A modified version of the SEIR model with the effects of vaccination and inter-state movement is proposed to simulate the spread of COVID-19 in Malaysia. A mathematical analysis of the proposed model was performed to derive the basic reproduction number. To enhance the model’s forecasting capabilities, the model parameters were estimated using the Nelder–Mead simplex method by fitting the model outputs to the observed data. Our results showed a good fit between the model outputs and available data, where the model (...) was then able to perform short-term predictions. In line with the rapid vaccination program, our model predicted that the COVID-19 cases in the country would decrease by the end of August. Furthermore, our findings indicated that relaxing travel restrictions from a highly vaccinated region to a low vaccinated region would result in an epidemic outbreak. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for the relationship between internal employer brand image and talent retention. An extensive and semi-systematic literature review identified a number of antecedents and consequences that have been empirically tested in various cutting-edge research studies that were conducted around the world. The existing literature is reviewed using a topical approach, and 66 research studies, most recent from various repositories, were carefully chosen and reviewed based on the criteria. Such studies (...) have been discerned and synthesized in order to establish a complete and accurate understanding of the phenomenon. Finally, a comprehensive and relatively rich conceptual framework has been proposed for future empirical explanations in various social settings via prospective research. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the impact of stakeholders’ views on the practices of green innovation (GI), consequent effect on environmental and organizational performance (OP), and moderating influence of innovation orientation. A quantitative method was employed for the sample size of 515 responses. To accumulate the data from the respondents, convenient random sampling was used. Data were collected from manufacturing and services firms through a field survey by using a closed-ended questionnaire based in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The analysis (...) was done using the structural equation model of the partial least square analysis method. Our findings proved a positive and significant link between stakeholders’ views on GI practices. A significant association has been found between GI practices and environmental and OP. The moderating effect was found to be negative but statistically significant. This research offers numerous contributions and provides decision-making insinuations. (shrink)

Essays on linguistics in Malaysia; festschrift in honor of Asmah Haji Omar, a doctor in linguistics at Universiti Malaya.

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

Within Muslim communities, the ‘ulama are considered the most crucial corporate social agency that drives the ideological and spiritual energy to the members of the society who find religious teachings necessary for their individual and social, if not always political, lives. However, when the ‘ulama of Bangladesh gathered under the umbrella platform of Hefazat-e-Islam in 2010, agitated by the numerous upheavals of the government’s policies, scholars and members of the civil society often dubbed them as regressive, reactionary, and insensitive to (...) modern changes. While anthropologists have challenged this dichotomy, this article aims to understand the HI ‘ulama’s views on modern changes and how the ‘ulama safeguard the traditional integrity in legal, educational, and gender aspects within the domain of the Bangladeshi state mechanism. Based on anthropological notions of tradition and piety, this article argues that the ‘ulama’s position on education, woman, and legal questions is neither monolithic nor static; rather there is always discussion, debate, and dynamism within the ‘ulama itself. (shrink)

ExcerptThe title of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play enacts a complex collision between politics and aesthetics.1 The titular colon divides two oppositions from each other, thus producing a couple of couples. If the “either/or” of Hamlet or Hecuba mandates an absolute decision between opposed terms, a frame familiar to us from this theorist of the sovereign decision and the friend/enemy distinction, the logic of the “both/and” within The Intrusion of the Time into (...) the Play insists upon the messy fact of lived historical interpenetration between the seemingly disjunctive spheres of politics and…. (shrink)

One result of successful argumentation – able arguers presenting cogent arguments to competent audiences – is a transfer of credibility from premises to conclusions. From a purely logical perspective, neither dubious premises nor fallacious inference should lower the credibility of the target conclusion. Nevertheless, some arguments do backfire this way. Dialectical and rhetorical considerations come into play. Three inter-related conclusions emerge from a catalogue of hapless arguers and backfiring arguments. First, there are advantages to paying attention to arguers and their (...) contexts, rather than focusing narrowly on their arguments, in order to understand what can go wrong in argumentation. Traditional fallacy identification, with its exclusive attention to faulty inferences, is inadequate to explain the full range of argumentative failures. Second, the notion of an Ideal Arguer can be defined by contrast with her less than ideal peers to serve as a useful tool in argument evaluation. And third, not all of the ways that arguers raise doubts about their conclusions are pathological. On the contrary, some ways that doubts are raised concerning our intended conclusions are an integral part of ideal argumentative practice. (shrink)

Meaning, according to a significant number of philosophers, is an intrinsically normative notion.1 For this reason, it is suggested, meaning is not conducive to a naturalistic explanation. In this paper, I shall not address whether this is indeed so. Nor shall I present arguments in support of the normativity thesis (see Glock 2005; Kripke 1982). Instead, I shall examine and respond to two forceful objections recently (and independently) raised against it by Boghossian (2005), Hattiangadi (2006) and Miller (2006). Although I (...) shall argue that the objections are unsuccessful, they are worth attending to, not only because the normativity thesis is so widely accepted and is thought to have such ramifications but, most importantly, because doing so offers the opportunity to help clarify how it is to be understood. (shrink)

