Deliberative democracy entails a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. To that end, people engage in an exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at the right answer or the best judgement they can make in the circumstances. Of course, in practice a shared judgement may be impossible to reach. Yet while compromise may seem a natural way of dealing with the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved – for example, some deliberative theorists argue that a willingness (...) to compromise manifests respect for the considered views of others, even as we continue to disagree with them – the relationship between deliberation and compromise is not as straightforward as one might think. To explain why, this paper contrasts conflicts of judgement with conflicts of preference, interest and value to show why greater attention needs to be paid to the character of the decision to be made. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the retort ‘easy for you to say’ is a complaint about the target’s standing, but that it invokes a standing norm that is unjustified. Moreover, I argue that in many cases the person for whom it is ‘easy to say’ should speak.

Using evolutionary game theory, I consider how guilt can provide individual fitness benefits to actors both before and after bad behavior. This supplements recent work by philosophers on the evolution of guilt with a more complete picture of the relevant selection pressures.

Prior research shows mixed findings regarding individuals’ belief-revision strategies. The current research is aimed to test (a) whether individuals’ reasoning across abstract vs real-world content shows similarity, and (b) whether individuals’ syllogistic reasoning predicts their belief-revision strategies. Experiment 1, testing 76 participants (50 females), provides evidence for the similarity in reasoning across abstract and real-world content (p.05). Individuals seem to revise the conditional statement in the AC and DA inferences, especially when the content poses a threat. In contrast, individuals prefer (...) to revise the categorical premise in the MT inferences, especially when the content poses a threat. These findings suggest that in the face of inconsistency individuals’ decision about which of their prior beliefs they should revise is influenced by the structure and content of the belief-contravening problem rather than their reasoning ability. (shrink)

First published in 1988, the aim of this book can be stated in Nietzsche’s words: ‘To look at science from the perspective of the artist, but at art from that of life’. The title contests the notions that science alone can provide us with the most objective truth about the world, and that artistic endeavour can produce nothing more valuable than entertainment. O’Hear argues that art and the study of art are not indispensable aspects of human life, and that this (...) is equally as important as the investigation of the natural world. (shrink)

I examine how Heather Douglas’ account of values in science applies to the assessment of actual cases of scientific practice. I focus on the case of applied toxicologists’ acceptance of molecular evidence-gathering methods and evidential sources. I demonstrate that a set of social and institutional processes plays a philosophically significant role in changing toxicologists’ inductive risk judgments about different kinds of evidence. I suggest that Douglas’ inductive risk framework can be integrated with a suitable account of evidence, such as Helen (...) Longino’s contextual empiricism, to address the role of social context in the cases like the one examined here. I introduce such an integrated account and show how Longino’s contextual empiricism and inductive risk framework fruitfully complement each other in analyzing the novel aspects of the toxicology case. (shrink)

This article seeks to understand a puzzling aspect of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, namely, the many religious analogies Simmel uses to characterize money. We argue that with these analogies Simmel indicates how what he would later term ‘the transcendent character of life’ permeates mundane monetary interactions. Specifically, we articulate how key religious forms of experience – faith, unity, and individuality – exist in monetary exchange and point toward a distinctively Simmelian way to understand the interplay between religion and (...) economics. (shrink)

Are new democracies with divided government and volatile parties politically ill fated? The literature suggests so, but cases of emergent democracies such as Taiwan and Brazil that face both conditions defy the prediction. This paper explains why: party volatility follows from pursuing distinct executive and legislature agendas under divided government; the political ambition that underlies these conditions sustains democratic and even political performance. We evaluate the argument through government spending in Taiwan. The results corroborate our expectations: they show more parties (...) composing the legislature as government spending favors an executive agenda and neglects a legislative welfare-spending agenda. The findings make three contributions to the literature: first, they reveal a political divide between executive and legislature rather than ideological parties to undercut concerns regarding performance. Second, they demonstrate that the strategic use of government spending to institutionalize party development along an executive agenda fuels party fragmentation. Third, they show that legislators split, switch, or create alternative routes to office in reaction to strategic spending to underscore that ambition underlies party volatility and divided government. (shrink)

