearance of laughter’s regenerating power…. The theme of madness is inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at the world with different eyes, not dimmed by “normal,” that is by commonplace ideas and judgments. In folk grotesque, madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official “truth.” It is a “festive” madness. In Romantic grotesque, on the other hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation. [P. 39]Bakhtin’s typology of laughter, for all its richly textured local insights, is haunted, from its inception, by a wistfully nostalgic longing for a realm of pure and ahistorical spontaneity, a rite of universal participation whose essentially affirmative character is guaranteed by its very universality. The most characteristic feature of such a carnival is, in fact, its abolition of all distinctions between participant and viewer:Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it…. It has a universal spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. [P. 7]Yet as soon as the question of representation arises, whether in Rabelais or in his successors, the “footlights” which separate actor and spectator, reader and character, come into being, introducing the very divisions the work’s themes deny. Belatedness, the knowledge of coming after the festival has already been fragmented, is thus not limited to a post-Rabelaisian, bourgeois culture; it is itself a condition of every Saturnalian text, and what has changed is not the inclusiveness of the carnival per se but the literary consequences of acknowledging that belatedness. Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione, a volume of verse. He is currently at work on a book about the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. (shrink)

Irony, one of the most basic, pervasive, and variegated of rhetorical tropes, is as fundamental to musical thought as it is to poetry, prose, and spoken language. In this wide-ranging study of musical irony, Michael Cherlin draws upon the rich history of irony as developed by rhetoricians, philosophers, literary scholars, poets, and novelists. With occasional reflections on film music and other contemporary works, the principal focus of the book is classical music, both instrumental and vocal, ranging from Mozart to (...) Mahler. The result is a surprising array of approaches toward the making and interpretation of irony in music. Including nearly ninety musical examples, the book is clearly structured and engagingly written. This interdisciplinary volume will appeal to those interested in the relationship between music and literature as well as to scholars of musical composition, technique, and style. (shrink)

This is an entry into a collective journal of the twenty-first century years of plague. It introduces the notion of ‘lawfare’ by way of the contemporary case concerning Lula da Silva and Brazil’s fall from grace. The latter is presented as an instance of violence in the international context, the managerial attitude to global disasters and, indeed, a plague. It chronicles the social struggles around the case and on that basis builds a somewhat playful manifesto for a new relationship between (...) legal scholarship, the law school and the imaginary of permanent catastrophe and plague. (shrink)

"MIchael Morgan has served up an intellectual treat. These subtle and carefully reasoned essays explore the dilemmas of the post-modern Jew who would take history seriously without losing the commanding presence Israel heard at Sinai.... It is a pleasure to be nourished by a fresh mind exploring the tension between reason and revelation, history and faith." —Rabbi Samuel Karff "This is without doubt one of the most significant works in modern Jewish thought and a must for a thoughtful student (...) of contemporary Jewish philosophy." —Rabbie Sheldon Zimmerman "This may well mark the next stage in the long history of Jewish self-understanding." —Ethics "... rigorous history of modern Jewish thought... " —Choice Is Judaism a timeless, universal set of beliefs or, rather, is it historical and contingent in its relation to different times and places? Morgan clarifies the tensions and dilemmas that characterize modern thinking about the nature of Judaism and clears the way for Jews to appreciate their historical situation, yet locate enduring values and principles in a post-Holocaust world. (shrink)

Medicine at the Crossroads is a collection of essays based a column originally published in the Waco-Tribune Herald by renowned cardiologist Dr. Michael Attas of Baylor University. It touches on three perspectives - the physician, the patient, and the healthcare system - and addresses some of the most pressing questions in medicine today.