The concept of the singular thing and its ethical-political footprints, in Spinoza’s philosophy, guide the following text, which proposes to think together education and civility. With the Dutch philosopher, we learn that union and conflict are not contradictory terms, neither ethically nor politically; framing, therefore, an educational field of action poses the question of democracy as the foundation of a daily fight against fear and servitude. Thus, dealing with destruction - which is not in singular beings but arises in encounters (...) - and Spinoza’s idea of an exemplar of human nature open up space for us to characterize the political intensity of virtue as an effort to act freely and which passes through education. The text therefore points out times of education from the diversity of temporalities that act in the social and political body. (shrink)

It is extraordinary, when one thinks about it, how little attention has been paid by theorists of the nature and justification of punishment to the idea that punishment is essentially a matter of self-defense. H. L. A. Hart, for example, in his famous “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” is clearly committed to the view that, at bottom, there are just three directions in which a plausible theory of punishment can go: we can try to justify punishment on purely consequentialist (...) grounds, which for Hart, I think, would be to try to construct a purely utilitarian justification of punishment; we can try to justify punishment on purely retributive grounds; or we can try to justify punishment on grounds that are some sort of shrewd combination of consequentialist and retributive considerations. Entirely absent from Hart's discussion is any consideration of the possibility that punishment might be neither a matter of maximizing the good, nor of exacting retribution for a wrongful act, nor of some imaginative combination of these things, but, rather, of something altogether different from either of them: namely, the exercise of a fundamental right of self-protection. Similarly, but much more recently, R. A. Duff, despite the fact that he himself introduces and defends an extremely interesting fourth possibility, begins his discussion by writing as though, apart from his contribution, there are available to us essentially just the options previously sketched by Hart. Again, there is no mention here, any more than in Hart's or any number of other recent discussions, of the possibility that we might be able to justify the institution of punishment on grounds that are indeed forward-looking, to use Hart's famous term, but that are not at all consequentialist in any ordinary sense of the word. (shrink)

According to inferential role semantics, for any given expression to possess a particular meaning one must be disposed to make or, alternatively, acknowledge as correct certain inferential transitions involving it. As Williamson points out, pejoratives such as ‘Boche’ seem to provide a counter-example to IRS. Many speakers are neither disposed to use such expressions nor consider it proper to do so. But it does not follow, as IRS appears to entail, that such speakers do not understand pejoratives or that they (...) lack meaning. In this paper, I examine recent responses to this problem by Boghossian and Brandom and argue that their proposed construal of the kind of inferential rules governing a pejorative such as ‘Boche’ is to be ruled out on the grounds that it is non-conservative. I defend the appeal to conservatism in this instance against criticism and, in doing so, propose an alternative approach to pejoratives on behalf of IRS that resolves the problem Williamson poses. (shrink)

What is the true worth of Wittgenstein's contribution to philosophy? Answers to this question are strongly divided. However, most assessments rest on certain popular misreadings of his purpose. This book challenges both "theoretical" and "therapeutic" interpretations. In their place, it seeks to establish that, from beginning to end, Wittgenstein regarded clarification as the true end of philosophy. It argues that, properly understood, his approach exemplifies rather than betrays critical philosophy and provides a viable alternative to other contemporary offerings.