Creativity of Ivan Vyshensky is one of the outstanding ideological and artistic phenomena of the end of XVI - beginning of XVII century. Closely linked to the events of the time, she witnessed the arrival in the Ukrainian spiritual culture of the artist, who put all her talent in defense of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Although, to be more specific, Ivan Vyshensky's person would be more right to recognize the apologist of the foundations of ancient Ukrainian Orthodoxy, whose spokesmen strongly opposed the (...) measures connected with the preparation, proclamation and implementation of the Orthodox-Catholic Union in the territory of the Commonwealth. The problem, it is known, turned out to be so significant and complex that it divided the Ukrainian ethnic group at the time of its active national self-awareness into two denominationally opposing camps. In such circumstances, the "Russian faith" and the Orthodox Church as a whole became the subject of special affection, the most touching place, its national banner and slogan, "or, as A. Richinsky noted, signs of nationality. It is understandable that dignitaries, including church and religious ones, also had denominators of Orthodox Catholic unification. Therefore, the attempt to objectify the view of the need for church-religious union within the framework of the Commonwealth, as well as to improve the understanding of those initial principles, which were guided by Ivan Vyshensky, requires an expansion and deepening of thematic expositions. In this sense, the task of the proposed article we would like to reduce to a brief analysis of the polemical works of anti-union content of the late XVI - early XVII centuries, that is, the time when Ivan Vyshensky lived and created, and which in one way or another will help them to comprehend their congruence or contradiction artist's credo. (shrink)

Modern Christian religiosity as a whole, and in particular the Greek-Catholic way of expressing it, are all-round in the public consciousness. Religion is transformed as intensely as other components of the latter. That is why today it is relevant to analyze, on the one hand, the relation of existential and anthropocentric, and on the other - the pluralistic filling of modern Ukrainian Greek Catholicism and to find out the optimal degree of this relation.

Nesta obra, o autor, busca essas duas dimensões da herança do autor da Pedagogia do oprimido: análise das convergências e divergências de seu pensamento com o de Lucien Goldmann e Edgar Morin e de suas idéias com o final do século XX.

The dominant model for bioethical inquiry taught in medical schools is that of principlism. The heritage of this methodology can be traced to the Enlightenment project of generating a universalizable justification for normative morality arising from within the individual, rational agent. This project has been criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests that its failure has resulted in a fragmented and incoherent contemporary ethical framework characterized by fundamental intractability in moral debate. This incoherence implicates principlist conceptions of bioethics. Medical ethics as (...) practiced, though, is partially in keeping with teleological alternatives to principlism. Nonetheless, the hegemony of principlism threatens to harm the practice of good medicine whenever it is used to provide justification for the sanction or prohibition of practices, despite not being equipped to grant moral authority to such justifications. An example of this failure and its resulting harm is expressed in the growing obsolescence of living donor liver transplantation. (shrink)

This is the first volume in the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus of Ordo IV which comprises works on moral issues. It presents the panegyric of Philip the Fair , the father of Charles V, and the Education of Princes . Both works equally instruct princes how to behave morally. The third work in this volume treats language and praises the Word of God.

Classicism in architecture and literature; Turkey; history.

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploration of the Functional Properties of Interaction: Computer Models and Pointers for Theory” by Etienne B. Roesch, Matthew Spencer, Slawomir J. Nasuto, Thomas Tanay & J. Mark Bishop. Upshot: We support Roesch and his co-authors’ theoretical stance on constructivist artificial agents, and wish to enrich their “exploration of the functional properties of interaction” with complementary results. By revisiting their experiments with an agent that we developed previously, we explore two issues that they deliberately left (...) aside: autonomous intentionality and dynamic reutilization of knowledge by the agent. Our results reveal an alternative pathway to constructivism that addresses the central question of intentionality in a single agent from the very beginning of its design, suggesting that the property of distributed processing proposed by Roesch et al. is not essential to constructivism. (shrink)