As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in (...) the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive (...) fairness (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

Every attempt to examine our consciousness’s passive life and its dynamic in its various forms inevitably intersects with our primal awareness of the future. Even though Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness enjoys a certain fame, his conception of our primordial relation to the future has not been adequately accounted for. The book at hand aims to offer a close study of Husserl’s view of protentional consciousness and to trace its unique contribution to our overall awareness of time. It offers an extensive (...) analysis of various aspects of protention by investigating its connection to different fields and levels of experience. To achieve such a task, the book stresses the need to enrich the familiar formal account of protention with a material one. Thus, alongside issues pertaining exclusively to the form of protention, such as its relation to fulfillment as well as its double-intentional structure, various other dimensions are discussed, such as the phenomena of disappointment and correction as well as the role hyle plays in both of them. In the same vein, special attention is given to the relation between protentional consciousness and affectivity, thus shedding light on the dynamic unity of our living-present. What this study purports to show is that Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped to offer a solid account of the thinnest and subtlest ways in which we are aware of the future in our experiential life. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to (...) the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts. (shrink)

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what (...) it entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

This study contributes substantially to research on Aristotelian logic in Byzantium. It includes a critical edition of the commentary by Leo Magentenos, the Metropolitan of Mytilene (twelfth c.?) on Book II of the Prior Analytics along with an edition of the syllogism diagram attributed to this work in the manuscript tradition of this work.

Quel rapport entretenait Marx avec la culture, l'histoire et la philosophie de la Grèce antique? Pourquoi le jeune Marx s'était-il intéressé à la pensée d'Epicure? Que représentait pour lui la philosophie enseignée par le fondateur de l'École du Jardin? A part l'aspect purement philosophique du rapport de l'auteur du Capital à la Grèce antique, on se donnera également pour tâche de mettre en perspective la contribution que les notions marxiennes de classe, de lutte des classes et d'exploitation peuvent apporter à (...) une compréhension féconde de l'histoire des formations sociales grecques, en partant de l'oeuvre majeure de l'historien britannique G. E. M. de Ste Croix. (shrink)

The political and social reaction to the ‘refugee crisis’ in Australia cannot be solely understood in purely geo-political or economic terms. Neither can the persistence of racism in Australian political culture be explained in terms of its electoral advantage. This article contends that the racist attitudes of the Australian Liberal Government, and John Howard in particular, hide deeper unconscious processes that are historically embedded in the national imaginary. These unconscious processes are manifested in the invasion complex which lies just below (...) the surface of Australia’s political culture. (shrink)

In presenting her attractive theory of concepts, Millikan makes an unwarranted assumption about the role of language in concept acquisition. The phoneme string, rather than the “word” as a semantic entity, may suffice to play the crucial role in the acquisition of substance concepts. Hence Millikan may underestimate the degree of similarity between language and other media of perception.

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not attracted much attention in (...) the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

Promising is clearly a social practice or convention. By uttering the formula, “I hereby promise to do X,” we can raise in others the expectation that we will in fact do X. But this succeeds only because there is a social practice that consists (inter alia) in a disposition on the part of promisers to do what they promise, and an expectation on the part of promisees that promisers will so behave. It is equally clear that, barring special circumstances of (...) some kind, it is morally wrong for promisers to fail to do what they have promised to do. What is perhaps less clear is how the moral wrongness that is involved when promises are broken is related to the social practice that makes promising possible in the first place. (shrink)

First English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1909 doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche.

In this paper I argue that Mill’s ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ regarding the human will and action cannot apply on all cases, and that the human mind has potentially the capacity to create freely a will or action that, no matter what kind of knowledge we possess, cannot be predicted. More precisely, I argue against Mill’s attempt of conjunction between the freedom of the will and the ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ while I attempt a comparison with the relevant Kantian approach. (...) I then claim that a will cannot be free and be predicted at the same time, as both the elements of freedom and unpredictability of the will are founded on the very process of its formulation as an outcome of genuine creativity. I, thus, attempt to propose a more substantially free view of free will and action than the ones presented by the prominent conceptions. (shrink)

Recently, much attention has been paid to ‘rational requirements’ and, especially, to what I call ‘rational requirements of formal coherence as such’. These requirements are satisfied just when our attitudes are formally coherent: for example, when our beliefs do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, these requirements are puzzling. In particular, it is unclear why we should satisfy them. In light of this, I explore the conjecture that there are no requirements of formal coherence. I do so by trying to construct (...) a theory of error for the idea that there are such requirements. (shrink)