The research addresses the effect of sense of control on perceived stress by controlling for the intervening effects of Religiosity and Materialism. A total of 609 emerging adults living in Dhaka city participated in the survey; surveyors used a 48-item structural closed-ended questionnaire to collect the responses. The elicited responses were quantified, and structural equation models were formulated to identify any associations among the variables of interest. The findings suggest that sense of control is a strong determinant of perceived stress; (...) neither religiosity nor materialism mediate the association. The study advances the transactional model of stress and coping. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Intensifying Phronesis:Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical CultureDaniel L. SmithAll too well versed in the commonness of what is multiple and entangled, we are no longer capable of experiencing the strangeness that carries with it all that is simple.—Martin Heidegger, Aristotle's Metaphysics θ 1-3IntroductionIn Norms of Rhetorical Culture Thomas Farrell returns to the thought of Aristotle to develop a contemporary conception of rhetoric as a mode of practical philosophy, one that (...) foregrounds the importance of phronesis. Returning to Aristotle's work to forge contemporary conceptions of rhetoric as practical philosophy is nothing new. What is novel about Farrell's approach, however, are his thoughts on Aristotle's conception of "phainomena," or appearances. "Appearances," Farrell states, "come to us as configurations, as ensembles of objects, habitats, paths, tools, tasks, icons, and more or less recognizable characters that engage and reassure us with their... familiarity" (1993, 27). Phainomena and their stability, therefore, constitute the milieux of human life. But coupled with the stability of phainomena that lends continuity and predictability to our lives is their dynamic element of mutability, contingency, and unpredictability. Therefore phainomena can also be "ambiguous or even equivocal and incomplete," according to Farrell (27). This stable-mutable aspect of phainomena, and thus human life itself, demands that we have ways of inhabiting and responding to the worlds these phainomena constitute.Farrell cites a comment by Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne as an "apt characterization" of Aristotle's thought: Cezanne, writes Merleau-Ponty, "did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear..." (quoted in Farrell, 27). For Farrell, Merleau-Ponty's observation concisely expresses a fundamental aspect of Aristotle's [End Page 77] thought, namely, a focus on the relation between the being of things and their dynamic modes of appearing, which are distinct but inextricably connected. Aristotle's conception of phainomena, Farrell's work suggests, offers possibilities for thinking about rhetoric as practical philosophy, a rhetoric that would be "an art of real life" (274), one that, because of the stability-contingency of real life, features the concept of phronesis.It is interesting to note that the issue of being-appearing that Farrell attributes to Aristotle sounds like a problematic of twentieth-century European phenomenology. Given Merleau-Ponty's status as one of the preeminent phenomenologists of the twentieth century, it is surprising that Farrell makes no mention of Merleau-Ponty's—or phenomenology's—interest in the dynamics of phainomena; nor does he make any explicit connections between Aristotle, rhetoric, and phenomenology. In fact, Farrell's thoughts on the connections between rhetoric and the being-appearing of phainomena are virtually eclipsed in his book when he turns to Jürgen Habermas. Farrell claims "that Habermas's project on discourse ethics, together with his practical placement of the public sphere, offers a basis for synthesizing the normative component of practical wisdom and a rhetoric goaded by emancipatory reason" (188). Farrell's interest in theorizing the enactment of "emancipatory reason" in the public sphere, through norm-governed rhetorical practices (of argumentation, deliberation, and so forth), takes precedence over theorizing the rhetoric-phainomena connection (or at the very least, does not facilitate a phenomenological consideration of rhetorical cultures and norms). This is not a criticism of Farrell, but rather the citing of an absence that opens a possibility. More specifically, because Farrell does not see, or perhaps is not interested in, the connection between his understanding of Aristotle and the problematic of phenomenology, he is not prompted to explore the possibilities that lie in bringing rhetorical studies into an encounter with phenomenology. Furthermore, given the connection Farrell makes between Aristotle and phainomena, Farrell's work suggests that it might be interesting to see what possibilities for rhetoric might exist in readings of Aristotle by phenomenologists.This essay will attempt to look into possibilities unexamined by Farrell. My aim in assuming this task, however, is not to theorize and facilitate the enactment of "emancipatory reason" in the public sphere through discourse governed by normative standards or ideals. Rather, my goal is to highlight the ways that phenomenology and phenomenological readings of Aristotle can help rhetorical scholars to examine... (shrink)

Orthodoxy has it that all counterpossibles are vacuously true. Yet there are strong arguments both for and against the use of non-vacuous counterpossibles in metaphysics. Even more compelling evidence may be expected from science. Arguably philosophy should defer to best scientific practice. If scientific practice comes with a commitment to non-vacuous counterpossibles, this may be the decisive reason to reject semantic orthodoxy and accept non-vacuity. I critically examine various examples of the purported scientific use of non-vacuous counterpossibles and argue that (...) they are not convincing. They neither establish that scientific practice comes with a commitment to the non-vacuity of counterpossibles, nor that incurring such a commitment would be useful in scientific practice. I illustrate a variety of counterstrategies on behalf of orthodoxy. (shrink)

In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was (...) embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. (shrink)

In the third of his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid devotes the fourth chapter to the concept of‘identity’, and the sixth chapter to Locke’s theory of ‘personal identity’. This latter chapter is widely regarded as a definitive refutation of the thesis that personal identity is no more than memories of a certain sort. It is interesting that the terms ‘identity’ and ‘personal identity’ do not appear as chapter or section titles elsewhere in any of Reid’s works; and (...) Hume is neither mentioned nor his theory of personal identity discussed in the two chapters specifically addressed to the matter. Moreover, while Locke, Reid, and Hume are often anthologized in works on personal identity, Reid is always presented as replying only to Locke. (shrink)

Although profoundly influential for essentially the whole of philosophy’s twenty-five hundred year history, the model of a science that is outlined in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics has recently been abandoned on grounds that developments in mathematics and logic over the last century or so have rendered it obsolete. Nor has anything emerged to take its place. As things stand we have not even the outlines of an adequate understanding of the rationality of mathematics as a scientific practice. It seems reasonable, in (...) light of this lacuna, to return again to Frege—who was at once one of the last great defenders of the model and a key figure in the very developments that have been taken to spell its demise—in hopes of finding a way forward. What we find when we do is that although Frege remains true to the spirit of the model, he also modifies it in very fundamental ways. So modified, I will suggest, the model continues to provide a viable and compelling image of scientific rationality by showing, in broad outline, how we achieve, and maintain, cognitive control in our mathematical investigations. (shrink)

