In Nicomachean Ethics 7.7 (= Eudemian Ethics 6.7), Aristotle distinguishes softness (malakia) from lack of self-control (akrasia) and endurance (karteria) from self-control (enkrateia). This paper argues that unqualified softness consists of a disposition to give up acting to avoid the painful toil (ponos) required to execute practical resolutions, and (coincidentally) to enjoy the pleasures of rest and relaxation. The enduring person, in contrast, persists in her commitments despite the painful effort required to enact them. Along the way, I argue that (...) this interpretation qualifies our understanding of the pleasures and pains with which temperance and intemperance are concerned. (shrink)

Knowledge-first epistemology includes a knowledge norm of action: roughly, act only on what you know. This norm has been criticized, especially from the perspective of so-called standard decision theory. Mueller and Ross provide example decision problems which seem to show that acting properly cannot require knowledge. I argue that this conclusion depends on applying a particular decision theory which is ill-motivated in this context. Agents’ knowledge is often most plausibly formalized as an ambiguous epistemic state, and the theory of decision (...) under ambiguity is then the appropriate modeling tool. I show how to model agents as acting rationally on the basis of their knowledge according to such a theory. I conclude that the tension between the knowledge norm of action and formal decision theory is illusory; the knowledge-first paradigm should be used to actively select the decision-theoretical tools that can best capture the knowledge-based decisions in any given situation. (shrink)

The East/West divide seems to be as old as history itself, the roots of Orientalism and anti-Semitism lying far beyond the origins of modern Western imperialism. The very project of Western classical republicanism had its darker side: to purloin the legacy of the Greeks, distancing them from Eastern systems deemed 'despotic' and 'other'. Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince is a thoroughly revisionist book, challenging not only the comfortable view the West has of its own political evolution, but the negative (...) stereotypes of non-Western systems. Not only did these images serve to legitimate early modern European nation states struggling for an identity, but they also served to justify slavery and other forms of domination over subject peoples. Drawing upon archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Springborg discusses the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian contribution of political forms and cultic institutions to classical Graeco-Roman civilization, an Eastern legacy to the West long obscured for political reasons. A different reading of the foundation myths of Athens and Rome, certain texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the writings of Herodotus, Isocrates, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, permits us to restore possible lines of filtration. Renaissance thought, long believed to have ushered in the Western classical republican tradition, demonstrates a curious ambivalence towards powerful Eastern system, objects of fascination as much as fear. We do not yet find sedimented the divide between Western Democracy and oriental despotism, in which post-Reformation thought as been set in stone. This major new study will be of interest to students of political history, political theory, comparative politics and political archaeology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what value pluralism tells us about the pursuit of moral coherence as a method of moral reasoning. I focus on the status of the norm of ‘systematicity,’ or the demand that our principles be as few and as simple as possible. I argue that, given certain descriptive facts about the pluralistic ways we value, epistemic ways of supporting a systematicity norm do not succeed. Because it is sometimes suggested that coherence functions in moral reasoning (...) as it does in scientific reasoning, my argument considers analogies and disanalogies between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Desde una hermenéutica ontológica política se hacen visibles y audibles prácticas singulares a partir del punto de vista de los estudios latinoamericanos, los cuales apelan por una perspectiva de afirmación como propone Arturo Escobar respecto a una mirada sobre la diversidad y singularidad de accio..

Most people believe that extraterrestrial beings or porpoises or computers could someday be recognized as persons. Given the significant constitutional differences between these entities and ourselves, the general assumption appears to be that ‘person’ is not a natural kind term. David Wiggins offers an illuminating challenge to this popular dogma in ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’. Wiggins does not claim that ‘person’ actually is a natural kind term; but he argues hard for (...) the advantages of regarding it as something like a natural kind classification. The problem is that, whatever its merits, there are obvious and fatal objections to the view that person is a natural kind. My aim is to present a modification of the natural kind thesis which avoids these objections and retains the attractions of the basic position. (shrink)

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é interpretar o livro Dialética do esclarecimento e seus principais argumentos, considerando a dominação masculina que perpassa a racionalidade moderna. Para isso, sugere-se uma interpretação acerca do entrelaçamento entre mito e esclarecimento, durante o processo de civilização ocidental, indicando que os argumentos de Adorno e Horkheimer tomam a modernidade como um projeto fundamentalmente masculino.This article aims to interpret the book Dialectic of Enlightenment and its main arguments considering the masculine domination which permeates the modern rationality. (...) In order to do this an interpretation about the intertwining between myth and enlightenment during the process of western civilization is suggested, indicating that the arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer take modernity as a fundamentally male project. (shrink)