In this article we revisit two different temporal phases related to the main publication of Serge Moscovici's book La Psychanalyse, son image et son public together with two key promissing notions of the theory, cognitive polyphasia and anchoring. The first phase, initiated by the durkheimian cercle, will give us the occasion to retrieve the traces of the fascinating intellectual debate about collective psychology that was involved in producing ¨frontier¨ propositions and renewing their perspectives in today's light, namely throught cognitive polyphasia. (...) The second phase, more recent, inspired by classical and modern research into the social representation's field, will serve us as a basis for a new hypothesis about anchoring. We will attempt to suggest that traditional familiarization allocated to anchoring can also work in the opposite sense, transmitting and guaranteeing the non-familiar, establishing strangeness. Finally, we are arguing that social representations are more than a simple theory, just as the symbol is always more than what it symbolizes. (shrink)

Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. (...) Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and to hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time. This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy. Nikos Passas is Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. (shrink)

While the theory of belief change has attracted a lot of interest from researchers, work on implementing belief change and actually putting it to use in real-world problems is still scarce. In this paper, we present an implementation of propositional belief change using Binary Decision Diagrams. Upper complexity bounds for the algorithm are presented and discussed. The approach is presented both in the general case, as well as on specific belief change operators from the literature. In an effort to gain (...) a better understanding of the empirical efficiency of the algorithms involved, a fault diagnosis problem on combinational circuits is presented, implemented and evaluated. (shrink)

Pélops sur un cratère du début du IVe s. av. J.-C. découvert à Pella L’article se réfère à un fragment de cratère en cloche à figures rouges découvert dans la région de la nouvelle entrée du site archéologique de Pella. Le vase présente un intérêt tout particulier, en raison de la rareté du thème iconographique. Sur la face principale est représenté le char de Pélops dans lequel devait aussi se trouver Hippodamie. Des éléments de la scène évoquent un enlèvement, ainsi (...) que la course de chars entre Pélops et Oenomaos. Le vase est attribué à l’atelier du Peintre d’Athènes 12255 et daté du début du ive s. av. J.-C. Cette datation permet de relier le thème iconographique du cratère à la victoire du roi Archélaos dans une course de chars aux jeux Olympiques, ainsi qu’à la fondation des fêtes olympiques en Macédoine. Notre cratère fait partie des nombreux vases à figures rouges arrivés dans la capitale macédonienne, qui confirment les échanges commerciaux avec l’Attique. (shrink)

Despite considerable evidence that neural activity in monkeys reflects various aspects of face perception, relatively little is known about monkeys’ face processing abilities. Two characteristics of face processing observed in humans are a subordinate-level entry point, here, the default recognition of faces at the subordinate, rather than basic, level of categorization, and holistic effects, i.e. perception of facial displays as an integrated whole. The present study used an adaptation paradigm to test whether untrained rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) display these hallmarks (...) of face processing. In experiments 1 and 2, macaques showed greater rebound from adaptation to conspecific faces than to other animals at the individual or subordinate level. In experiment 3, exchanging only the bottom half of a monkey face produced greater rebound in aligned than in misaligned composites, indicating that for normal, aligned faces, the new bottom half may have influenced the perception of the whole face. Scan path analysis supported this assertion: during rebound, fixation to the unchanged eye region was renewed, but only for aligned stimuli. These experiments show that macaques naturally display the distinguishing characteristics of face processing seen in humans and provide the first clear demonstration that holistic information guides scan paths for conspecific faces. (shrink)

In-vivo phenotyping of genetically engineered mouse models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is established by combining BT-MRI and CASL G. Vanhoutte1, E. Storkebaum2, P. Carmeliet2, A. Van der Linden1.

In the aftermath of 9/11, world leaders addressed the nation as a body under threat and hastened in new policies to bolster border protection and ‘securitize’ immigration. While the terrorist attacks cast new forms of public attention on the risks posed by mobile agents, the link between national security and regulating migration has always been at the forefront of the constitution of the nation state. Despite this persistent anxiety towards the social impact of migration and the status of people on (...) the move, a more general understanding of mobility is not only missing in public debates, but has been a lacunae in the social sciences. What is mobility — a state, a force, a set of shifting co-ordinates? How does the definition of mobility shape social attitudes and personal experiences? This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the classical paradigm for understanding of mobility in the social sciences. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with this paradigm. The limits and kinetophobic associations generated by the classical paradigm are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt’s theory of residentialism. The final part of this article outlines an alternative conceptual frame that is based on key terms from complexity theory. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière is one of the central figures in the contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. This introduction maps the shift of focus in Rancière’s writing from political theory to contemporary art practice and also traces the enduring interest in ideas on equality and creativity. It situates Rancière’s rich body of writing in relation to key theorists such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, art historian Terry Smith and anthropologist George E. Marcus. I argue that Rancière offers a distinctive approach in (...) this broad field by clarifying the specificity of the artist’s task in the production of critical and creative transformation, or what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In conclusion, I complement Rancière’s invocation to break out of the oppositional paradigm in which the political and aesthetic are usually confined by outlining some further methodological techniques for addressing contemporary art. (shrink)