A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the political All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture as well (...) as other philosophies and traditions, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones, such as those based on race, sex, or caste. Which hierarchical relations are morally justified and why? Bell and Wang argue that it depends on the nature of the social relation and context. Different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations: what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives, though these will be very different from the unjust hierarchies that have governed us in the past. A vigorous, systematic defense of hierarchy in the modern world, Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms. (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and others include (...) in this category some cases of glitches, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, the actions of one’s children or one’s country, and certain instances of explicit bias and implicit bias. Enoch and Mason argue that in these cases S should extend the realm of S’s responsibility. Drawing on Aristotle’s emphases on retrospective attitudes and the non-voluntary, this paper attempts to clarify the relation between quality of will and blameworthiness. I analyze cases where (1) S is clearly not morally responsible for an action or event, E, yet (2) S deserves reproach for E unless S has the appropriate retrospective attitudes (such as regret) or the absence of inappropriate attitudes toward E. (shrink)

RELIGIOUSNESS WITHOUT GOD AND FAITH. INSPIRED BY JERZY GROTOWSKI The purpose of this article is to present a certain idea of religiousness. It could be called religiousness without God and without faith. I found its premises in the work of the Polish theatre reformer Jerzy Grotowski. He was neither a prophet nor the founder of the religion; primarily, he was a man of theatre. But for him, in the age of “God’s death” the theatre was a substitute of religion and (...) religious experience. He understood his “poor theatre” as a search for sense of life, an authentic life and the world’s salvation. At various stages of his artistic way, which I present in the first unit of this article, he tried to reach to deeper dimensions of reality. In the end, he went far beyond the theatre. In the second unit, I show the features of religiousness without God and faith. In this religiousness, God exists and does not exists, he is a question, or doubtfulness. The Faith is a physical action, instead of seriousness, we have irony, grotesque, buffo. Keywords: GOD, FAITH, RELIGIOUSNESS, JERZY GROTOWSKI. (shrink)

This article aims to sketch a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis. In understanding Ereignis as the presencing of being, the fun­damental question is whether and how this presence of being, i.e., presence as such, can be experienced. While this experience is incompatible with a transcendental ap­proach, the suggestion here is that Ereignis can be experienced not as my own, but as an anonymous presence. To flesh out this suggestion, a close reading of Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity in the (...) Contributions will elaborate on why presence can belong neither to humanity nor to being. In a second step, a motif in Heidegger’s reception of Schelling is discussed which clarifies that the experience of Ereignis involves a necessity that goes beyond subjectivity. In a third step, the idea of “letting-presence” shows how the coming into being of experience has to remain anonymous in order to be the experience of Ereignis. (shrink)

This paper argues that a specifically environmental ethic is neither needed nor perhaps desirable for effecting the change in values for which many environmentalists have rightly called. Rather, familiar values such as beauty and excellence, and especially an outlook that regards those values as central aspects of a good life, may be all that is needed. The requisite ethic of appreciation is already embedded to some degree in a wide range of cultures, so no radical shift in values is called (...) for, nor convergence on a tendentious moral framework. But this outlook meets with skepticism from the dominant public ethos, as embodied for instance in mainstream economics. While this paper does not offer a full-blooded defense of an aesthetic grounding for environmental concern, it does suggest that the skepticism about such a grounding is considerably overblown. (shrink)

François Viète is often regarded as the first modern mathematician on the grounds that he was the first to develop the literal notation, that is, the use of two sorts of letters, one for the unknown and the other for the known parameters of a problem. The fact that he achieved neither a modern conception of quantity nor a modern understanding of curves, both of which are explicit in Descartes’ Geometry, is to be explained on this view “by an incomplete (...) symbolization rather than by any obstacle intrinsic in the system.” Descartes’ Geometry provides only a “clearer expression” of themes already sounded in Viète’s work, one that perfects Viète’s literal calculus and gives it “its modern form”; it merely continues the “‘new’ and ‘pure’ algebra which Viète first established as the ‘general analytic art’.” It can seem, furthermore, that this must be right, that had there been some obstacle intrinsic to Viète’s system that barred the way to a modern conception of quantity and a modern understanding of curves, then Descartes’ Geometry would have had to have taken a very different form than it did. As it was, Descartes had only to improve Viète’s symbolism, free himself of the last vestiges of the ancient view of geometrical and arithmetical objects, and apply the new symbolism to the study of curves in order to achieve what Viète did not but could have. But what, really, is the status of this “could have”; what would it actually have taken for Viète to achieve Descartes’ results in the Geometry? The interest of the question lies in its potential to better our understanding of the nature of modern mathematics. (shrink)