Two very different insights motivate characterizing the brain as a computer. One depends on mathematical theory that defines computability in a highly abstract sense. Here the foundational idea is that of a Turing machine. Not an actual machine, the Turing machine is really a conceptual way of making the point that any well-defined function could be executed, step by step, according to simple 'if-you-are-in-state-P-and-have-input-Q-then-do-R' rules, given enough time (maybe infinite time) [see COMPUTATION]. Insofar as the brain is a device whose (...) input and output can be characterized in terms of some mathematical function -- however complicated -- then in that very abstract sense, it can be mimicked by a Turning machine. Given what is known so far brains do seem to depend on cause-effect operations, and hence brains appear to be, in some formal sense, equivalent to a Turing machine [see CHURCH-TURING THESIS]. On its own, however, this reveals nothing at all of how the mind-brain actually works. The second insight depends on looking at the brain as a biological device that processes information from the environment to build complex representations that enable the brain to make predictions and select advantageous behaviors. Where necessary to avoid ambiguity, we will refer to the first notion of computation as algorithmic computation, and the second as information processing computation. (shrink)

Models of content-sharing behavior on online social media platforms typically represent content spread as a diffusion process modeled on contagious diseases; users’ behavior is modeled with single-agent decision theory. However, social media platforms are interactive spaces where users care about reactions to, and further spread of, the content they post. Thus, social media interaction falls under the intended use cases for game theory. In contrast to existing models leaving strategic reasoning out, we capture agents’ social media decisions within a cognitive (...) hierarchy framework, which can be interpreted as making formally precise how agents make strategic choices based on mutual expectations of rationality. Analytically, we identify limit cases in which a platform can be swamped with content that no agents personally like but all expect to elicit reactions (think obvious fake-news). We then use agent-based simulations to show that a range of more realistic cases give rise to similar outcomes. (shrink)

El propósito de la investigación es profundizar en los fundamentos filosóficos de la teoría arquitectónica de Leon Battista Alberti en el tratado _De re aedificatoria_, en particular en el Prefacio y el libro I, donde se discuten aspectos centrales del proceso de diseño entendido como creación intelectual y estética a través de los conceptos de _pulchritudo_ y _lineamenta_. El punto de partida del análisis se sitúa en la relación establecida entre los principios de _lineamenta_ y _forma_ en la teoría retórica (...) ciceroniana y en los conceptos de espacio, lugar, _forma_, cuerpo y proporción que tienen su origen en la tradición filosófica platónica y aristotélica, la geometría euclidiana y la teoría arquitectónica vitruviana. Se considera que desde la Antigüedad, la arquitectura estaba ligada a conceptos de naturaleza filosófica de los que derivaban sus principios. (shrink)

I present and defend in this paper a pluralistic approach to intertheoretical reduction. In this, reduction is understood as a family of models that can help to achieve certain epistemic and ontological goals. I will then argue that the reductive model (or combination of models) that is best suited to a particular case study will depend on the specific goals that motivate reduction in that case.

In the dissertation I provide an account of action descriptions which emphasizes their role as explanations of consequences. By showing that consequences are ascribed to an action under a description, and only when that description can explain the consequence, I undermine the view that consequences are brute events. Roughly, I reason as follows. If consequences were brute events, then their ascription to an action wouldn't hinge on how we understand the action. We could, for instance, say in ordinary circumstances "John (...) tensed his finger" and as a consequence "Mary became a widow" without any untowardness at all. I show both that we do not do this and that we cannot do it. That we do not do it is supported primarily by linguistic intuitions; mainly I show that there is an infelicity in ascribing to an action a consequence which is not explained by that action. To support the claim that we cannot do this I argue that if there were no "fit" between action and consequence that would make communication difficult. ;I then use this characterization of action descriptions and consequences to serve as a criterion for identifying the privileged description of an action. Any one action may have several action descriptions. In light of this, there is a question raised about which, if any, of these descriptions is privileged. I show that within the wider social context there is a description of the action which is dominant. Then I argue that this description is and should be chosen in virtue of the explanatory power of action descriptions with respect to consequences. (shrink)

The papers in this volume question how perceptions of space influenced understandings of the body and its functions, illness and treatment, and the surrounding natural and built environments in relation to health in the classical and ...