Die Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise stellt unsere Gesellschaft vor Herausforderungen, die wir so nicht kannten. WAs ist jetzt eigentlich wirklich wichtig - fur uns Menschen, individuell und als Teil eines Systems? Ist jetzt vor allem Sicherheit angesagt? Oder Gerechtigkeit? Menschliche Beziehungen? Und Verantwortung wer hat sie, wer nimmt sie an und kann sie mir jemand abnehmen? Bringt uns die Globalisierung zusammen oder fuhrt sie zur Ausbeutung jedes Einzelnen? Was fur eine Rolle spielt dabei die Religion? Dass die Antworten auf diese Fragen (...) drangen, zeigt die hitzige offentliche Diskussion uber die derzeitige Krise. MIchael Bordt SJ und seine Kollegen haben zu den alten Fragen der Menschheit ebenso ihren ganz eigenen Standpunkt wie zu der neuen Weltlage. IN einer Reihe von ebenso klugen wie mitreiSSenden Essays erfahren wir jetzt davon in einer reizvollen Mischung aus Philosophie, Spiritualitat und zeitgeschichtlicher Auseinandersetzung. (shrink)

After the opening address by Dr. J. W. Cook, chairman of the meeting, who welcomed the participants and outlined the programme of speakers, Professor Michael Polanyi of Manchester University, chairman of the Committee on Science and Freedom, spoke on the background and activities of the Committee and showed how the apartheid issue fitted into the series of 'campaigns' which the Committee has fought on behalf of academic freedom.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Robert C. Solomon IN DEFENSE OF SENTIMENTALITY "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. 66TA That's Wrong with Sentimentality?"1 That tide of Mark JefV V ferson's 1983 Mindessay already indicates a great deal notonly about the gist of his article but about a century-old prejudice that has been devastating to ethics and literature (...) alike. According to that prejudice, it goes without saying that there is something wrong with it, even if it is difficult to put one's finger on it. To be called "sentimental" is to be ridiculed, or dismissed. Sentimentality is a weakness, it suggests hypocrisy. Or, perhaps it is the fact that sentimental people are so... so embarrassing. (How awkward it is talking or sitting next to someone weeping or gushing, when one is dry-eyed and somber.) Or, perhaps it is the well-confirmed fact that sentimentalists have such poor taste, and sentimental literature is, above all, literature that is cheap, superficial, and manipulative—in other words, verbal kitsch. Such mawkish literature jerks tears from otherwise sensible readers, and sentimentalists are those who actually enjoy that humiliating experience. Perhaps that is why Oscar Wilde thought that sentimentalists were really cynics ("Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism").2 Or, perhaps what bothers us is what bothered Michael Tanner, that sentimental people indulge themselves in their feelings instead of doing what should be done.3 It is often said that the problem is that sentimentality and sentimental literature alike give us a false view of the world, distort our thinking and substitute a "saccharine" portrait of the world in place ofwhat we all know to be the horrible realities. Moreover, as Jefferson more than merely suggests, the "simple-minded sympathies " ofsentimentality might actually promote fascism and racism. Mary Midgley similarly suggests that sentimentality leads to brutality.4 But Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 304-323 Robert C. Solomon305 even where sentimentality is a harmless diversion—a Daphne du Maurier novel on a sad Saturday afternoon—it seems to be all but agreed that sentimentality is no virtue even ifit is not, like cruelty and hypocrisy, intrinsically vicious. Something is wrong with sentimentality; the only question is, what is it that is wrong? In this essay, I will argue that there is nothing wrong with sentimentality. Of course, like any quasi-ethical category, it admits of unwarranted excesses and hypocritical abuses, and is prone to various pathological distortions. But the prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and in fact is an extension ofthat all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy. Our disdain for sentimentality is the rationalist's discomfort with any display of emotion, warranted as well as unwarranted, appropriate as well as inappropriate. It is as ifthe very word, "sentimentality," has been loaded with the connotations of "too much"—too much feeling and too litde common sense and rationality, as if these were opposed instead of mutually supportive. It is as if sentimentality and its sentiments are never warranted and always inappropriate. The word has come to be used as the name of a deficiency or a weakness if not, as some critics have written, a malaise. But I take sentimentality to be nothing more nor less than the "appeal to tender feelings," and though one can manipulate and abuse such feelings (including one's own), and though they can on occasion be misdirected or excessive, there is nothing wrong with them as such and hence nothing (in that respect) wrong with literature that provokes us, that "moves" us, to abstract affection or weeping. Sentimentality implies no deficiency in one's rational faculties and does not imply any inappropriateness, unwillingness, or lack of readiness to act. Sentimentality does not involve any distortion of the world and it does not impede but rather prepares and motivates us to react in "the real world." It is not an escape from reality or responsibility, but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than an obstacle to it. Historically, I want to trace the fate of sentimentality to... (shrink)