Truth in Wittgenstein′s Later Philosophy. In this paper I attempt to examine Wittgenstein′s understanding of truth in his later period. In doing so, I orient myself primarily on the remarks published as Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. My primary aim in the destructive part is to show that his later philosophy neither espouses a redundancy and deflationary, nor an epistemic and anti-realist conception of truth. Both strands of interpretation are strongly represented in the debate. An examination of Wittgenstein’s remarks on (...) the correspondence theory of truth will also shed some light on his thoughts about truth. Furthermore, in the preceding constructive part of this paper, I will try to demonstrate that (1) for Wittgenstein there is a strong link between truths that we accept based on our certainties and our use of the term “truth” and (2) that skepticism about truth, which claims that all accepted truths in our Weltbild (“world-view”) could be actually false, fails to give any meaning to its use of “truth”. This culminates in Wittgenstein′s insight, that the question of what truth is can only be answered relative to the Weltbild. Therefore, talking about truths that transcend our Weltbild becomes nonsense. (shrink)

Students and teachers of Chinese history and philosophy will not want to miss Daniel Gardner's accessible translation of the teachings of Chu Hsi —a luminary of the Confucian tradition who dominated Chinese intellectual life for centuries. Homing in on a primary concern of our own time, Gardner focuses on Chu Hsi's passionate interest in education and its importance to individual development. For hundreds of years, every literate person in China was familiar with Chu Hsi's teachings. They informed the curricula (...) of private academies and public schools and became the basis of the state's prestigious civil service examinations. Nor was Chu's influence limited to China. In Korea and Japan as well, his teachings defined the terms of scholarly debate and served as the foundation for state ideology. Chu Hsi was convinced that through education anyone could learn to be fully moral and thus travel the road to sagehood. Throughout his life, he struggled with the philosophical questions underlying education: What should people learn? How should they go about learning? What enables them to learn? What are the aims and the effects of learning? Part One of _Learning to Be a Sage_ examines Chu Hsi's views on learning and how he arrived at them. Part Two presents a translation of the chapters devoted to learning in the _Conversations of Master Chu_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On Inception by Martin HeideggerDaniel NeumannHEIDEGGER, Martin. On Inception. Translated by Peter Hanley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. xi + 171 pp. Cloth, $40.00This translation [End Page 548] of Heidegger's On Inception (written in 1941 and published in German in 2005 as Über den Anfang) is an important addition to the translated corpus of texts on the themes of Ereignis (event) and the history of beyng (Seynsgeschichte) that (...) occupied Heidegger's thinking from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and that resulted in a series of writings that remained unpublished during his lifetime. Similar to those other volumes, On Inception does not follow a linear train of thought but offers short and often fragmentary notes and musings that, nonetheless, build on one another. There is a considerable thematic overlap with the other writings on the event. Many of the themes found here, such as the role of technology in exposing contemporary understanding of being, Hölderlin as the poet of the saying of beyng, or the notion of another beginning of the unconcealment of beyng, can be found in Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness, and The Event as well.What sets On Inception apart from these other volumes is the focus on the inceptual aspect of the thinking of beyng. In this regard, the first and longest of the six sections comprising the book (entitled "The Incipience of Inception") offers the most extended original contribution Heidegger makes here. It concerns the question of how one can think from out of the unconcealment of beyng. Exploring this topic throws more light on many of the questions that the reading of the other volumes raises, such as whether the event should be thought of as a one-time historical occurrence; how one can think from out of the event, that is, how it constitutes the possibility of thinking it; and the relationship between beings, being (referring to the truth of the presence of beings), and beyng (referring to the truth of the presencing of being). All of these issues concern the inceptual character of the event, whose understanding affords a better sense of paradigmatic change in thinking and dwelling associated with it. To understand the inceptual character of the event gives the reader a clue as to where to begin thinking (about) it. This does not remove the considerable and intentional obscurity surrounding these ideas, but it shows Heidegger as constantly altering and refining how to think of the history of the concealment and unconcealment of beyng. One of the biggest disagreements among interpreters has been whether to read this in transcendental or realist terms, that is, whether we should take the unconcealment of beyng as the proffering of a real, mind-independent totality or as a cipher for our transcendental ability to understand and make sense of the appearance of being. In this regard, the question of incipience goes toward elucidating who or what is thought to begin this unconcealment.What, then, does an inceptive thinking of beyng amount to? Put negatively, it can concern neither beyng as some sort of cause of beings, nor beings themselves as what appear as a consequence of beyng's unconcealment: "[I]nception is not the inception of something other than what it itself is; equally, inception is not the inception of itself, as if what were being thought of were a producing and causing." To think beyng as inception puts emphasis on the emergent nature of the opening of the clearing in which beings can come to presence for someone. That is, the [End Page 549] word "inception" names the very opening up of the possibility to consider the truth of beyng, that is, to think the event. What is at stake is therefore the incipient nature of inception—the fact that grasping what the term means cannot be based on any one incipient thing, but on incipience (Anfängnis). There is a processual (or, to use Daniela Vallega-Neu's more Heideggerian term, poietic) aspect to the way Heidegger thinks the event, and incipience in many ways expresses this poietic nature because it both suggests that there is something that begins and unfolds, but also conceals what... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that neither St. Bonaventure nor St. Thomas are eudaimonists in the normal sense. Neither holds that happiness--which is a condition of human persons, and thus falls on the creature side of the Creator/creature divide--is the ultimate end of human beings strictly speaking, being rather a penultimate end. God is the true ultimate end of human beings, and He falls on the other side of the Creator/creature divide. -/- Both St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure hold that (...) happiness consists in the attainment of God. They differ in that St. Bonaventure holds that loving God constitutes the attainment of God, for he who loves God has God. St. Thomas, on the other hand, holds that loving God does not in and of itself mean having Him. Love causes us to desire union with God, but is not itself union with Him. God is attained when He is known. However, St. Thomas also holds that loving God is better than knowing Him, and thus better than happiness. This is because God Himself, and not our happiness in knowing Him, is our true ultimate end. -/- On the basis of these theories, both St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas avoid the self-centeredness objections to eudaimonism, while being able to incorporate all of the strengths of virtue ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and essays, (...) Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s distinction of chatter from silence gives forgiveness a linguistic spin. How can forgiveness be spoken? Is forgiveness something to be said and heard? Is saying it aloud saying too much, or too little? What is said when (and if) forgiveness is said? Should forgiveness be chatted away, or reserved in silence? For Kierkegaard, the answer(s) is (are) neither/nor: forgiveness can only be said indirectly, kept (almost) indistinguishable from resentment or indifference, as if discarded in the face of offense—if it (...) is to happen. (shrink)