• But this rests on the debatable view that understanding a moral reason implies being motivated to conform to it. Psychopaths do seem to have at least a “rote” or emotionally shallow understanding that their acts are wrong.

Today’s business students are tomorrow’s business leaders. To ensure they have skills in creating profitable, pro-social, ethical organizations, we need to consider alternative methods of teaching CSR. In this proposed symposium, we will present different approaches to international CSR/Service-Learning.

What principles explain or justify legal institutions or decisions, thereby transforming coercion to authority? Are there or could there be any such universal principles? Can any philosophical theory account for such principles? How, if at all, do philosophical theories of law and politics apply to particular issues? And finally, what, if any, do such practical applications tell us about general theories and principles? The essays in this volume represent the efforts of an international group of scholars to understand these general (...) aspects of legal philosophy. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:To obliterate history from any narrative model, you must flatten that model so that no temporal change is possible. One way to do this is to remove instances of conflict, another is to render conflict perpetual. The latter is the move made by Game of Thrones, a television drama treated here as an antiutopian text, a model of twenty-first century epic fantasy in its surrender not of morality but of historicity.

Resumen: El presente trabajo se centra en el análisis del Anteproyecto de reforma de la legislación civil española en materia de capacidad jurídica de las personas con discapacidad publicado recientemente por el Gobierno español. Su objetivo consiste en determinar la adecuación de las principales modificaciones planteadas en este anteproyecto a las exigencias del artículo 12 de la Convención Internacional sobre los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad tal y como han sido interpretadas por su Comité en la Observación General Nº1 (...) Abstract: This paper focuses on the analysis of the prelimimary Draf Law of reform of the Spanish civil legislation on legal capacity of persons with disabilities, published by the Spanish Government on September 26th 2018. Its aim is to determine the conformity of the main modifications proposed in this preliminary Draft to the requirements of article 12 of the Conventionon the Rights of Persons with Disabilitiesas interpreted by its Committee in the General Comment Nº 1. (shrink)

In an essayistic and experimental approach, which includes the reconstruction of conceptual contexts and poetic writing, this article interrogates the passages and hybridizations between poetry and philosophy from the point of view of their relation to Eros. Thus, in dialogues with Sappho, Anne Carson, Walter Benjamin and Hans Blumenberg, I present the notion of “eroticization of language” as a point of convergence between poetic production and theoretical impulse.

Les esthétiques contemporaines nous ont habitués à penser que la valeur formelle d’un objet d’art n’était pas seulement formelle et que l’attention esthétique n’excluait ni l’intérêt cognitif ni l’émotion morale. Du côté de l’art, on a également observé ces dernières décennies un refus des distinctions trop catégoriques (forme/contenu ; fait/ valeur ; art/vie ; esthétique/cognitif/ émotionnel), en même temps qu’un retour à une pratique ouvertement orientée vers la vie éthique. Aussi, dans un contexte social où les discours et les images (...) médiatiques brouillent la perception du réel et de la mémoire, l’art cherche-t-il, par l’invention d’un autre langage et par le retour à la rhétorique dont l’histoire scientifique s’est défaite, à susciter la fonction imaginaire de la mémoire, en construisant une relation esthétique et critique aux lieux de notre histoire. Cette recherche apparaît notamment dans le travail d’Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Pascal Convert, Anne et Patrick Poirier, Arno Gisinger ou Jochen Gerz, dont les œuvres ne se situent pas hors du monde mais au contraire prennent pied dans l’histoire, la mémoire collective et la réalité sociale, pour en explorer les failles et permettre au public une appropriation plus authentique de sa propre existence éthique et sociale. (shrink)

Using data from the General Social Survey and the National Organizations Survey, this study assesses the extent to which job search methods affect gender composition in a job. In contrast to past research and the popular notion that networking maximizes job search outcomes, it is found that women who use informal job search methods had jobs with more women in them compared to not using such methods. Women using formal job search methods had jobs with fewer women in them compared (...) to not using these methods. For men, job search methods were not associated with the gender composition of the job. (shrink)