In this paper I shall briefly analyze Husserl’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent reactions against the positivist stance on natural science and on the new cultural role that philosophy should play in relation to science. To a great extent, their philosophies can be considered as a departure from positivism, although for quite different reasons. I shall argue that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, took positivism as a starting point that he tried to overcome from within. This endeavor led him to defend some theses (...) of a pragmatist flavour as well as a peculiar type of radical agnosticism on ontological and epistemological issues. Husserl, however, considered that positivism was a dead-end for philosophy. Positivism has beheaded philosophy as a consequence of advancing a reductive view of science. Phenomenology is the attempt to understand the genetic and subjective processes that have ended up in an objective and scientific image of the world. (shrink)

Derrida à Montréal n'est pas le titre d'une pièce de théâtre, mais celui d'un essai qui suit, en trois actes, trois événements singuliers qui ont eu lieu à Montréal et auxquels Jacques Derrida a participé en 1971, en 1979 et en 1997. Au "Premier Acte", Michael Naas relit de près la première communication du philosophe, "Signature événement contexte", un texte qui prend très au sérieux - et les critique tout à la fois - la théorie des speech acts de (...) John L. Austin et les questions du contexte, de la présence, de l'écriture, de l'événement et de la signature qui lui sont liées. Au "Deuxième Acte", on retrouve Derrida traitant de ces mêmes questions, mais d'un point de vue politique où il s'intéresse aux "Déclarations d'Indépendance". Enfin, au "Troisième Acte", Derrida poursuit cette discussion ininterrompue qui se concentre, une fois de plus, sur ces mêmes aspects, mais à la lumière de la notion d'événement. C'est comme si Montréal avait chaque fois été la scène rêvée où Derrida avait pu explorer ces questions pour lui cruciales."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Soren Kierkegaard is widely held to be the founder of existentialism. His faith is ironic, playful and passionate, and he wrote like a novelist. This book brilliantly explains his life and thought.

We clarify the arguments in Neural organization: Structure, function, and dynamics, acknowledge important contributions cited by our critics, and respond to their criticisms by charting directions for further development of our integrated approach to theoretical and empirical studies of neural organization. We first discuss functional organization in general (behavior versus cognitive functioning, the need to study body and brain together, function in ontogeny and phylogeny) and then focus on schema theory (noting that schema theory is not just a top-down theory (...) and discussing the transition from action-oriented perception to cognition). We then turn to dynamical organization, with a focus first on neural modeling and dynamics (clarifying the multiple functions of neurons and brain regions, and looking further at various forms of dynamics) and second on learning, development, and self-organization (looking at monoaminergic systems, reinforcement, self-organization, postnatal development, and disease). We close with a brief philosophical discussion of postmodernism and reductionism. (shrink)

Barnett argues that the United Nations, by operating on the principle of the consent of the parties, can encourage the development of a more stable and cooperative security architecture.

The structure of the traditional paradigm -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the ancient western world -- Narrative fiction as philosophically interpreted in the modern and contemporary western world -- The structure of the new paradigm -- What makes an artifact philosophy? -- Literature as philosophy -- The special logic of fictive narrative philosophy -- Constructional devices -- How do we judge fictive narrative philosophy? -- When should we use direct discourse philosophy and when fictive narrative philosophy? -- How (...) might fictive narrative philosophy change the academy? -- First order metaethical principles: my own philosophical work on ethics and personhood theory as a first step for ethics & fictive narrative philosophy -- My own work in fictive narrative philosophy. (shrink)