The paper develops a Kantian view of the highest good and the relation between virtue and happiness. Several Kantian theses are defended, among them the thesis that the highest good is realized only if every virtuous individual is happy, the view that virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness, and the proposition that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for the worthiness of being happy. The author argues that the highest good ought to be realized and that it ought (...) to be that everyone who is virtuous is happy. To prove these claims, the author will use techniques developed by modern deontic logicians. According to Kant, we do not have an immediate duty to promote our own happiness, the aim of morality being not personal satisfaction but rather virtue and the good will. The important question is not “How do I become happy?” but “How do I become good?”. The arguments in this paper support this view. (shrink)

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view (...) the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts, Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science. (shrink)

The current article seeks to describe the intellectual dialogue between Raymond Aron and Max Weber. A Dialogue that is marked essentially by two different stages. The first stage comes from discovery: Aron meets Weber in the 1930s and is strongly attracted by his methodological rigour as for his manner of understanding the political reality. Then, from the 1950s onward, Aron distances himself somewhat from some of Weber's central theses. Particularly, he doesn't believe that a scientist, as such, is able to (...) reach something akin to neutrality. This, however, does not prevent him from recognising in Weber's work a very solid contribution to social sciences, nor does it prevent him from picking many of his teachings. (shrink)

Daniel Sutherland - Kant on Arithmetic, Algebra, and the Theory of Proportions - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 533-558 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Kant on Arithmetic, Algebra, and the Theory of Proportions Daniel Sutherland Kant's philosophy of mathematics has both enthralled and exercised philosophers since the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. Neither the Critique nor any other work provides a sustained and focused account of his (...) mature views on mathematical cognition, forcing readers to glean what they can from disparate contexts. Despite these hurdles, Kant's views have been of great interest to philosophers of mathematics. They have also been of interest to philosophers wishing to understand Kant's philosophy more generally, since Kant maintains that mathematical judgments are synthetic a priori and that the type of synthesis underlying mathematics is the same as that underlying the perception of objects . Our understanding of Kant's views has been greatly improved during the last four decades by work on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. Despite these advances, however, I think the recent work has largely neglected the importance of Kant's theory of magnitudes and the extent to which that theory is influenced by the Eudoxian theory of proportions presented in Euclid's Elements. As a consequence, an important feature of Kant's.. (shrink)

After sketching familiar pragmatist arguments that seem to show that relations of reference and meaning shed no light on the role of language in our claims to knowledge, an alternative conception (inspired by Kripke's work on proper names and Sellars' conception of concepts and causal laws) is outlined. Neither relations of reference nor meanings are given; instead both essentially involve commitments that are different in kind from the sorts of propositional commitments made in judgment. If so, the pragmatist is mistaken (...) in concluding that meaning is a philosopher's fiction and reference nothing more than a technical notion of formal semantics. (shrink)