The relationship between intimacy and honesty seems a paradoxical one. While intimate relationships would seem to demand a high level of honesty, this same intimacy might make us more likely to shield the other or protect ourselves through benevolent lying or the withholding of information. It would seem that honesty may not always be the best policy in intimate relationships. The purpose of this article is to examine the tension between honesty and intimacy in Kant’s duty of friendship, and it (...) will highlight the limitations of Kant’s expectations of friendship. At the same time I will use Kant’s own appeal to the autonomy of moral agents to delineate an appropriate role for the obligations of honesty and self disclosure in friendship. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * 1. To drift is to be propelled by currents. 2. Sentences are textual currents. 3. To drift is to be com pelled with currents. 4. To be compelled is to be overcome by some force. 5. To be overcome by some force requires the instantiation of a weightless body (virtual or actual), upon which and through which a force can operate. 6. Forces can be physical, cognitive, unconscious and sensory. 7. Forces of drift have no particular telos; they incline bodies without knowable destination. 8. Drifting is nomadic, where nomadism includes movements between places, times (also time-zones), genres, thought and cognitive states. 9. Forces are attractors; attractivity is a force. 10. Attractivity is a relation between force and body. 11. Attractivity is relation of exteriority; it is of the domain of the foreign. 12. To drift is to become the prey of attraction, the prey of the foreign. 13. In the movement of becoming prey, one can either be eaten or feed into a re-composition of things. 14. Drifting is liminal; it can be equally productive and destructive. 15. The deviated course implied by drifting may yield novelty, yet may equally yield a perpetual deferral of any positionality. 16. The state of drifting is necessary to the creation of novelty. 17. The state of drifting can inhibit the creation of novelty. 18. The modern drift was celebrated as a form of emancipation, through the liberation of urban structures traced on foot, to the negation of banal tasks in riding on the open highway. In the attention economy, drifting has become a paradigm of labour, precarious and otherwise. 19. To drift in a novel fashion requires a necessary threshold between distraction and re-attraction. 20. Re-attraction is a form of going off-track, yet implies the fidelity to an alter force. Re-attraction is eccentric in inclination, that is, decentred, casting alter orbits of orientation. 21. Eccentricity is a form of drift defined as a body inflected by the force of heterogeneous inclination. Eccentricity is the fidelity to the becoming-foreign of the body as prey to attractivity. 22. Drift as eccentricity is equal to the creation of novel modes of inclination alter to the limits of normative orbits of determinate trajectories. 23. The effects of eccentric drifting can only be known post-movement. 24. All modes of drifting (natural and cognitive) are relative to some former position, although distances and their capacity for measurement are inconsistent. 25. Eccentric drifting does not result in relativism. Drifting is transitional, and, like a Moiré pattern, produces interferences between things. 26. Where there is drifting there are both side-effects and side-affects, which feed-back into the inclination of drift itself. 27. Side-effects and side-affects may produce conditions and sensibilities of failure. 28. The ethics of drifting play out in the responsiveness to side-effects/side-affects. 29. Eccentric drifting is not algorithmic, informational, strategic nor opportunistic; it is tactically lived experience. 30. Eccentric drifting is a dance with contingency, of repositioning a body (a body includes thought) through the affirmation of re-attraction. 31. Eccentric drifting is a form of love, a love of existence that proceeds strategic coupling with ideas, people, situations, places and so forth. 32. As a form of love, eccentric drifting can generate changes of state (and even changes of State). 33. Currents that propel/compel a state of eccentric drifting may be imaginary; a possible current includes the attractive force to that which is not (yet) present. 34. Eccentric drifting is not only a state of transitional movement, but most importantly includes the fabrication of imaginary forces that could propel/compel a given body and its spheres of interaction. 35. These sentences comment on drift, but are not exemplary of drifting. (shrink)

En el primer estudio sistemático sobre la psicología de Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard´s Psychology (1972), escrito en danés por Kresten Nordentoft, el autor considera que el primer intento de presentar las teorías psicológicas de Kierkegaard fue realizado por Rollo May en The Meaning of Anxiety (1950). Además de esta obra, en 1958, junto con Ernest Angel y Henri Ellenberguer, May edita Existence. A new dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. El objetivo de este artículo consiste en describir el modo en que May concibe (...) a Kierkegaard como “psicólogo”, a partir del análisis del existencialismo y su coincidencia con el psicoanálisis en el diagnóstico de la “crisis del individuo moderno”. Para ello, se toman los conceptos de angustia y existencia como los principales ejes temáticos de la descripción. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic produced immeasurable impacts on the economy, education, and socialization, besides the loss of millions of lives. Thus, there has been an accelerated development of an unprecedented number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates to control the pandemic. The World Health Organization’s emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines still in clinical trial allowed immunizing the population. This paper presents a perspective of the bioethical precepts of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice in the emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines. Furthermore, it emphasizes (...) the importance of surveillance at all stages of vaccine development to detect adverse effects and ensure compliance with bioethical precepts. (shrink)