Recent professional guidelines published by the General Medical Council instruct physicians in the UK to be honest and open in any financial agreements they have with their patients and third parties. These guidelines are in addition to a European policy addressing disclosure of physician financial interests in the industry. Similarly, In the US, a national open payments program as well as Federal regulations under the Affordable Care Act re-address the issue of disclosure of physician financial interests in America. These new (...) professional and legal changes make us rethink the fiduciary duties of providers working under new organizational and financial schemes, specifically their clinical fidelity and their moral and professional obligations to act in the best interests of patients. The article describes the legal changes providing the background for such proposals and offers a prima facie ethical analysis of these evolving issues. It is argued that although disclosure of conflicting interest may increase trust it may not necessarily be beneficial to patients nor accord with their expectations and needs. Due to the extra burden associated with disclosure as well as its implications on the medical profession and the therapeutic relationship, it should be held that transparency of physician financial interest should not result in mandatory disclosure of such interest by physicians. It could lead, as some initiatives in Europe and the US already demonstrate, to voluntary or mandatory disclosure schemes carried out by the industry itself. Such schemes should be in addition to medical education and the address of the more general phenomenon of physician conflict of interest in ethical codes and ethical training of the parties involved. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship on early modern theories of plagiarism, the examination focuses on how learned communicative practice treated plagiarism. Contrary to the norm established in the discourse (...) on plagiarism, the plagiariser and his work were not excluded from the respublica literaria. Instead, the case became part of academic memory, and was itself frequently reported in a plagiaristic manner. In closing, a comparative glance at the juridically‐based treatment of a current case of plagiarism (a politician's dissertation of 2009) is taken. The paper argues that the contradiction between the theoretical norm and the actual eighteenth‐century management of plagiarism resulted from the familiarity of unmarked „copying“ in pre‐modern scholarly practice. The paper shows that early modern learned culture, although characterised by Steven Shapin as a „moral economy,“ neither felt compelled to impose its crucial ethical norm in a case of open non‐conformance, nor did it consistently observe this norm for routine processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian EconomyDaniel J. GargolaDennis P. Kehoe. Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv 1 269 pp. Cloth, $42.50, £29.95 (UK, Europe).This book is more than an investigation into an aspect of Roman law and legal thought. At the very beginning, Dennis Kehoe clearly identifies his goal: “My (...) purpose in this study is to clarify the basic relationships characterizing the agrarian economy of the early Roman Empire by analyzing the economic mentality that guided upper-class Romans in managing their wealth. My conviction is that the type of agrarian planning based on upper-class conceptions of investment and profit played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman economy as a whole.... In this study, I propose to address this problem by analyzing the assumptions that the Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian and in other classical sources made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. I base my analysis on the legal sources because, as I shall demonstrate, they offer a more comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans than we can gain from other types of evidence, including literary evidence, documentary papyri, and inscriptions” (vii).The author’s awareness of the problems in using legal evidence to shed light on larger issues and his openness about his own assumptions and about the limitations of the methods and the sources he has chosen to employ are among the work’s great strengths. In marked contrast with some other investigations of such matters, Kehoe does not assume that laws provide a simple, straightforward, and transparent entry into the structure and organization of economy and society. The work opens with an examination of the legal sources as evidence. Their condition offers one problem. The writings of the late Republican and early Imperial jurists are preserved largely in relatively brief citations included in the great collections of the sixth-century a.d.: Justinian’s Digest and Code. As Kehoe notes, this presents a major problem for investigators: to what extent do these passages represent the original—that is, was obsolete material removed systematically, and were the passages adjusted to fit the compilers’ concerns? Following authorities such as M. Kaser and F. Wieacker, the author takes an optimistic view of the matter, suggesting that “contemporary scholarship is justified in moving away from the suspicion that the Digest is so thoroughly interpolated that the opinions of the classical jurists can only be recovered after exhaustive reconstruction of the texts” (9). While accepting the possibility of interpolation in individual cases, he has based his study on the “belief that the existing collections of legal texts do allow us to trace the thinking, in particular the economic thinking, of the classical Roman legal authorities” (10).Having declared his intention to regard the citations as reasonably accurate reflections of their originals, Kehoe then turns to a more central question: the extent to which juristic writings reflect actual conditions. One school of [End Page 323] thought, represented by scholars such as Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens, Ga., 1995]), suggests that Roman jurists operated within a system of traditional representations, maintained as if fossilized long after the conditions that had given rise to them had changed, and that legal writers largely wrote about internal problems in interpretation that had arisen within this system. The jurists, then, did not address problems of their own day, nor were they interested in adapting the law to new circumstances, and their opinions need bear little resemblance to actual arrangements in their own time and place. Others, however, are more convinced of the timeliness of Roman legal writing. Scholars such as B. W. Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome [Princeton 1980]) and S. D. Martin (The Roman Jurists and the Organization of Private Building in the Late Republic and Early Empire [Brussels 1989]) maintain that Roman jurists consciously and directly addressed in their writings the social and economic concerns of their contemporaries in the governing elite.Once again, Kehoe takes care to situate... (shrink)

This book first published in the year 2021 June. Paperback: 240 pages Publisher: Kuhn von Verden Verlag. Includes bibliographical references. 1). Philosophy. 2). Metaphysics. 3). Philosophy, German. 4). Philosophy, German -- 19th century. 5). Philosophy, German and Greek Influences Metaphysics. 6). Nihilism (Philosophy). 7). Eternal return. I. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. II. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-.[Translation from German into English of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notes of 1881]. New Translation and Notes by Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Many of the notes have (...) never been translated into English before. Go inside the workshop of a great philosopher's mind and read these notes. Table of Contents Introduction and Preface (Pages: 1-11 ) Notebook: 11 = M III 1. Spring - Autumn 1881 11 [1 to 348] (Pages: 12-167 ) Nietzsche’s Notebooks in English: a Translator’s Introduction and Afterward (Pages: 168-183 ) The thought of the eternal return of the same (Pages: 184-197 ) Later Recapitulation note of 1888 14 [188] (Pages: 198-204 ) Rejection of the idea of eternal (Pages: 205 ) Translation of 4 notes by Nietzsche on Perspectivism (Pages: 206-210 ) Nietzsche gets some final few words (Pages: 211-216 ) Bibliographies (Pages: 217-236 ) Project started in summer of 2012. No one else has read this book for errors. As always, any errors, mistakes or oversights etc. are mine alone. Given a couple more years, I could improve this book. This is a philosophical translation and not a philological translation. If you want to get in to more philological details you must learn German (see Nietzschechannel plus many published books on the topics). Translation notes. I have not tried to fix, polish-up, or clarify Nietzsche’s unpublished writings. Some of the translator have really refined Nietzsche’s ideas and positions. I have not “fixed” Nietzsche. I have not dropped or added words or changed the wording to make Nietzsche’s position clearer or stronger (others have done enough damage). Learn German and read the texts in German – my best recommendation and advice to you the reader. There are groups on the internet that work on all the details of translating Nietzsche’s remarks. There are many nuances and shades of the meaning in attempting to translate anyone’s language. Some words I could not translate from German and French; and I left those few words in German, but more words in French. I think most of the French texts are quotes that Nietzsche wrote down from French authors that he was reading at the time he wrote these notes. Reader beware. There are many historical and philosophical allusions as in all of Nietzsche’s philosophical writings and these notebooks are similar. Remember these are “notebooks” and include lots of notes or jottings -- and these are neither fragments nor polished drafts for publication. Nietzsche may have written these notebooks from back to front and re-used various notebooks at a later time. In the German text there are missing punctuations marks, missing quotation marks, missing words, abbreviation of words, miss numbered section, working table of contents for project books he wanted to publish, projects outlined, quotes without quote marks. Enjoy reading and thinking with Nietzsche in his unpublished notes. (shrink)

One of the most important aspects of human life is the role of ethics and value judgments, which are unavoidable in everyday life. On the other hand, belief in the afterlife significantly influences various human affairs. This article explores the impact of belief in resurrection on moral values and judgments using a descriptive and analytical method. In this context, it critiques and analyzes the school of ethical utilitarianism, one of the most prominent ethical schools of the contemporary era. Several issues (...) arise when attempting to calculate the outcomes of actions both quantitatively and qualitatively. These include the conflict between profiteering and moral conscience in specific responsibilities, the conflict with justice in many instances, and the contrast between quantitative and qualitative criteria in the pursuit of pleasure. There is also a conflict between human intention and will, and a conflict between supporting the interests of the minority and those of the majority. Furthermore, utilitarianism fails to account for eternal life and how to live in the next world, and it neglects the spiritual dimensions and growth of humanity. Even without considering the afterlife, utilitarianism relies solely on quantitative and material calculations as criteria. Therefore, the moral system and profit-oriented logic, along with its various forms, are neither reliable nor practical. If we do not believe in the Return, we lack a complete rational justification for moral rules and value systems. From the perspective of the afterlife, the ideal and intrinsic good is happiness in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing both worldly happiness and happiness in the hereafter. When voluntary actions and attributes are connected to this intrinsically good and desirable end, their positive or negative moral judgments are determined. A system of political ethics that focuses on the hereafter possesses all the advantages and virtues of other systems, but it does not suffer from their shortcomings and faults. (shrink)

In 2019, The Hastings Center will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. It is more than a bit staggering to think how far we have come since 1969. When I floated the idea of a center on bioethics to my friend and neighbor, psychiatrist Willard Gaylin, at a Christmas party in 1968—even before the word “bioethics” was used—I had only the fuzziest idea of where that would take us. Neither Will nor I had run anything, nor did we know how to raise (...) money to support an organization. We would and did learn how, but much of what we did in those early years was made up on the fly. We not only had to invent an organization but no less to invent a field of research and education on issues still little noticed by the public or academics. Out of curiosity, I recently googled “bioethics.” I was astonished at what I found and by the sheer quantity of what is going on. (shrink)

Christopher Gauker proposes that all cognition can be divided into nonconceptual image-based thought and conceptual language-based thought. The division between the two hinges on the representational powers of their respective mediums. I argue that a richer variety of representational states and processes is necessary in order to explain both human and nonhuman cognition. There are aspects of nonhuman cognition that cannot be explained simply by images, and there are aspects of human conceptual thought, particularly those dealing with causal reasoning, that (...) push us towards positing abstract systems of representation that are neither imagistic nor linguistic. Conceptual thought, then, occurs in its own proprietary inner code, not in images or words. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of changes implemented during Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's administration (20032003), which displayed bias against changes and introduced schemes to justify the systems it upheld. Transmutations wrought during Abdullah's tenure may have been neither substantial nor totalizing, but within the conservative paradigm which had long gripped national politics, Abdullah's deviations were significant nevertheless.